Lia Waugh Powell and Kayla Cole Baker

Newspaper headlines and documentaries have recently exposed the horrors and corruptions within the food industry.  Most people today have a basic idea of what goes on behind closed doors in the food industry; few know exactly what happens.  This day and hour, animals are being produced, transported, and slaughtered in larger quantities than ever before.  This high demand creates a need for efficiency and quickness resulting in unfair and inhumane treatment for commercial purposes.

Factory farming, according to the ASPCA, is “a large-scale industrial operation that houses hundreds or thousands of food animals in extremely restricted conditions and treats them as non-sentient economic commodities.”  The mistreatment begins in the process of raising the animals.  Factory farms begin with force breeding, in which animals are made to reproduce at unnaturally accelerated rates.  This causes the animals to become exhausted and stressed, putting their immune systems at higher risk for disease.  Because all of the animals resulting from force breeding need to be stored, the unnatural overpopulation causes them to be cramped into small areas.  They have no room to move, causing animals to get trampled to death or badly injured.  The lack of space makes ventilation sparse and disease easily spreadable.  To control the diseases among animals, the farm workers consistently feed them normally unnecessary antibiotics and hormones.  In addition, these antibiotics are used to kill intestinal bacteria, stimulating growth to speed up production along with the hormones with which they’re injected.

The abuse is far from over with the raising of the animals.  When the farm workers transfer the animals to the slaughterhouse, they still do not treat the animals as if their treatment could inflict pain.  As animals are transferred, they are crammed into trailers, mostly in harsh temperatures.  As cold weather worsens, animals start to freeze to the sides of the trailers.  The skin of the pigs or cows sticks to the side, and when they are roughly being pulled off to enter the slaughterhouse, their skin remains on the trailer.  Many who got sick or injured along the way are forced from the trailers with a bulldozer and piled with the other dead animals, waiting to join them in death.  The U.S. Department of Agriculture says each year about ten percent or nine hundred million animals never reach the slaughterhouse.

After arriving from the farms, the animals are put in line to be slaughtered.  Federal law requires animals be unconscious during processing, but unfortunately, that is not always the case.  The majority of slaughterhouses use electrical wands or what the industry calls a “captive bolt” to make the animals unconscious, but these are not always effective.  An account from a worker of a factory farm recounts, “To get done with them faster, we’d put eight or nine of them in the knocking box at a time.  You start shooting, the calves are jumping, and they’re all piling up on top of each other.  You don’t know which ones got shot and which didn’t.  They’re hung anyway and down the line they go, wriggling and yelling, to be slaughtered, fully conscious.”  Even with this requirement, some observations tell us thirty percent of animals being processed are still conscious while they go through the assembly line.  One worker confessed, “A lot of times the skinner finds a cow is still conscious when he slices the side of his head and the cow starts kicking wildly.  If that happens, the skinner shoves a knife into the back of its head to cut the spinal cord.  This only paralyzes them, it doesn’t stop the pain.”  The blame for this is put on faulty equipment or improper training of the workers.  The U.S. Department of Agriculture conducted a survey among all United State slaughtering houses, showing barely thirty-six percent were using “acceptable” slaughtering techniques.

The inhumane act of slaughtering does not only affect the animals, it takes a toll on the workers emotionally and physically as well.  A worker shares his experience with working in a slaughterhouse: “I’ve taken my job pressure and frustration out on the animals, my wife and on myself with heavy drinking.  With an animal that makes you angry, you don’t just kill it.  You blow the windpipe; make it drown in its own blood, spit in its nose.  I would cut its eye out and the hog would just scream.  One time I sliced off the end of a hog’s nose.  The hog went crazy, so I took a handful of salt brine and ground it into its nose.  Now that hog really went nuts….”  Not only emotionally, the lack of training the staff has acquired can stay with them the rest of their lives.  With bloody floors, sharp instruments, and thrashing animals surrounding, it’s easy to slip and injure yourself.  Without closely paying attention, the heavy machinery could cause major injury.  A worker testifies his observations: “The conditions are very dangerous and workers aren’t well trained for machinery.  One machine has a whirring blade that catches people in it.  One woman’s breast got caught in it and it was torn off.  Another’s shirt got caught and her face was dragged into it.”  Those disabled by machines and complain of the dangers are almost always replaced.

