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All Creation Groans: the Lives of Factory Farm Animals in the United States

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All Creation Groans: the Lives of Factory Farm Animals in the United States InSight: RIVIER ACADEMIC JOURNAL, VOLUME 13, NUMBER 1, SPRING 2017 “ALL CREATION GROANS”: The Lives of Factory Farm Animals in the United States Sr. Lucille C. Thibodeau, pm, Ph.D.* Writer-in-Residence, Department of English, Rivier University Today, more animals suffer at human hands than at any other time in history. It is therefore not surprising that an intense and controversial debate is taking place over the status of the 60+ billion animals raised and slaughtered for food worldwide every year. To keep up with the high demand for meat, industrialized nations employ modern processes generally referred to as “factory farming.” This article focuses on factory farming in the United States because the United States inaugurated this approach to farming, because factory farming is more highly sophisticated here than elsewhere, and because the government agency overseeing it, the Department of Agriculture (USDA), publishes abundant readily available statistics that reveal the astonishing scale of factory farming in this country.1 The debate over factory farming is often “complicated and contentious,”2 with the deepest point of contention arising over the nature, degree, and duration of suffering food animals undergo. “In their numbers and in the duration and depth of the cruelty inflicted upon them,” writes Allan Kornberg, M.D., former Executive Director of Farm Sanctuary in a 2012 Farm Sanctuary brochure, “factory-farm animals are the most widely abused and most suffering of all creatures on our planet.” Raising the specter of animal suffering inevitably raises the question of animal consciousness and sentience. Jeremy Bentham, the 18th-century founder of utilitarianism, focused on sentience as the source of animals’ entitlement to equal consideration of interests. Simply put, an interest is anything a being may want to do and strive for. Human and non-human animals have many interests in common, such as living, eating, drinking, sleeping, reproducing, being comfortable, avoiding pain and suffering, having their needs met, and the like. The moral principle of equal consideration of interests holds that one should both include all affected interests when calculating the rightness of an action and weigh those interests equally.3 In An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation, Bentham, in a long portentous footnote, asserted that “the question is not, Can they reason? Nor, Can they talk? But, Can they suffer?”4 In one sentence, Bentham challenges all those who would deny rights to animals based on reason, language, or any other morally irrelevant factor. Sentience, the ability to experience pleasure and pain, is the only morally significant factor, because that capacity is “a prerequisite for having interests at all,--at the very least an interest in not suffering.5 Bentham’s footnote was a battle cry: our moral responsibilities to animals are neither different from nor less important than our responsibilities to 1 “Upwards of 99 percent of all animals eaten in this country come from ‘factory farms.’” Jonathan Safran Foer, Eating Animals (New York: Little, Brown, 2009), 12. Factory farms are also called CAFOs (“confined animal feeding operations”) and factory farming is sometimes referred to as “industrialized farm animal production” (IFAP). 2 Paul Waldau, Animal Rights: What Everyone Needs to Know (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 34. 3 See Peter Singer, Animal Liberation (New York: HarperCollins, updated edition, 2009), 5. Singer bases the argument of his book, and his entire ethical theory, on this moral principle. The principle opposes theories that either exclude some interests from the moral calculus or weigh certain interests differently from others. Where animals have a characteristic equal to humans, such as the ability to feel, for example, one must provide for an equal consideration of interests. 4 (Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 2007), 311. This Dover edition is an unabridged republication of the edition published at the Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1907. It in turn was a reprint of “A New Edition, corrected by the Author,” published in 1823. The work originally appeared in 1780 and was first published in 1789. 5 Singer, Animal Liberation, 7. Copyright © 2017 by Sr. Lucille C. Thibodeau. Published by Rivier University, with permission. 