The Georgia Straight (Vancouver) February 26, 2009
The cruel truth about organic and free-range meat and dairy products
By Becci Gindin-Clarke
When I first learned about factory farming, I was disgusted. The extreme
confinement, the routine mutilations, the horrors of transport, and the
cruelty of slaughter-they all got to me in a big way. I decided that there
had to be another option.
I began purchasing what I hoped were more humane alternatives, like
free-range and organic products. Then I did more research into what it all
meant, and I was troubled by what I learned.
The first thing I discovered was that words like "free range" and "free run"
don't mean very much. In Canada, the labels aren't regulated at all.
Typically, free-run animals are kept indoors for their entire lives, and,
while free-range farms generally allow access to the outdoors, that "access"
can be as laughable as a tiny door leading to a little gravel lot. The
mutilations common on factory farms-debeaking, detoeing, dehorning,
castration-are perfectly legal, and performed without anaesthesia. What's
more, free-range animals die just as young and in the same slaughterhouses
as their factory-farmed counterparts.
When a farm calls itself free range or free run, it might consist of a few
dozen happy animals wandering around outside, but it's much more likely to
consist of a few enormous sheds crowded with hundreds of thousands of
animals who almost never see daylight until en route to the slaughterhouse.
I found it disturbing that both types of farms qualify as free range.
Organic farms, I learned, tend to be superior. To qualify as organic, farms
must adhere to a specific set of rules. Animals must be provided with a
certain amount of daylight and outdoor access, and their shelters must be
clean. Most importantly, there are third-party verifiers who are expected to
monitor farms and ensure that they qualify as organic. Looks good, right?
Perhaps not good enough, since there are some things that didn't change
regardless of what kind of farm I examined. Even when one assumes that all
the rules of organic farming are adhered to, there are certain unavoidable
unpleasantries. For example, even organic animals-whether raised for meat or
dairy or eggs-are sent to slaughter at a fraction of their natural
lifespans. Chickens can live for 10 years or more, but when raised for meat,
the organic ones die just as young as free-range and factory-farmed
chickens-usually at around 45 days old, sometimes as late as 81 days. And
cows can live into their 20s, but when raised for meat they are slaughtered
at only a few years old. Egg-laying chickens are still slaughtered when they
aren't producing enough eggs, usually when they are about two, and dairy
cows and goats are held up to a similar standard.
I also found out that, in B.C., there are no special hatcheries for organic
egg-laying chickens. That means that they come from the same hatcheries as
factory-farmed and free-range chickens, where male chicks are slaughtered
soon after birth-typically, by being ground up in trash compactors or simply
thrown live into dumpsters. And just as in conventional farming, any males
born to ever-pregnant dairy cows and goats are usually taken from their
mothers almost immediately and either slaughtered or raised for meat-and not
necessarily on an organic farm.
And then we come to the end of it all. Both free-range and organic animals
must be transported to slaughter. Organic rules allow no more than 24 hours
without food or water. There are no rules for free-range animals, so they
can travel more than 36 hours, exposed to the elements, to get to the same
slaughterhouse as any factory-farmed animal. In B.C., organic animals are
either taken to an exclusively organic slaughterhouse (there are two in the
province) or a qualified conventional slaughterhouse, where they are killed
before or after all the non-organic animals, so that the equipment can be
sterilized. There does not appear to be any special "humane" slaughter for
organic animals, though, so I can only assume that they die in the same
manner as all the others.
In the end, I decided that, for me, "humane" isn't humane enough.