Style guru Martha Stewart has joined Farm Sanctuary to oppose factory farming. She talks a bit about why we should all speak out against it.  Join Martha and Farm Sanctuary and the millions who already speak for the animals by (1) not eating them and (2) expressing your support for bills that restrict factory farming operations. This is an issue that crosses political lines. After visiting the Farm Sanctuary website you might want to stop at the Humane Farming Association‘s, and see what they are doing to make factory farms a thing of the past.

Following graphic undercover footage obtained by MFA – showing workers throwing, kicking, dragging, and beating turkeys, as well as birds suffering from bloody open wounds and infections – the Hoke County Sheriff’s Department raided a Butterball factory farm facility in Shannon, North Carolina, early Thursday morning.

The undercover footage recorded at Butterballreveals:

• Workers violently kicking and stomping on birds, dragging them by their fragile wings and necks, and maliciously throwing turkeys onto the ground or into transport trucks in full view of company management;
• Employees bashing in the heads of live birds with metal bars, leaving many to slowly suffer and die from their injuries;
• Turkeys covered in flies, living in their own waste, unable to access food or water and suffering from severe feather loss and necrotic (dead) muscles and skin;
• Birds suffering from serious untreated illnesses and injuries, including open sores, infections, rotting eyes, and broken bones; and
• Severely injured turkeys, unable to stand up or walk, left to die without any veterinary care, because treating sick or injured birds was too costly and time consuming, as the farm manager explained to MFA’s investigator.

After viewing the undercover video,veterinarian Dr. Debra Teachout said, “A culture of blatant and severe animalmistreatment has been allowed to flourish unchecked [at Butterball], and for that reason, this facility should be shut down immediately.”

As this investigation illustrates, the lives of turkeys in Butterball’s factory farms are brutal and filled with fear, violence and prolonged suffering. While wild turkeys are sleek, agile and able to fly, Butterball’s turkeys have been selectively bred to grow so large, so quickly, that many of them suffer from painful bone defects, hip joint lesions, crippling foot and leg deformities,and fatal heart attacks. Due to the company’s lack of meaningful animal welfare policies, training or procedures, Butterball subjects countless turkeys to immeasurable cruelty and neglect each year.

“Butterball is guilty of extreme animal abuse and should be held criminally accountable,” said MFA’s Executive Director Nathan Runkle. “Before ending up in restaurants and grocery stores, our investigation shows turkeys killed for Butterball are routinely crowded intofilthy warehouses, neglected to die from festering, bloody wounds, and thrown, kicked, and beaten by factory farm workers.”

To view the undercover video and see what you can do about it, visit ButterballAbuse.com.

In a recent study, [Criminology professor Amy] Fitzgerald crunched numbers from the FBI’s Uniform Crime Report database, census data, and arrest and offence reports from 581 U.S. counties from 1994 to 2002.

“I have a graph that shows that as the number of slaughterhouse workers in a community increases, the crime rate also increases,” she says. [...]

Fitzgerald compared slaughterhouse communities to those with comparison industries — dangerous, repetitive work that did not involve killing animals. These were not associated with a rise in crime at all, she says. In some cases, they seemed to bring the crime rate down.“The unique thing about (abattoirs) is that (workers are) not dealing with inanimate objects, but instead dealing with live animals coming in and then killing them, and processing what’s left of them.”

You can read the whole article here >>

And for further reading on this same topic, consider reading these previous Vegan Soapbox articles:

• Let People Care
• When Visitors Come
• Workers Suffer Alongside Animals
• Overworked, Underpaid Turkey Killers
• Race, Class, And Industrialized “Food”
• Resources For The Human Animal Rights Discussion
• Animal Rights Violations Beget Human Rights Violations
• Slaughterhouse Workers

Got more to add to the discussion of the link between violence to animals and violence to humans? Say your piece below in the comments!

