Sobering Statistics About Factory Farming
Why It's Smart to Go Vegan
According to the General Accounting Office, more plant species have been eliminated or threatened by livestock grazing than any other cause, and cattle grazing harms about 20% of endangered and threatened species. Some $37 million of taxpayer money is used to trap, poison, gas, and gun down almost one million wild animals and birds each year for livestock protection and pest control.
In the United States, every year 10 billion land animals and countless billions of fish raised at fish farms or taken from the wild are killed for food. The factory farming industry treats animals not as the sentient creatures they are, but rather as profitable commodities. They live in crowded cages and enclosures, are deprived of a normal social or family life, and spend their short lives largely without seeing daylight or being able to walk on the ground.
Forty million cows and calves are killed annually. Cows have a life span of 20-25 years, but a factory-farmed cow is used up by the time it is 3 to 4 years old and sent to the slaughterhouse. The organic waste from these giant farming operations is tremendous. Cattle alone are responsible for almost one billion tons of it, much of which finds its way into our groundwater.
On arrival at the slaughterhouse, animals that are too weak, sick, or injured to move are tied to the backs of trucks and dragged to areas where they are piled on top of each other (still alive) so that they can be easily killed and butchered. They are called downed animals, and they may suffer for days without food, water, or medical attention. These sick animals are often rejected for human consumption and wind up in pet food.
Of the 10 million biogenetically engineered dairy cows in the U.S., at least half spend their entire lives in crowded milking pens or barns with concrete floors. They are artificially inseminated on the rape rack-a charming term used by farmers-and their male calves are sold to veal producers within two days of birth, who chain them for 12 to 16 weeks inside dark, tiny crates. They are denied mother's milk in order to produce the pale veal color. Factory-farmed dairy cows, like beef cows, are sprayed with pesticides and doused with antibiotics, hormones, and tranquilizers. The chemical residue is passed on to all those who consume their milk. Cow's milk contains three times as much protein and 50% more fat than human milk, and is designed specifically to create a 300-pound cow within one year of birth, not to nourish humans.
Almost 10 billion chickens, turkeys and ducks are slaughtered each year for their meat. An additional four hundred million egg-laying hens live a hellish life, five to a cage only 18 inches in width (a chicken's wingspan is 32 inches). Broiler chickens are raised in buildings with up to nine birds per square foot. Egg producers suffocate or grind up (alive) 280 million male chicks per year. Chicken processors, who kill about 5,000 chickens per hour, disregard hygiene because of lack of time and often just return bodies dropped on the floor to the processing line. A chicken factory uses up to 100 million gallons of water per day.
Approximately 100 million pigs are killed annually for food. Most pork, bacon, and ham comes from pigs who spend their short lives in stacked crates or barren cement pens with iron bars. Mother pigs are immobilized in pens almost constantly and treated as nothing more than breeding and feeding machines. The pig industry is a major contributor to pollution in this country, creating thousands of tons of waste that foul the air and infiltrate groundwater. Factory farming is a disastrous combination of environmental degradation, animal cruelty, and human health abuse. What can you do about it as a consumer? It's not enough just to switch to eating the products of so-called humanely raised animals. They're still slaughtered in the end, and their lives are often not much different from factory-farmed animals. The best way to protect yourself and your loved ones from the horrors of the animal farming industry is to switch to a plant-based diet.
Published by Barbara Joan Baxter
Barbara Joan is a freelance writer/editor/publisher/webhead and the proud guardian of ten dogs and cats. Books of poems and a memoir are in the works. View profile
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23 Comments
Post a CommentSay what? Sorry you're upset, but I'm really not clear on why, Christy, since you gave no specifics. Good luck with your thesis. Really. I don't often get comments with such a mixed message. Live and learn, I guess.
Im a medical student, so i don't know much about agriculture acept that i live in nebraska and im around it constantly. But as a medical student, i noted basic facts in your article that are incorrect, which makes the rest of what you say unaccountable. This article was the most biased, ranting, worthless crap i've read this week, and i've been researching for a thesis paper to abolish factory farming so i'm really on your side, which makes you look even worse. Every fact you have about how many animals are killed for their meat is useless, we know billions of animals are killed for their meat, we're eating them! A lesson in composed and objective argueing is in store for you.
Bob, the evidence is so compelling about the horrors of factory farming for human health, the environment, and the animals involved that it's hard for me to understand how anyone could keep eating that stuff and actually enjoy it. Every time I see a commercial for the latest version of bacon cheeseburger (always consumed, of course, by young, slender, healthy-looking actors) it amazes me anew how in denial most humans still are about their food sources despite easy access to the real facts, and how the corporate meat/dairy/egg lobby exploits it, if you can even call that stuff food.
