Old McDonald Doesn’t Live Here Anymore

Ah, the pastoral pleasures of farm life! Fluffy sheep grazing contentedly in the fields, the chickens clucking in the henhouse, and the pigs happily munching away on the family’s leftovers from their communal trough. Everyone’s happy and healthy and doing their part for the cycle of life.

Unfortunately, real-life farms are not at all like that. At least, not in this day and age of mass-quantity factory farms where the well-being of animals is hardly considered and the only issue is how to harvest as much meat for market as is possible per square foot of land. To that end, farmers now forgo traditional grazing practices and pack as many animals as possible into crowded feedlots, where they do nothing throughout their short lives but eat tons of grain and drink thousands of gallons of water. Dairy cows are often treated better than beef cattle, but increasingly, dairy farmers are keeping their cows housed inside barns, where they develop leg and hoof problems due to standing continuously on cement floors. Cows today are also forced to produce more milk than ever before; they are constantly milked by machines with little rest, causing them to develop painfully inflamed udders. The forced milk production shortens their lives too. When treated well, cows can live for up to twenty years, producing milk for over half their life. Today’s dairy cows are so overmilked that they can only produce for three or four years, after which time they’re sent to the slaughterhouse.

Cows aren’t the only animals to suffer under factory farming practices. Chickens are treated especially poorly, living their entire lives in cramped confinement. They are crowded so closely together that they’re debeaked— their beaks are snapped off with a machine tool—so that they don’t harm each other with their
hysterical pecking. Debeaked chickens have difficulty eating, which isn’t surprising, and live in such terrible conditions that they’re forced to eat their own and other chickens’ feces along with their food; this contributes to the wide variety of potentially deadly bacteria that gets passed onto the consumer.

Besides the debeaking, another unpleasant practice is molting. Chickens produce more eggs when they shed their feathers, so egg farmers induce the egg-laying state by starving the birds for up to twelve days at a time. Besides being inhumane, some researchers have concluded that forced molting increases chickens’ levels of salmonella. This also assists egg farmers in weeding out the weaker hens—about 3 percent of chickens die of starvation during the forced molting process. In fact, the entire egg- production process starts with killing. Male chicks have no function on a modern egg farm and are culled by workers whose job consists of identifying them and tossing them, while still alive, into machines that grind them up and add them to the hens’ feed. Practices like this, along with molting and debeaking, have caused such a public outcry that even the McDonald’s Corporation couldn’t ignore it. In 2000, the fast-food giant sent letters to the farmers who provided the over 1.5 billion eggs that they use each year, demanding that chickens be housed in larger cages and that forced molting be stopped.

Campylobacter

The most frequently contaminated of all meat in the United States is undoubtedly chicken. The poultry industry is the first to admit that a lot of the chicken they sell contains Campylobacter bacteria. Most of you have probably never even heard of Campylobacter bacteria, because it is not reported on nearly as much as E. coli. But, in reality, this specific kind of bacteria kills more Americans every year than E. coli, and the death toll continues to rise. The bacteria get into the mucosal layer of the intestines and cause a disease that can be recognized by bloody diarrhea, fever, body aches and pains, and abdominal discomfort. Unlike other food poisoning, symptoms don’t usually arise until a week after ingestion. The Food Revolution reports that 40 percent of the cases of the Guillain-Barre syndrome, a life-threatening condition of paralysis, often followed the onset of an infection from Campylobacter bacteria. Although the poultry industry is well aware of the threat of Campylobacter and what causes it (contaminated litter or the bedding of the chicken coupe), they refuse to do anything about it because of the extra financial cost.