Vegan for Life - Jack Norris [92]
And here’s the key point: Any company that tried to unilaterally restructure by seriously boosting welfare standards, while working within the conventional factory farming system, would face insurmountable cost disadvantages. They’d be unable to compete and would be driven from business.
So while it’s convenient to blame management or supervision, and while there are certainly brutal and callous workers at some factory farms, that’s not the root of the problem. Factory farms are universally cruel by design, and these cruelties can’t be removed in any way other than for the entire industry to fundamentally restructure.
If industry wants to put an end to future cruelty videos, they’ve got to switch to systems with more space per animal, they’ve got to put an end to crowded transport and hurried slaughter, and they need to hire more workers to tend fewer animals. In short, the economics that keep animal products cheap are the same economics that guarantee a constant stream of videos shining a spotlight on the industry.
This is absolutely not a matter of bad supervision: The only way agribusiness can put an end to its worst cruelties is to spend vastly more money on each animal it raises, while putting a system in place where no company can cut corners. Until then, the videos will keep right on coming.39
ALTERNATIVES TO FACTORY FARMS
There are many other problems associated with factory farming, related to global warming and food safety, that are beyond the scope of this book. What is clear—based on animal cruelty, environmental effects, and human health—is that factory farming must end. This then raises questions about whether there are humane options for people who wish to continue eating animal products.
There are a number of labels used on animal products that suggest the animals lived in better conditions than factory farms: “humane,” “all-natural,” “free range,” and “organic” are some of them. You might be surprised, however, to learn that products carrying these labels almost universally come from factory-farmed animals—and from the same slaughterhouses we discussed above. For example, the slaughterhouse investigated for cruel treatment of veal calves was the same company used by organic Vermont dairy farms (see page 225).
In 2010, the Cornucopia Institute, an organic farm watchdog group, released Scrambled Eggs: Separating Factory Farm Egg Production from Authentic Organic Agriculture. The report was based on visits to more than 15 percent of USDA-certified organic egg farms and surveys of all name-brand and private-label industry egg companies. While organic standards include a requirement for outdoor access for animals, including laying hens, they found that “most industrial-scale producers are currently confining tens of thousands of hens inside henhouses, commonly only offering tiny concrete or wooden porches as ‘outdoor access’—and getting away with it. In some cases they’ve used statements from veterinarians concerning hypothetical disease transmission as an excuse to offer no outdoor access whatsoever.” (Emphasis added.)
Mark A. Kastel, the Cornucopia Institute’s co-director and senior farm policy analyst, said, “[I]t’s obvious that a high percentage of the eggs on the market should be labeled ‘produced with organic feed’ rather than bearing the USDA-certified organic logo.”
For most products touted as “humanely produced,” cruelty lurks behind the cheerful label. Even if free-range dairy farms provide better treatment for cows, their male calves are still taken from their mothers within hours of birth and sold for veal production. Chickens in cage-free facilities can spread their wings, but they still spend their entire lives packed by the tens of thousands into windowless warehouses. The male chicks are still killed at birth