Animals or 'Meat Factories'

"Yoho, I am finally out. How can a so-called civilised society keep animals in factories? My millions of mates and I have never seen daylight. Moving around is seen as a waste of energy! No future for us but the butcher. We are living animals with feelings damn it! Not just a money-making product! Ein zwei drei, alle Tieren frei!"

European animal farms are heavily industrialised and highly specialised. The meat you eat is processed through a number of different farming factories the same way a car is made from pieces of steel moving through different stages of fabrication.

At pig farms specialised in breeding, there is a concentration of “productive animals.” Highly fertile sows are mated with particularly fast and large-growing boars. There is little interest in, for example, breeding animals that are capable of resisting disease. After going through this sub-breeding farm, the sows go to a multiplication farm where the piglets are born. Their tails and the young bores’ testicles are immediately cut off. There is so little living space that the piglets bite each other’s tails and ears from stress. The piglets are separated from their mothers after four weeks, and six weeks later, they are transported to a meat farm. This is more like a factory of small unit pig cages with very limited space, usually about 0.8 m2 per pig. Living without daylight and barely any movement causes physical and mental illnesses, which are treated by pumping the animals full of antibiotics and sedatives. Here, in about three months the pigs grow from 25 to 115 kilograms, fed on high-protein fodder from South America. After this they are taken to a slaughter farm. That is, if they live that long at all; 12 - 20 % of the young die prematurely. Many also die during the large distance transports across Europe, sometimes under extreme conditions, such as being packed together without water, food, or light. It should be mentioned that not only are pigs locked up, exploited, and killed in this way, similar stories can be told about cattle or chicken.

In Europe, there are often tens of thousands of pigs at one farm, reaching up to as much as 100,000 animals. Keeping far too many animals in small spaces, transporting them over long distances and overfeeding them with unbalanced food and medicines has given rise to huge epidemics among farm animals in recent years, such as foot and mouth disease. This leads to large scale slaughtering of all affected farm animals and has devastating consequences for not only the farmer, but also large numbers of non-farm animals of similar species in that area are eliminated.

Animals are also killed for the production of milk and egg.
Like humans, cows only produce milk after giving birth. A milk cow needs to calve every 6 months to stay ‘productive.' Intense milking causes many of them to have udder and teat infections giving off pus, which can be found in the milk (about one finger cap in every litre). Since the milk is meant for humans, the calves are taken away from the mother cows. Females become milk cows, while the bull calves are not really needed for anything else but for their flesh.

For egg production, we need breeding hens. These are hatched at specialised breeding farms from where hens are selected for breeding and cockerels are either gassed or shredded into pieces. They are useless for the industry as they cannot lay eggs and these breeding varieties are not good for meat.

Eating meat, milk products, or eggs makes also you responsible for the mistreatment and killing in the animal industry. What is the justification behind this large scale slaughtering for human consumption? What is a relevant difference between animals and humans that could legitimize this treatment? Is it that humans are conscious? We cannot know whether or not some animals have consciousness, but why should this be a relevant distinction anyway? We know very little about the feelings of the mentally handicapped, but of course we do not mistreat them based on that. Then, is it that animals are less intelligent than humans or that they belong to a different species? Discrimination and exploitation of other species by humans has it own definition: speciecism. Factory farming is speciecism in its worst form.

A frequently used argument to legitimise meat eating is that it's “natural” to do so. Animals eat each other, so why shouldn't humans do the same? “Natural” is not per se good. Natural and moral are two different things. Violence is perceived as natural, but seen as wrong. Most people are capable of making moral choices and have the possibility to choose to not eat meat. Not eating other animals may seem unnatural, but it's an obvious moral responsibility.

It is possible to find an alternative in organic production but in most cases this is not many steps away from the factory farming. Organic production faces many of the same problems and cannot expand much on space and fodder. And in any case, it is not a solution to the problem: why? Why, if we can agree that animals do not exist to be exploited, can there be a demand for animal products which reduces the animal to a “meat factory?”