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Excerpt Chapter 7: THE MYTH OF THE WHOLESOME BARNYARD ... Our image of animals living a happy existence in the barnyard is a myth of the past. The barnyard was phased out after World War II, and the factory farming system replaced it almost entirely. ... My compassionate sister Betsy who did most of the drawings in this book calls them "animal penitentiaries." ... BEEF CATTLE Beef cattle spend four or five months being "finished" on corn and soy beans to fatten them up. ... They are dehorned, a very painful procedure in which the horns and surrounding tissue is cut out and then further burned away with caustic chemicals. Dehorning is necessary because these animals are going to become violent as a result of the way they will be treated. ... Beef cattle pass their last weeks in feed lots where not a blade of grass grows, standing and lying constantly in mud or dust and their excrement. ... Modern U.S. laws do not allow an animal to fall into the blood of another animal. So for an animal to be slaughtered conscious—as required by modern kosher rules --, a chain is attached to one rear leg ... a process that rips muscle and cartilage and pulls the leg out of its socket. ... DAIRY CATTLE America's ten million dairy cows rarely see a growing blade of grass. The modern factory farm method is to house them in feedlots. ... Dairy cows must be impregnated yearly in order to keep their milk flowing. Calves are removed immediately after they are born ... for veal production. ... VEAL Veal crates are typically 22 inches wide. Calves can move only a few inches in any direction. ... Their legs atrophy through lack of exercise, and they have trouble walking to their deaths at around 100 days. Genuflect once more to the false god Dollar. ... Calves remain helplessly weak. Their diet is government surplus milk and butter—subsidized with our tax dollars. Veal calves are never given water to drink. Water would quench their thirst, and they would drink less milk. They are given no hay, lest they obtain the iron it contains. They develop chronic diarrhea and live constantly in their own excrement. ... Around 20 percent of calves die of a host of illnesses and cancers before slaughter. Veal is the meat of sick and suffering animals. LAYING HENS ... Newly hatched chicks ... are separated into useful females and useless males. Males are tossed into big plastic bags where they slowly suffocate. (J. Mason, and Peter Singer, Animal Factories, 1980, p. 5.) They are ground up and fed back to other chickens. ... The surviving females are promptly de-beaked with a red-hot clipper. A chicken's beak is extremely sensitive, and it is as painful to a chicken to be de-beaked as it would be if someone whacked off part of your nose and mouth. Chicks are de-beaked because they are going to be driven mad by their coming confinement, and without de-beaking they would peck each other to death. ... Cages are stacked several layers high, so chickens below are showered with urine and feces raining down from above. ... Diseases race through the chicken population, and the birds are fed a continuous diet of antibiotics. Ninety percent of the hens have cancer—leukosis—when they are set for slaughter. ... DUCKS AND GEESE In order to fatten ducks and geese as quickly as possible, factory farmers use a long funnel to force-feed grain down their necks. Sometimes their stomachs burst. ... PIGS ... Piglets that are deformed or that are crushed by the sow are fed right back to her, along with the afterbirth. The motto in the pork industry is "feed it back to them." ... Piglets are moved to cages, which can be stacked many layers high. ... Urine and feces rain down onto piglets in the lower cages. ... The stench must be particularly painful to pigs because of their highly developed sense of smell. ... When pigs are housed all together in a building without individual confinement, they engage in "tail biting," which means they eat off each other's tails and start consuming each other's buttocks .... ... [T]en percent of pigs die of heart attacks, fighting furiously, while being driven to their deaths. ... ETHICAL ANALYSIS ... These animals lack our degree of intellectual capacity, but they have much of our emotional capacity. They dream; their eyes move when they sleep. Young animals frolic and play like children. Cow and calf, sow and piglet, hen and chick—they bond with each other. ... They are very upset when they are separated, just as human mother and child would be. ... Animals have exactly the same pain receptors and sense of touch we do. Cattle in an open farm yard will moan in sadness and fear when they witness the death of other animals. In the same way, when these animals arrive at the slaughterhouse entrance, they hear their fellows crying out, and they understand that their deaths are coming. Animals fight for their lives; they often have to be forced into the killing pens. ... So we must ask: How can we live comfortably with ourselves, knowing the terror and pain that exists on a daily basis for the world's 15 billion factory farm animals? ... We humans have enormous compassion for our pets but little compassion for the factory animals that are killed to put meat on our plates. ... ... Jeremy Bentham in 1780 said: "The question is not Can they reason? nor Can they talk? but Can they suffer?" ... ... If E.T. comes to earth, he may class humans as just another animal and cook us up for dinner. Would that be ethical? SPECULATION ABOUT AN UNCONSCIOUS CONNECTION ... Koko is a domesticated gorilla who has learned sign language. She becomes highly emotional as she describes the day that poachers killed her mother and kidnapped her away to civilization. It may be that many species are conscious and do remember their own history. It may just be that their thoughts are trapped inside because we have not learned how to decipher their language. ... Insensitive people in the past said things like: "Oh, come on, they are just slaves;" ... "Oh, come on, they are just women." We ... no longer say such things. However, insensitive people today still say, "Oh, come on, they are just animals." We have shed our bigotries towards slaves, blacks, foreigners, and women. When will be learn to shed our bigotry toward animals? ... In making ourselves insensitive to the terror and pain of animals, have we not made ourselves insensitive to other voices or some greater Voice that is trying to tell us of a way out of the moral and environmental mess our world is in? ... ... Animals are on a lower intellectual level than we are, however, Jewish philosopher Nachmanides believed that animals are on a higher spiritual level than humans. ... If the animals we eat would never harm us and are more innocent than we are and exist on a higher spiritual level than we do, is it not all the more unjust that we maker them suffer so much? ... I have concluded that the pain and terror we inflict on animals is morally significant. ... Peace among humans will not come until we make peace with other species and the natural environment in general. ...
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