Those in the field of animal processing are not the only people affected by this way of producing.  The consumers eating these meats produced by factory farms are also harmed.  The antibiotics and hormones animals are required to eat because of the conditions they live in have harmful effects in humans who consume them.  The animals are fed these antibiotics all of their lives, and they become part of their body.  When we eat them, we also get the antibiotics and hormones they were given.  Consuming these can create a long-term problem with our own health.  The overdose of antibiotics can build up in our system, creating immunity from medicines used to fight certain strains of bacteria and illnesses.  Overdoses in hormones also affect us negatively.  Too much of a hormone can create growth problems in humans, just as it would make an animal grow unnaturally.  Within the food we eat are also defects as a result of factory farming and inhumane slaughter.  The food product from mass producing farms such as meat, eggs, and dairy products suffers in nutrition.  Using improper slaughtering techniques results in blood-spattered meat only acceptable for low-grade meat products, such as hamburgers.  As for eggs and dairy products, the force breeding and being injected with hormones to speed up the production affects the quality of the product.  There are not as many health benefits and nutrition as a natural, healthy process would produce.

Yet another way factory farming affects the world around us is environmentally.  When hundreds of animals are confined to one area, the surrounding land is harmed.  So many animals create much more waste than land can support, as well as putting chemicals in the air through processing.  This pollutes our soil, air, and water quality.  The excessive amount of waste is stored in waste lagoons, which often leak, admitting the manure into our ground and waterways, adding bacteria.  Side effects from this can result in Blue Infant Syndrome and other diseases.  The manure is also taken by companies to spray as fertilizer, releasing chemicals into the air we breathe and a gas dangerous to those in close proximity to a large amount called hydrogen sulfide.  Side effects range from sore throat to seizures and death.

In an attempt to stop this inhumane slaughtering, Congress recognized the Humane Methods of Animal Slaughter Act on August 27, 1958: “Congress finds the use of humane methods in the slaughter of livestock to prevent needless suffering; resulting in safer and better working conditions for persons engaged in the slaughtering industry; brings about improvement of products and economies in slaughtering operations; and produces other benefits for producers, processors and consumers which tend to expedite an orderly flow of livestock and livestock products in the interstate and foreign commerce.  It is therefore declared to be the policy of the United States that the slaughter shall be carried out only by humane methods.”  Though this held up while the demand for food was in smaller quantities, as it grew so did the inhumane treatment of animals.  This created the need for President Bush to sign into law the “Farm Security and Rural Investment Act of 2002.”  This includes a resolution the Humane Methods of Slaughter Act of 1958 be fully reinforced to prevent this needless suffering of animals.  It also requires the Secretary of Agriculture to track volitions and report them to Congress annually.  This poses the question: if these requirements are laws to be reported annually, why has factory farming continued to be a problem?  According to Arthur Hughes, Vice-Chairmen of the National Council of Food Inspection, the new federal regulations have given slaughterhouses more responsibility to comply with plant operation, but requirements have left them powerless to enforce them.  He explains in an interview, “Drastic increases in production speeds, lack of support from supervisors in plants, new inspection policies which significantly reduce our enforcement authority, and little or no access to the areas of the plants where animals are killed, have significantly hampered our ability to ensure compliance with humane regulations.”

With all of the problems of factory farming evident above, the question comes to mind, “what can be done to change this?”  Simply stepping up for the rights of animals made clear in the Humane Methods of Slaughter Act can change the way these factories are run.  In 1999, McDonald’s and other fast food companies received word of what was happening inside these slaughtering houses. McDonald’s showed up to investigate if the safety concerns were true.  They then set up newer guidelines for workers to follow, but nothing more.  Ways to ensure you are not supporting this horrific issue is by buying products marked as organic or free range.  They both mean cows, chickens, and pigs have not eaten pesticides and are not being raised in factory farms.  This not only does not feed the fast food business money and encourage them to keep producing, but it also supports local farmers.  Another thing to look into is http://www.localharvest.org/, a Web site that allows you to find local farms near you and regularly order fresh produce and other foods with a good cause.

Works Referenced

Bonné, Jon. “Can the Animals You Eat Be Treated Humanely?” Msnbc.com Web. 14 December 2011.

Farm Sanctuary. Farmsanctuary.org. Web. 14 December 2011.

People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA): The Animal Rights Organization. PETA.org. Web. 14 December 2011.

U.S. Food and Drug Administration Home Page. Web. 14 December 2011.