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 at the family’s leftovers from their communal trough. Everyone’s happy and healthy and doing their part for the cycle of life. Right?
Unfortunately, it’s not at all like that. At least, not in this day and age of mass-quantity factory farms where the well-being of animals isn’t considered – the only issue is how to harvest as much meat for market as possible per square foot of land. And to that end, farmers now forgo traditional grazing practices, packing 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 not much – increasingly, dairy farmers are keeping their cows housed inside barns their entire lives, where they develop leg and hoof problems due to standing in once place on cement floors. Cows today are also forced to produce more milk than ever before, being constantly milked by machines with little rest from the process, giving them painfully inflamed udders. The forced milk production shortens their lives, too – when treated well, cows can live for up to 20 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, crowded so closely together that they’re "debeaked" – their beaks 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, contributing 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’re shedding their feathers, so egg farmers induce the 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 male chicks 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 enough of 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 provide 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.
