Farm Animals Subject to Abuse and Exploitation Now

Farm Animals Subject to Abuse and Exploitation Now

Holly Cheever, Veterinarian, 2000, Albany Law Environmental Outlook Journal, Fall, 5 Alb. L. Envtl. Outlook 2, p. 45-6

As mentioned, one of the greatest tragedies for the animals raised in modern intensive confinement systems is their inability to lead anything remotely resembling a "normal" or natural life. In the interests of increasing profit margins by cramming the maximal numbers of animals into the minimal amount of space, animals are denied the opportunity to go outside, to exist in their evolutionarily determined natural social groupings (note that all of the "food animal" species are intensely social beings), to eat a natural diet, and to follow their natural biorhythms and hormonal patterns for reproduction. Their abnormal and highly stressful existence produces a wealth of illness and abnormal stereotypic and aggressive behaviors, not seen in their natural groupings. Rather than redesign their environments to eliminate these stresses, the animal is redesigned (de-beaking in chickens and tail docking in hogs, for example) to minimize the damage that each "product" can inflict on its cage- or pen-mates. Very little, if any, attention is paid to the animal's physical and behavioral needs other than the minimum diet needed for growth and production. Yet animal scientists and ethologists increasingly remind us that our domestically bred food animal species still have the behavioral propensities and physical needs of their wild ancestors. ⁿ¹⁰ I will merely highlight some of the standard industrial practices that are particularly cruel.

"Battery" chickens--the term for chickens raised for egg production--suffer horribly so that Americans can consume massive numbers of eggs at low cost. The battery cage, roughly the size of the front page of a daily newspaper, may hold 3 to 5 chickens, each one being accorded a mere 48 square inches of space standing on wire mesh. There is no opportunity for dust baths, for preening and perching, nor for the hours of concentrated food prehension and social interaction that occupy a natural hen's waking hours. There is not even the opportunity to stretch their wings to their full 3-foot extent. After 80 weeks of egg production, as the laying cycle begins to wane and egg numbers drop, the flock is shocked into a second season of production by "forced moulting" in which the entire flock is abruptly denied any food for an average of 10 to 14 days. They are starved, in fact, in a manner that is illegal by every state's anti-cruelty statutes with which I am familiar. However, due to the power of the agribusiness and farm bureau lobby, there are few (if any) states' attorneys general willing to take on a case of this nature.

For those hens who survive this brutal process and then survive the reintroduction of feed two weeks later (many hens die of choking and crop impaction in their frantic efforts to eat after their prolonged starvation), they will demonstrate a drop of 25-35% body weight--think about that in your own terms--and will have suffered atrophy of muscle, liver, skeleton, and reproductive tissues. They may have pathological bone fractures due to calcium loss and will have a higher incidence of the transmission of Salmonella to their eggs due to the well-known  [*46]  impact of stress and starvation on the immune system. The human health impact of increased Salmonella in eggs has caused the USDA's Food Safety and Inspection Service to ask egg and poultry producers to "eliminate forced molting practices and adopt alternatives that reduce public health risks." ⁿ¹¹ However, surviving hens will demonstrate increased egg production until their slaughter at 110 to 140 weeks of age.

The de-beaking mentioned earlier is the means by which the hens are prevented from attacking each other to the point of death as a reaction to their intense and stressful overcrowding. Despite the assurances by Mr. Frank Perdue that de-beaking is no more painful than cutting off the tip of your "pinkie nail," it is a horrendously painful procedure analogous to slicing off the front third of a human's face and results in chronic phantom pain in addition to the acute pain of the procedure. Let us not forget the fate of the male chicks born in an egg production facility: having no future as egg layers, they are exterminated by economically profitable methods including suffocation by successive layers of discarded chicks in dumpsters or in large plastic bags and by being ground alive in the equivalent of an industrial-strength Waring blender. Unfortunately, these birds, whether male or female, never have an opportunity to express many complicated behavior patterns and their intelligence, to which private flock managers can well attest.