“Although physically hidden from view, the grim realities of the factory farm are now widely known due the pioneering work of an influential cadre of writers. Peter Singer (Animal Liberation), Anna Moore Lappe (Diet for a Small Planet), Eric Schlosser (Fast Food Nation), Michael Pollan (The Omnivore’s Dilemma), and Jonathan Safran Foer (Eating Animals), among others, have succeeded in rattling mainstream nerves with their forthright analyses of factory farming. Passively or actively, we have absorbed their messages in all their gory detail and, with good reason, declared ourselves to be disturbed–often deeply so–with factory farming. Consumers are disturbed for the simple but powerful reason that, however unexamined the sentiment might be, we believe that farm animals deserve better.  Deep down–again, however vague the notion is– we oppose factory farms because we know that animals matter enough not to be unnecessarily harmed.” read the rest >>

These notes are from a presentation by Melanie Joy, author of Why We Love Dogs, Eat Pigs, and Wear Cows, about why the localvore and happy meat movements are a good sign. She calls this group of eaters “neocarnists” and she says they are a sign that things have changed for the better.

Most carnists are “traditional carnists” and they eat animals simply out of habit. They have not examined their carnism and don’t have many answers to the question “Why do you eat animals?”

Then there are three types of neocarnists: compassionate carnism, ecocarnism, and biocarnism. The “compassionate” carnists proclaim to care about animal welfare, but this “exists in philosophy, not reality.” I think here she means that happy meat is not truly possible since producers are motivated by profit, not compassion, that meat requires death, and that humans make mistakes thus even a “humane” meat system results in suffering.

The ecocarnists view empathy and compassion as weaknesses. And the biocarnists have a selective view of human history that view humans as essentially hunters.

Joy suggests these strategic responses to neocarnists:

1. Recognize this as progress. Neocarnism is a form of backlash against effective vegan advocacy. Animal rights activists have created a situation where many people finally feel compelled to examine their carnism but most are not yet willing to act on the reasonable, logical conclusions of serious ethical examination of animal-eating. So they’ve created defense mechanisms like denial and excuse-making to rationalize their consumption of animal products. The result is neocarnnism.

2. Ecourage self-reflection. Neocarnism is an acknowledgment that there are ethical problems associated with eating animals. So a reasonable reaction to neocarnists is to encourage more self-reflection. Perhaps if they think more about the issues and why they’ve decided that factory farming is wrong they might come to the conclusion that all animalexploitation is wrong.

UPDATE: Melanie Joy has published an article on this topic. The article is available here: http://www.onegreenplanet.org/lifestyle/understanding-neocarnism/

From Nicholas Kristoff’s recent article in the New York Times:

Every year in the United States, 325,000 people are hospitalized because of food-borne illnesses and 5,000 die, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. That’s right: food kills one person every two hours. [...]

90 percent of the livestock antibiotics are administered in their food or water, typically to healthy animals to keep them from getting sick when they are confined in squalid and crowded conditions.
The single state of North Carolina uses more antibiotics for livestock than the entire United States uses for humans.

This cavalier use of low-level antibiotics creates a perfect breeding ground for antibiotic-resistant pathogens. [...]

Other countries are moving to ban the feeding of antibiotics to livestock. But in the United States, the agribusiness lobby still has a hold on Congress.

Emphasis added.
The article is online at: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/12/opinion/12kristof.html

Here’s a video from CBS on the same topic:

Choosing meats with the “organic” label can help, but it’s not enough. The label has loopholes that can still encourage the spread of disease and cause food poisoning in humans. Moreover, there are numerous environmental problems associated with factory farming and those won’t disappear if consumers simply opt for the “organic” label.

What’s required to change the food system to protect human health is a significant reduction in the consumption of animal products. If people simply eat less meat, then overcrowding and all the problems associated with it will be reduced.

For the benefit of your own health, the health of your loved ones and the whole of humanity, the environment, and animals, please eat fewer animal products! Please make the choice today to reduce your comsumption of animals and commit to to your decision. Opt for vegan options whenever they are available and ask for them whenever they are not available.

The billboard features a puppy and a piglet, and asks the question, “Why love one but eat the other?”. It then suggests: “Choose vegetarian” and directs observers to the CCVN website and to Mercy For Animals.

The billboard is in a prime location just north of the city, on highway 101, one of the busiest highways in the country.

CCVN’s  billboard will remain up until July 10, reaching thousands of drivers every day.

And it’s short: two articles.

Read ‘em and share ‘em:

“A new strain of the MRSA ‘superbug’ has been found in British cows and is believed to be infecting humans. Environmental campaigners say the new strain has emerged because of the over-use of antibiotics by dairy farmers.”