Okay, food is important and is neccesary, but factory farms do more harm than good. Let's start with the bacteria that is blown off manure by fans, waste pools, and the factory farm itself- this bacteria kills more people every year than HIV/AIDS. Plus antibiotics that is used to keep animals alive in terrible conditions is transfered to people who eat it and living around it. So more disease and tolerance of antibiotics. If you live by a factory farm you have a MUCH higher risk of ashma, miscarrages, and respitory diseases. Factory farms have money and DO NOT have ANY regulations on how much harmful junk they can release into the air, water or environment becasue they are 'agricultural'. Factory farm money won't stay in your state, it goes mostly to California. As for the jobs it provides, working in the nasty conditions cause most of them to develop respitory problems or other diseses. I'd rather be poor and have clean water and air, than be rich and sick. If a factory farm comes to
Sam, it saddens MY soul that you're so brainwashed about plant-based versus animal-based diets, as are many Americans, thanks to relentless propaganda from the meat/dairy/egg mafia. The truth is that NOBODY needs to eat animal products to be healthy. Did you know that the rather conservative American Dietetic Association announced about six months ago, after studying the current research, that a properly planned vegetarian or vegan diet is as healthy, if not healthier, than an animal-based diet? And that the American Diabetic Association also approves well-balanced plant-based diets for diabetics? Check out their websites, and also the decades-long nutritional studies of Dr. T. Colin Campbell. Sounds like you're the one who needs to do the research!
It saddens my soul that this poor reporting is being read by people that don't know about the benefits of meat in our diets. Like animal fat helps brain development, or that some of the greatest deficiencies in the American diet are due to vegan diets. Please, please do real research prior to letting scare tactics like these articles determine what you put into your bodies (or rather don't put in your body).
and when a drought hits, they're forced to choose between feeding their expensive animals or feeding themselves. I used to be like you. I ran around for 50 years as an omnivore with occasional forays into vegetarianism. I've been vegan for the last ten and I feel great. I'm the proof of my own beliefs. That's cool that your grannie is still alive, but there will always be people who live for 100+ years eating and drinking all the wrong things. That has more to do with good genes. I'm more interested in doing what's right than what may allow me to live longer, although I do believe plant-based living will add productive, healthy years to my life span.
Actually I was thinking of a more illegal kind of smoking! ;) But anyway, what has increased longevity are vaccines, antibiotics and a lot of questionable drugs that manage to keep people alive longer (if you can call living in a nursing home in a permanent daze and popping dozens of pills every day a life). Read T. Colin Campbell and others about the unhealthiness of an animal-based diet. It's good that you're an "ethical farmer" (that's better than the alternative), but if everyone did as you did, there wouldn't be enough animal products to go around to feed 12 billion people, because you are by definition small scale. In contrast, if the fields set aside to grow food to feed your animals (who are in turn eaten by humans) were dedicated to growing plant-based foods for humans, it would be much more sensible, rational, logical, and would be able to feed many more humans (instead of teaching people in third world countries that they have to keep animals in order to be healthy, and w
Funny you should ask. Actually I do smoke and that will probably be the cause of my early retirement so to speak. Now as an ethical farmer I can say it has been the abundance of and availability of good food that has increased the longevity of life in the last few decades,and that is a fact. My Grandma who is 106 years old says eat your meat and vegetables, not just veggies.Truthfully it is grains and vegetables that deplete nutrients in the soil. Livestock compost actually replenishes nutrients, as does commercial fertilizer at least when I took agriculture thats the way it was,and still is. The only plants that help replenish nutrients are legumes, which only fixate nitrogen. As far as being in touch and up to speed, I am as that is what I do, so I ask again how have most people got so out of touch with agriculture, and what do you think would happen if all farmers in North America got fed up with all the bashing and went on strike? The planet can certainly sustain 6 b people as it i
What are you smoking, bruce? Livestock production has extincted wildllife and seriously impoverished the soil. I live in New Mexico, and just the other day there was an article in the paper about how drinking water is being polluted by dairy CAFOs. There are a number of books out that corroborate what I say, including "Eating Animals" by Jonathan Safran Foer and a couple of books by Michael Pollan. Why don't you bring yourself up to speed about the farming and ranching of animal products and what it's done to the environment? As for my job, I am officially retired but am first and foremost an animal advocate and ethical vegan, and one of the ways I advocate is through writing. If you don't like what I write, you don't have to read it. Simple. BTW, I'm also in favor of universal free birth control and abortion to control the human overpopulation crisis. The planet can't sustain 6 billion people, much less 12 billion.