Animal Factories
Jim Mason, Excerpts from Animal Factories

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The poultry industries’ successes with factory technology were watched with envy by the livestock industries. By the 1960s the principles of confinement, mass production and automated feeding and watering were applied to systems for cattle and pigs. In the dairy industry, about half of the nation’s 10 million milk cows are housed in some type of factory system. In the beef industry, most of the nation’s top-grade beef comes from huge feedlots where animals are fattened on grain and growth promotants. All of the “formula-fed” veal industry’s 1.2 million calves are raised under strict factory conditions. About two-thirds of the pork industry’s 80 million hogs a year are raised in “total confinement” factories where they may never see the light of day until they are trucked to slaughter.

There is more to factory farming, however, than automated buildings, hardware, and equipment. They do reduce the chores of tending large numbers of animals, so they make mass production possible. They also aid the manipulation of animals’ growth and reproduction by giving the producer more nearly absolute control over the animals’ environment. In cold weather, for example, confined pigs tend to gain weight faster than pigs outside because more of feed energy goes to fat than to creating body heat. But the rest of factory farming consists of animal breeding and management. Everything about animals’ lives, their genetics, diet, digestion, sexual behavior, social behavior — even their ability to move about — is manipulated to try to force them to produce more.

From Farm Journal:

Estrus control will open the doors to factory hog production. Control of female cycles is the missing link to the assembly-line approach.

In some cases, animal physiology may be directly manipulated. In the feedlot beef business, for example, operators implant pellets of anabolic steroids in animals’ ears to speed up muscle growth. In the egg business, producers make hens lay eggs over a longer period of time by controlling lighting in the factory buildings. They know that birds lay eggs in the springtime, when the days are getting longer. Using light-proof houses and artificial lighting, egg producers create the illusion of eternal spring by keeping the light on a little longer each day. After about a year of this, the flock’s productivity drops and a producer may use a management technique called “force molting” to revive it. This manipulation shocks and disorients the birds by leaving them in the dark for a few days without food and water. A few birds die in the process, but most come through and begin producing all over again on a renewed phony springtime lighting routine.

In the formula-fed veal business, producers manipulate calves’ diet and mobility in order to make their flesh pale and tender. One part of the strategy is to get very young animals and keep them soft and tender by denying them exercise. The other part is to manipulate diet and nutrition in order to cause anemia, which, in turn, produces pale meat. To carry out the strategy, veal producers buy day-old calves cast off by dairy farmers and place them in individual stalls in a confinement building. For fourteen to sixteen weeks the calf stays in a space barely larger than its own body, often chained by the neck to further restrict movement. Throughout this confinement the producer allows the calf only one food, called “milk replacer” — a mixture of dried skim milk, dried whey, starch, fats, sugar, mold inhibitors, vitamins and antibiotics. Long on fat and sugar but short on iron, the diet is designed to make the calves fatten quickly before the anemia gets too severe.

Factory farmers would call their techniques “management,” but we could call them manipulations. Many of them reach right into the animals’ bodies — to cut on them or change them in ways that boost production. We have already seen how debeaking of chickens became because it “controlled” cannibalism in unnaturally large, confined flocks. In many poultry factories, producers also cut off their birds’ toes just behind the claw. This “toe-clipping” is said to keep the birds calmer as it prevents fighting and “back-ripping.” In breeding flocks, producers may also cut off males’ wattles and combs. These “dubbed” males are not so competitive with each other on the crowded floor.

Crowded pigs, too, have similar social disorders in confinement, and they tend to chrew on each others’ tails. Occasionally, the tail-biting gets out of hand and some pigs kill and eat others. The non-invasive solution would be to put the pigs in a suitable environment where they can spread about and maintain a social order normal to pigs. But such an environment would make it difficult and time-consuming to feed, water and tend to large numbers of pigs. So the factory farmer’s strategy is fix the pig so that it cannot tail-bite, then the confinement building can be packed with pigs. To ensure that stressed pigs cannot tail-bite, farmers routinely cut off, or “dock,” the tails of young pigs a few days after birth.

From Hog Farm Management:

Forget the pig is an animal. Treat him just like a machine in a factory. Schedule treatments like you would lubrication. Breeding season like the first step in an assemblyline. And marketing like the delivery of finished goods.

Sexual mutilations are also a routine management tool, or manipulation. Castration of young pigs and bull calves has been routine since well before factory farming. Farmers claim that they do it to reduce male fighting and to prevent the flesh from becoming tough and smelly. On some farms, males’ penises are surgically manipulated, although these practices are much less widespread than castration. These altered males are needed to make artificial insemination more manageable. They are used to detect, but not copulate with, females in estrus so that the artificial inseminator knows which females to “service.” On some cattle operations, producers block the penis with a steel pin through the bulls’ sheaths. But this device holds the penis inside the animal, and soreness and infection may set in and cause the bull to lose his desire to mount.

Other producers, then, prefer the permanent solution of penectomy — surgical removal of the penis; they call these animals “gomer” bulls. A few hog factory farmers surgically re-route penises to exit the body at one side; they call these animals “sidewinders.” Females, too, get a share of sexual mutilations and manipulations. Much of it occurs in the techniques of ova or embryo transfer, which are used to get the greatest number of offspring from high-producing animals. If a dairy farmer has a cow whose annual tonnages of milk are breaking records, her calves will bring very high prices because of the likelihood that they will have her “milky” genes. So the farmer injects her with fertility hormones to make her ovaries produce extra eggs, then flushes those eggs from her, artificially fertilizers them and plants them in other, cheaper cows. The fertilized eggs are implanted in the surrogate mother cows through small incisions on each flank. In pigs, the ova or embryos are removed surgically. If her genes are in demand, a sow may be cut open and sewn up six or more times a year.

Aside from these deliberate manipulations of factory animals, there is a whole range of unintended ones that cause animal suffering. Crowding and stress tend to disrupt relations among animals, causing them to fight, bite and peck each other. Parent-offpsring relations, too, are disturbed in the factory environment. Mothers and offspring are unable to recognize each other because of the confusion of smells and sounds in large groups. In the pig factory, for example, a bored, detached sow may not recognize the squeals of one of her own litter should she roll over or step on one. The restrictive “farrowing stalls” are supposed to reduce these incidents, but some farmers claim that they don’t.

Stress and confusion can cause some mothers to abandon their offspring and to refuse to accept their suckling; the same conditions can make the young unable to seek out their mothers. Pregnant sows suffering greatly in total confinement factories. The biggest operations house them in individual “gestation” crates or stalls, which, like the veal crate, are scarcely larger than the sow’s body. In a few factories, sows are “tethered,” that is, chained at the neck to keep them from facing the feed trough. For sixteen weeks, pregnant sows are held in these devices — mainly for producers’ convenience. The crates and tethers make it easier to feed and control large numbers of animals for months at a time. The sows cannot turn around, run, walk, or otherwise exercise during their pregnancy, and to keep them from becoming obese, factory farmers feed them every third day. In many factories, they are kept in the dark to keep them from biting and fighting back at their stalls. Many act out their stress and boredom by repeated biting, chewing, pawing, swaying, head waving and other stereotypic motions known to be symptoms of frustration.

From Raising Veal Calves, Massachusetts Extension Services:

The health of the veal calf can best be described as anemic, weak and susceptible to disease.

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