1 ISSN 1559-9388 (online version), ISSN 1559-9396 (CD-ROM version). Sr. Lucille C. Thibodeau human beings. His cry, silent for over two hundred years, was echoed by Princeton University Professor of Ethics Peter Singer in the book that has become the definitive classic of the animal movement. Contemporary scientific evidence—supplementing what most people have understood, with plain common sense, since pre-history—proves that mammals and birds, among other species, do possess sentience and self-awareness.6 It must be said that since we cannot know some things with absolute certainty, we cannot claim knowledge of those things. So, because we cannot know with absolute certainty that some animals are sentient and aware of themselves, we cannot claim to know that some, or any, of them are not. The arguments of Bentham, Singer, and Linzey, among others, are supported by a 2008 report published jointly by the Pew Charitable Trusts and the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. In “Putting Meat on the Table: Industrial Farm Animal Production in America,” the Commission found that “the present system of producing food animals in the United States is not sustainable and presents an unacceptable level of risk to public health and damage to the environment, as well as unnecessary harm to the animals we raise for food.”7 The Commission recommends the total phase-out of intensive confinement practices and asserts unequivocally that “the most intensive confinement systems . constitute inhumane treatment” and thus fall short of current ethical and societal standards.8 Sixty-plus years ago, the American countryside was studded with thousands of small, family- owned farms where one crop was grown and several species of livestock were raised. The growing demand for meat by a booming post-World-War-II population led to the gradual replacement of these small farms by large facilities housing 2000 animals or more. These operations were supported (and still are) by huge government subsidies for certain crops—corn especially—that were found to be cost- effective in feeding large numbers of farm animals. The aim of these large operations was to grow more animals more quickly in less space by using cost-effective food and by replacing human labor with technology as much as possible. The industry devised a series of discrete production processes connected down to the minutest detail by economic transactions.9 When the economic logarithms kicked in, farmers and consumers found themselves at the extreme ends of the spectrum of animal 6 “The Cambridge Declaration on Consciousness,” proclaimed on July 7, 2012, presents the conclusions of a prominent international group of neuroscientists, and validates the findings of numerous prior scientific studies. The declaration, as well as several of the seventeen talks and presentations of the Francis Crick Memorial conference, can be found at http://www.fcmconference.org. On animal sentience, self-awareness, emotion, and suffering, see also Marc Bekoff, The Emotional Lives of Animals: A Leading Scientist Explores Animal Joy, Sorrow, and Empathy—And Why They Matter (Novato, CA: New World Library, 2007); Andrew Linzey, Why Animal Suffering Matters: Philosophy, Theology, and Practical Ethics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009); Carl Safina, Beyond Words: What Animals Think and Feel (New York: Henry Holt, 2015); Frans de Waal, Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are? (New York: W.W. Norton, 2016); and Jennifer Ackerman, The Genius of Birds (New York: Penguin Press, 2016). 7 “Putting Meat on the Table: Industrial Farm Animal Production in America,” a report of the Pew Commission on Industrial Farm Animal Production, viii. http://www.Pewtrusts.org. 8 “Putting Meat on the Table,” 38. A longer version of my paper examines some of the sources of ethical standards in the Western world regarding the treatment of animals. The positions of Pythagoras, Plutarch, the Hebrew Bible, the New Testament, the hagiographical literature of medieval monasticism, Thomas Aquinas, the Catechism of the Catholic Church, and Pope Francis are briefly highlighted. The positions of many other philosophers, religious figures, and activists receive extensive treatment in Norm Phelps, The Longest Struggle: Animal Advocacy from Pythagoras to PETA (New York: Lantern Books, 2007). 9 In the industry these processes are called “vertical integration.” Matthew Scully, Dominion: The Power of Man, the Suffering of Animals, and the Call to Mercy (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2002), 250. Scully points out that “As in all forms of tyranny, management intensifies as knowledge [of], interest in, or even curiosity about the subjects passes away,” 272. 2 “ALL CREATION GROANS” “production.” “The factory farm . succeeded by divorcing people from their food, eliminating farmers, and ruling agriculture by corporate fiat.”10 When profit is the only duty and efficient the only law, ethical standards are bound to fall short. How they fall short leads us to ask: “What happens to animals in such a system?” Are they able to express behaviors natural to them? Are they given food that their digestive systems are designed to metabolize? Are they subjected to physical alterations in the interest of their not harming one another or the humans who handle them? In other words, what is it like to be an animal living in such a system?11 On factory farms, 98 percent of the 9 billion chickens (up from 1.6 billion in 1960) raised and slaughtered in a year in the U.S. are egg-laying hens the vast majority of whom live out their entire two- year lives in battery cages—tiny wire cages in which several hens are packed together, each one allotted the industry standard (set by United Egg Producers) of 67 square inches of space—less than a standard sheet of 8½ x 11” paper.
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