Eden Farm Animal Sanctuary

"In fact, if one person is unkind to an animal it is considered to be cruelty, but where a lot of people are unkind to animals, especially in the name of commerce, the cruelty is condoned and, once large sums of money are at stake, will be defended to the last by otherwise intelligent people."
~Ruth Harrison "Animal Machines"

So many animals are caught up in factory farming that this is one of the biggest issues in animal rights. Factory farming is global, entrenched, especially in the United States and Europe, and advancing in many developing countries.

Farming evokes pastoral scenes of contented cattle and sheep grazing sun-blessed meadows. These scenes once had reality but abruptly ended in the 20th century with the development of factory farming. Animals from factory farms supply most of the meat, dairy produce and eggs in our supermarkets today, yet few people know about these animals' lives and what factory farms are like.

Names for Factory Farming

Ruth Harrison (1920 - 2000) used the term factory farm in her 1964 book Animal Machines: the new factory farming industry. The term gained usage in the 1960's as a pejorative label, so far are factory farms from traditional farms.

Only in the public mind are factory farms called farms. Official jargon for factory farms in the United States is operations, not farms, and the people who manage them are not farmers but operators. Specifically, factory farms in the US are called AFO's (animal feeding operations) and the biggest ones are called CAFO's (confined animal feeding operations). Other formal Americanisms for factory farm are industrial farm and corporate farm, acknowledging the roles of industry and business. The formal and long-winded name for factory farming in Britain is intensive livestock husbandry.

Characteristics of Factory Farming

Before the rise of factory farms, traditional farms were each owned or managed by a family. Traditional farms were numerous and diversified, growing and raising a mixture of crops and animals. Traditional farms have never been cruelty-free, but their livestock grazed pasture in moderate numbers, breathed fresh air in sunlight and in inclement weather animals might shelter on straw in barns.

From 1950 all this changed with the invasion of the countryside by factory farms. Factory farms are often owned or highly influenced by corporations and the guiding principle of these businesses is efficiency: producing the most produce and hence financial profit for the least expense. Factory farms are often big, but you can call any size of farm a factory farm depending on how it raises its animals.

How Factory Farming Started

You could say factory farming began with chickens in the United States about the 1930's. The big American cities demanded a growing influx of eggs and meat. Some farmers realised that instead of raising relatively few hens outdoors they could raise large flocks of hens all year by keeping them indoors. Raising tens of thousands of hens in each of several sheds kept production costs per bird down and problems were gradually overcome by inventing new farming methods.

The farmers specially bred two kinds of chicken: 'broilers' for meat production and egg-layers for egg production. Broilers thrived on cheap feed and the new egg-layers could lay more eggs. Artificial incubators hatched eggs en masse taken from relatively few breeding hens to replenish broilers and egg-layers. Male chicks were unwanted (they cannot lay eggs and broiler hens taste better) so were killed and went into cheap food or fertilizer.

Large numbers of birds generate massive amounts of excrement but the farmers developed methods of removing waste without interrupting production. Farm hands, instead of clearing away waste periodically, mucked out waste from broiler sheds only after all the birds were sent to the slaughterhouse and before the next batch of broilers arrived. Instead of egg-layers running about freely, farmers confined them to cages with wire-mesh floors so that droppings fell through and farm workers could clear away the waste without moving the cages or stopping egg production.

To counter the pernicious effects of crowding chickens into sheds with no sunlight or fresh air, farmers gave the chickens sulphur drugs to hold back contagious diseases and fed them vitamin D to compensate for loss of sunshine. They threw out ailing and dying chickens with the dead ones because trashing chickens was cheaper than providing them with medical treatment. Hens started injuring and cannibalising one another in their crowded sheds and to reduce this problem they were 'debeaked' - had the outer third of their beaks amputated. Finally, to keep labour costs down, farmers automated lighting, watering and feeding.

Thus the mass chicken and egg production of the 1930's set the pattern for the mass farming of pigs and cattle in the 1960's, bringing to bear the same tools of production: specialised breeding, indoor housing, excrement control, disease control, mutilation, environmental automation, and so on.

Animal Holocaust

The animal rights activist Henry Spira believed factory farming accounts for 95 percent of all animal suffering. Certainly, the factory farming industry and its supporters are creating the greatest suffering and death of domesticated animals in human history, an animal holocaust where literally billions of domesticated animals are factory farmed and transported to mass slaughterhouses every year. How far has humanity the moral right so thoroughly to dominate animal life, and so cruelly?

Toleration for Cruelty

Factory farms create grim lives for their inmates and generate questions about how far society is willing to exploit animals. Factory farming prompts the question of how people can tolerate the production of animals under such conditions: the inhumanity to the animals through drugs, mutilation, confinement, as well as the pollution of nature and the hazard to human health. Unfortunately, factory farming is acceptable to most people because of their ignorance about what really happens to farm animals. Factory farms are hidden from view and people who know about what happens in them wrongly accept the situation as inevitable and unchangeable.

Mutilation

Mutilating factory farmed animals is routine, widespread and epitomises the factory farming system. Mutilations benefit only the operators and are the manifest mark of a bad farming system.

Animals respond to living in factory farms by developing abnormal behaviours, such as pigs biting each other's tails off and hens pecking each other to death. The factory farm 'solution' is to try to fit the animals to the system by cutting off the bits that cause offence. But beaks, tails, horns and teeth are indispensable parts of animals for the animals. A cow's horns are important for maintaining her social position in the herd hierarchy and her tail communicates her mood to others.

Deep Ecology

Society's practical rebuttal of Deep Ecology is clearly shown by society's support for factory farming. Factory farming has a materialistic, anthropocentric, consumer-oriented attitude to animals. Factory farming is part of the fibre of shallow ecology: using nature's resources for unregulated human growth, relying on technological solutions to fix socio-economic problems. Factory farming would have no part to play in a truly caring, moral society that expands the circle of compassion to animals. The very presence of factory farming in human society demonstrates how far we are from such a moral state.

Our Choice

We are each responsible for our own actions not to be cruel and as far as possible not to cause suffering to others. Factory farms are a human invention and we have a choice whether to patronise or spurn their dead products. The whole system itself of course needs abandoning; this is what the factory farmed animals are telling us.

For photos of factory farming, please visit The Animals Voice * Warning* graphic photos.