Read more at BBC >>

“The point of factory farming is cheap meat, made possible by confining large numbers of animals in small spaces. Perhaps the greatest hidden cost is its potential effect on human health.

Small doses of antibiotics — too small to kill bacteria — are fed to factory farm animals as part of their regular diet to promote growth and offset the risks of overcrowding. What factory farms are really raising is antibiotic-resistant bacteria, which means that several classes of antibiotics no longer work the way they should in humans. We pay for cheap meat by sacrificing some of the most important drugs ever developed.”

Read more from the New York Times >>

For more articles on this issue, check out the antibiotics section of Vegan Soapbox >>

(Don’t forget to “like” Vegan Soapbox on facebook. Check out the facebook page here: http://www.facebook.com/VeganSoapbox )

Farm to Fridge – The Truth Behind Meat Production from Mercy For Animals on Vimeo.

Then they took the video on the road in a national tour. A special truck equipped with video screens played the film for passersby from Los Angeles to New York.

Here are some of the videos of press coverage that the tour received:

In short, if I keep a pig as a pet, I can’t kick it. If I keep a pig I intend to sell for food, I can pretty much torture it. State laws known as “Common Farming Exemptions” allow industry — rather than lawmakers — to make any practice legal as long as it’s common. [...]

thanks to Common Farming Exemptions, as long as I “raise” animals for food and it’s done by my fellow “farmers” (in this case, manufacturers might be a better word), I can put around 200 million male chicks a year through grinders (graphic video here), castrate — mostly without anesthetic — 65 million calves and piglets a year, breed sick animals (don’t forget: more than half a billion eggs were recalled last summer, from just two Iowa farms) who in turn breed antibiotic-resistant bacteria, allow those sick animals to die without individual veterinary care, imprison animals in cages so small they cannot turn around, skin live animals, or kill animals en masse to stem disease outbreaks.All of this is legal, because we will eat them.

We have “justifiable purposes”: pleasure (or, at this point, habit, because eating is hardly a pleasure if you do it in your car, or in 10 minutes), convenience — there are few things more filling per dollar than a cheeseburger — and of course corporate profits. We should be treating animals better and raising fewer of them; this would naturally reduce our consumption. All in all, a better situation for us, the animals, the world.

For more on CFEs (Common Farming Exemptions), please take a look at these websites:

• http://humanefacts.com/
• http://www.farmsanctuary.org/issues/factoryfarming/
• http://www.hbo.com/documentaries/death-on-a-factory-farm/index.html
• http://www.humanesociety.org/issues/campaigns/factory_farming/
• http://humanemyth.org/
• http://www.farmforward.com/farming-forward/factory-farming
• http://www.foodandwaterwatch.org/food/factoryfarms/
• http://www.eatinganimals.com/site/book/

Where Bittman’s analysis falls short is in his assumption that there aren’t good reasons why companion animals have more protections than farmed animals. Certainly, looking purely at the aspect of cruelty, environmental damage, and risk to human health, there is no crime worse than factory farming. In that, Bittman and I agree completely. However, there’s really no need for Bittman to belittle the suffering endured by a pet hamster who was tortured and killed.

Bittman’s rage against factory farming cruelty doesn’t seem to stem directly from concern for cows, pigs, or chickens. Rather, it seems to come from outrage that a pet hamster might have any legal protections at all. He finds that entire notion absurd, commenting “the city routinely is poisoning rodents as quickly and futilely as it possibly can” while pet owners can’t legally do the same to their rodents.

Indeed there is a contradiction in the amount of suffering these animals may endure. If we quantified animal suffering and measured it against human pleasure, there’s no question that the “food industry” causes far more ‘units of suffering‘ per ’units of pleasure’ than the pet industry, even including puppymills. And thus, when it comes to animal rights and welfare, there is no better cause than vegan advocacy.

However, that doesn’t mean we ought to abandon the legal enforcement of laws that protect companion animals. That doesn’t mean we ought to joke about “hamstercide” or that we ought to ignore an angry teen who killed her sister’s hamster. Recognizing animal cruelty when it takes place inside a family home is a first step to societal recognition of animal cruelty when it’s hidden behind closed doors at factory farms.