Animal Factories
Jim Mason, Excerpts from Animal Factories

Americans, at least, have a tremendous appetite for meat, dairy products and eggs. They have little appetite, however, for information on the lives of the animals that produce what they eat. Perhaps they sense something. Do they sense that beyond the mountain of steaks, hamburgers, sausages, cold cuts, ice cream, milkshakes, cheeses, pizzas, pastries, souffles and omelets consumed each year lies a whole mountain range of animal suffering and death? Most cannot see it. For them, what might be disgusting to the heart and the eye is blocked off by the cravings of the palate. Out of sight, out of mind, as the saying goes.

It is hard to see it, this mountain range of pain and destruction, for it is obscured by the mists of popular myth and the fog and haze generated by the animal industries. On television, sleek cows graze in lush fields while dairy industry advertisements tell us that “milk is a natural” or that it builds beautiful bodies. Or we are told that animals love to be eaten, as in the Oscar Mayer jingle in which a chorus of children sings: “I’d love to be an Oscar Mayer weiner ... then all the kids would take a bite of me.” In Starkist’s ads, Charlie the Tuna was always frustrated because he wasn’t chosen to be hooked, hacked to death and canned.

This is just the popular, breezy stuff. Beneath it all lies the heavy, Biblical stuff — the very old and deep myths that encourage human beings to use, kill and eat other animals. Whatever the directives before the flood, God makes it clear with Noah that human beings are to have absolute dominion over all other life: “The fear of you and the dread of you shall be upon every beast of the earth, and upon every fowl of the air, upon all that moveth upon the earth, and upon all the fishes of the sea; into your hand are they delivered. Every moving thing that liveth shall be meat [food] for you.”

And so they are. Nearly 10 billion moving things that liveth are killed and eaten each year in the United States alone. All these lives ... confined, controlled, snuffed, then poured into that mountain of animal flesh, fat and fluid. The average American consumes heavily of it — about 850 pounds, in retail weights, of meat, eggs, milk and cheese yearly.

From National Hog Farmer, March 1978:

The breeding sow should be thought of, and treated as, a valuable piece of machinery whose function is to pump out baby pigs like a sausage machine.

Animal foods from food animals ... Food for thought and thinking: The late, great human brain is a wonderful organ. It generates both deep emotion and acute awareness. So it knows how to take care of itself. It can shut out distrubing things — especially things that might interfere with pleasure and satisfaction. It is never better at this selection/ommission job than when it encounters information about the living beings who feed it. We need to think that they feel nothing, that their lives have none of the content of our own. We need a great, unbridgeable distance between them and us. We need it to separate them from us so that we can be more comfortable with them serving (and being served to) us.

And this is what makes it all so wrong. We degrade other life, we destroy a sense of kinship with the living world, we alienate ourselves from all of nature — all to keep up some old habits and appetites. these are costly: They cost us a sense of belonging here so that we can treat all of the world like a supermarket and a parking lot. They cost us too much of our empathy and feeling for the living world. Ultimately, humanity’s great reduction of animals has greatly reduced humanity.

The reduction began nearly 10,000 years ago in the Middle East, where tribes who specialized in hunting wild sheep gradually learned to capture animals and control flocks. They soon learned that by castrating males and separating females they could control mating and breeding in their animals. In time, these and other animal husbandry techniques produced docile animals in the sizes, shapes, and colors and with the kinds of horns and coats desired by their tribal keepers. In nearby regions, tribes who specialized in hunting wild goats, cattle or horses took similar steps toward domestication and animal husbandry.

This course of domestication, however, brought radical changes in the herders’ relations with animals. As forager/hunters, they had viewed animals as autonomous beings and as partners in the scheme of life. For many of these societies, animals were the creators of the world and they taught people how to hunt, build fires and live. Often the animals hunted were believed to be ancestors of the tribe. People believed that a Master of the Animals — a chief or leader of the animal herds — had made an agreement in the distant past with an ancestral tribal leader in which the tribe could hunt and live from the herd so long as it performed proper ceremonies and rituals.

Above all, forager/hunters believed that animals had supernatural powers of their own that could affect the livelihood and well being of the tribe. Animals were the tribe’s partners, but they were also forces of the mysterious living world around it. Parts and pieces of these beliefs persisted well after domestication, as in, for example, the many bull, ram and calf deities of some of the early agricultural societies. Gradually, however, herding and settled agriculture took the place of foraging/hunting and people took a new position in, and a new view of, the order of the living world. As agriculturalists and animal breeders, they were taking control of animals and many of the natural forces that had once been respected as supernatural powers or dieties. Other beings and forces that had once been seen as ancestors and partners came to be seen as slaves, resources, and agents for the benefit of human beings. Human beings took over the powers of animals and nature, and as a result they came to view the living world as a pyramid, with humanity at the pinnacle.

