After finishing the taught part of my Animal Welfare Science MSc last year, I started avoiding animal-related literature, podcasts, social media, and so on. Call it burnout or just oversaturation, but after two years assimilating all manner of books, articles, blogs and documentaries on animal suffering, I was exhausted and feeling increasingly numb. It was a nice few months of escapism. Then COVID-19 hit. A global pandemic stemming from human exploitation of wildlife. As we sit confined to our homes, with seemingly endless time on our hands to reassess the way we inhabit the world today, how can we not consider our use and abuse of animals?
So when Alamo Pictures got in touch to ask me to take a listen to their recent podcast ‘Eating Animals, Factory Farming and the Pandemic’, I put down my novel and plugged in my headphones. On the pod, host Matthew Sherwood interviews Phil Brooke, Research and Education Manager at Compassion in World Farming (CIWF) about how his organisation is fighting to change the way we raise animals for food. He encourages people to eat less and better meat, interrogating what our global appetite for animal flesh means for animal welfare, the environment and for human health. The two interweave their discussion with references to and clips from Christopher Quinn’s documentary film ‘Eating Animals’, produced and narrated by Natalie Portman and based on the best-selling book by Jonathan Safran Froer. This film (which, full disclosure, I haven’t yet seen) explores the history of factory farming, its impact on animals, and on the spread of disease. Sherwood plays several clips throughout the recording and, even without the visual, these are incredibly powerful. We hear, for instance, poultry farmer and whistle blower Craig Watts describe the suffering that took place among his birds (living ‘cage free’) and how this prompted him to expose the reality of the US industrial poultry system. Did I find these clips hard to listen to, after stepping away from this sort of material for so long? Yes, of course. But they reminded me of why I make the dietary choices I do and how important it is to revisit these feelings and reaffirm my beliefs. One of my biggest motivators to study animal welfare years ago was another podcast: ‘Ending Factory Farming as Soon as Possible‘ with Lewis Bollard, which covers similar issues to this one. I recommend giving both a listen.
Today, 83 billion animals are bred and slaughtered for food annually, excluding fish. This staggering figure is possible because of modern ‘factory farming’. But what exactly is factory farming? A line from Brooke that stuck in my mind was “Factory farming is hard to describe but most people know it when they see it”. We all know instinctively that industrial farming is morally wrong, that sentient animals shouldn’t be treated like machines, yet most of us inadvertently support these systems up to three times a day. As Brooke points out, factory farming was never planned: mankind got here step-by-step. Now we need to ask “How do we get to somewhere else?” In these modern industrialised systems, Brooke believes it is impossible to treat the animals well. In fact, if better medical care is available, the farmer is able to crowd the animals together even further. Physical health doesn’t always equate to mental health. And in most factory farms physical health is also profoundly lacking. The podcast uses poultry farming as an example, explaining how modern fast-growing breeds of chicken face respiratory disease, snapped limbs, rot, heart attacks. If a human baby grew at the same rate as one of these broiler chickens, at two months old he or she would weigh 600 pounds. Imagine the pain and physical deformities these mutant birds suffer. As Brooke says, factory farming isn’t just a system of immense cruelty, it signifies enormous “lack of respect for the animal”. We have lost sight of husbandry on these farms: as one audio clip from the film states, “There’s no way you can love an animal that has been genetically engineered to die in six weeks.”
Animals are not the only victims of industrial farming systems. The podcast talks about how industrial farming takes money from local producers and communities, meaning that cheap meat is actually very expensive for everybody, even the end consumer whose taxes help subsidise it. That three quid chicken comes at a tremendous cost to the farmer, the planet, the bird, and – as we’re now coming to realise – the health of human citizens. A “vital artery” of factory farming is antibiotics: nearly 80 percent of antibiotics produced by the pharmaceutical industry are used on farmed animals. In The Netherlands, 40 percent of chickens are a slow-grown breed and just 1 in 10 of these need antibiotics to stay healthy. As for the 60 percent who are fast-growing breeds? One in four. This is a system ripe for breeding disease, especially industrialised poultry farming, which is described as a melting pot of pathogens. When the viruses on the farm floor jump to humans, just as COVID-19 jumped from the wildlife in the wet markets, we get pandemics. Spanish influenza is just one example: the question isn’t if there’s going to be another lethal flu virus, it’s when.
So what are CIWF doing to help? They’ve already made significant steps in easing the torment of farmed animals in the UK; in 1990, their work led to the ban of veal crates, and nine years later, of gestation crates for pigs (we still have farrowing crates). In 2012, they campaigned and succeeded in having battery cages banned across Europe: intensively farmed hens now have to have slightly larger ‘enriched’ cages. They’ve also worked with supermarkets to encourage them to stock only higher welfare animals products; two-thirds of the eggs sold in the UK are now cage-free. This doesn’t necessarily equate to good welfare, as we hear in Watts’ clip, but it’s a start.
Just like the film ‘Eating Animals’, the podcast doesn’t push a vegan agenda. It presents you with the facts about factory farming and allows you to make up your own mind, whether that be choosing high welfare meat and less of it, or giving up animal products altogether. I urge you to listen. Ignorance might be bliss, but in a world where a pandemic can change our lives completely in the space of two weeks, I don’t think we have that luxury.
I always dont like eating any meat or animals and avoid all such things. I really want everyone must do this and save lot of animals lives. Its our duty too. But thanks for your article alice, its really motivated and must read for every non vegetarian.