The transition, some say, forced the greatest psychic upheaval in the course of human evolution. Culturally speaking, we turned the world upside down. It appears that we are still recovering from the shock.

From Farmer and Stockbreeder:

The modern layer is, after all, only a very efficient converting machine, changing the raw material — feedstuffs — into the finished product — the egg — less, of course, maintenance requirements.

In time, the reduction of animals and nature became the basic principle of Western civilization in both religious and secular thought. It was already the dominant worldview in Sumeria when writing — and history — began 5,000 years ago. It was expounded and expanded by both Old Testament scribes and Greek philosophers. It was strengthened by both Christian writers and philosophers of the Age of Reason. Rene Descartes, especially, was a major booster, as was Karl Marx and his students. It has had a stream of opponents over the centuries — Pythagoras, St. Francis, various 19th century poets, feminists, to name a few.

But it remains the dominant idea governing how humans are to live with the rest of the world. It feeds and legitimizes all of the forms of animal exploitation, whether they are for the realm of sport, science or industry. Today, the West’s 5,000-year obsession with animal/nature reduction is expressed in two violent, virulent forms. One is vivisection, in which animals are reduced to the status of test tubes — specifically bred to be given human diseases, injuries and conditions.

The other is intensive animal husbandry or industrial animal production — better known as “factory farming.” It is, in all respects, a child of modern science and the industrial revoltuion. Its overriding goal is to force animals raised for food to produce more from less and to do it faster. It considers the farm animal as a food machine — to be designed, modified, tuned up and souped up. It draws on biology and chemistry for the high-powered tools it needs to manipulate animals’ bodies, breeding and physiology. It draws on industrial technology to create the factory “environment” — one designed to assist the biological manipulations as well as to take the labor out of handling and caring for animals. Like any other factory, the factory farm is geared for mass production, and it uses automation and other assemblyline techniques to get it.

Factory farming began in the 1920s, not long after the discovery of the roles of vitamins A and D. When these were added to feed, chickens no longer needed sunlight and exercise for growth and proper bone development. That made it possible to raise large flocks indoors, year around. But chickens did not thrive in the large, crowded buildings. Diseases spread like wildfire and some birds pecked others to death in a frenzy. By the 1940s, though, the broiler business was getting big enough to attract poultry experts to solve its mass production problems. Their strategy was to modify the chicken to the factory system.

One found a solution to mass pecking and cannibalism: He burned off the tips of birds’ beaks with a blowtorch. Another expert invented an automatic debeaking machine, and debeaking became routine in the industry. With World War II came antiobiotics, and the broiler industry quickly learned that these drugs made chickens grow faster. Poultry geneticists joined the effort and created the prototype for today’s broad-breasted, fast-flesh broiler ckicken. Other poultry scientists found out how to speed bird growth by playing with feeding times and artificial lighting. The push for speedy growth was entirely profit driven: Fast-growing birds reached market weight on less feed, the biggest expense in chicken production. In addition, fast-growing birds meant more flocks per year out of the increasingly expensive factory buildings.

Today, the American broiler industry cranks out more than seven billion chickens each year. At speeds of up to 90 birds a minute, automated killing, plucking and dismembering machines process them into shrink-wrapped packages. From Broiler Industry: "It is obvious that the light supplied by sunshine during the day and normal darkenss at night is the most inferior of any lighting program."

Debeaking and many of the other manipulations discovered by the broiler industry were quickly adopted by egg producers, and they, too, learned how to maintain huge flocks in factory buildings. But they had additional problems. One was chicken manure. An egg-laying flock stayed in the factory for a year or more, and the manure pile-up killed birds and ruined eggs. The other problem was the tedious manual labor in gathering eggs. Some poultry expert solved both problems by putting hens in cages. The manure dropped through to a waste pit or onto the floor where it could be scraped away. Eggs rolled across the cage floor into a collection trough, so that workers could walk along and quickly fill their buckets. At first, producers placed one bird to a cage. Soon they found that birds were cheaper than wire or buildings, and crowded cages became the rule. With five birds per cage, the same building produced about five times as many eggs. Crowding caused more birds to die, but the losses were more than offset by the huge increase in the flow of eggs. Soon, even the workers were eliminated as cage equipment manufacturers perfected automatic feeding troughs and conveyor belts to collect eggs.

U.S. egg factories hold some 500 million hens in cages. Virtually all of the nation’s eggs come from caged, debeaked hens.

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