Animal Advocates Watchdog

Is the way we treat creatures raised for food unethical?

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From: Stephanie Brown
To: animalscanada-news@yahoogroups.com
Sent: Thursday, September 23, 2010 1:48 PM
Subject: [animalscanada-news] U of T Magazine: Animals raised for food

http://www.magazine.utoronto.ca/feature/ethics-of-raising-livetock-industrial-agriculture-animal-rights-u-of-t/

The Lives of Animals

Is the way we treat creatures raised for food unethical?

by Stacey Gibson

U of T Magazine

Gracie, a five-year-old Yorkshire pig, is lying in a patch of shade at
Snooters Farm Animal Sanctuary in Uxbridge, Ontario. At 600 pounds, she
needs all the relief she can get on this muggy spring day. Despite her
prodigious size, Gracie has a finely etched daintiness to her: delicate
translucent pink ears; tiny black eyes shadowed by long lashes; legs that
seem too slender to carry her corpulent body. Mud cakes the top of her pale
snout. Behind her, a black pot-bellied pig named Valentine trundles about,
snuffling at the ground. She stops a few feet away from Gracie and won’t
pass her; there’s a hierarchy here, and Gracie can be short-tempered.

Gracie was the first factory-farm pig that the sanctuary rescued, in 2005.
An employee at an industrial farm found out that the three-week-old piglet
had a leg infection, and that the owner had decided it would be more
economical to kill her than to treat her. The next day, the worker snuck
the 10-pound piglet out in her bag, and brought her to Snooters. By then,
the infection had spread to Gracie’s brain, leaving her with neurological
damage – which accounts for her bad temper and why Valentine gives her wide
berth.

“Everybody loves their pets, but food animals are regarded as second-class
citizens. We treat them as inanimate objects, but each has his or her own
personality,” says Brian Morris, co-owner of the 25-acre sanctuary, which
is home to 25 rescued animals, including two calves, a dozen pigs, and
horses and chickens.

Snooters is one of a growing number of sanctuaries in Canada that exist
partly in response to industrial agriculture. Factory farming began in
earnest after the Second World War, and the vast majority of the animals
raised for food in Canada now pass through this system. Any way you look at
it, it’s big business: in terms of profitability; in physical scale (some
Canadian factory farms, for example, house up to 50,000 laying hens); and
in environmental footprint, with one study showing that livestock
production worldwide is responsible for 18 per cent of greenhouse gases.
Even the sheer size of each animal is massive, as many have been bred to
grow as large and as rapidly as possible – to yield the most amount of
flesh in the shortest time frame.

Seven-hundred million animals are eaten each year in Canada, and most did
not spend their days in pastures. Rather, animals are often raised indoors,
without ever touching grass or feeling the fresh air. In their cramped
environments, they might not be able to walk around, or, in the case of
chickens and turkeys, flap their wings – much less graze, forage or form
social groups.

If Gracie hadn’t been “lucky” enough to get a leg infection and be rescued,
her fate would have been similar to the majority of the 1.5 million sows
raised in Canada each year: she would have spent a great deal of her life
pregnant in a two-by-sevenfoot steel cage – a space too small to turn
around or walk in. With nothing to do, she would have rubbed against and
bitten at her bars incessantly, or tried to root at her floor. She would
have given birth in a small farrowing crate in which she couldn’t turn
about, and nursed her piglets through bars. After her young were weaned at
two to three weeks, she would have, once again, been artificially
inseminated. By 24 to 30 months, after a few litters, Gracie wouldn’t have
been as productive, so she would have been sent to slaughter. Her male
piglets, in turn, would have been moved to overcrowded pens. Because tight
quarters lead to aggression, their teeth would have been clipped and their
tails cut. As well, they would have been castrated. These procedures would
have been done without anaesthesia.

The first time Gracie would have gone outdoors and felt the sun on her
would likely have been the trip to the slaughterhouse. Because she would
have been caged most of her life, she might have suffered from leg, joint
or cardiovascular problems, making it difficult to walk up the transport
ramp. This slow movement would have increased her likelihood of being
goaded with an electric prod. She could have been in the truck – without
food, water or rest – for up to 36 hours. Crowded conditions could have
meant no room to lie down or turn around, which could have led to injury.
Gracie could also have been harmed if the truck wasn’t equipped with proper
ventilation and temperature control. According to an international animal
protection agency, between two and three million animals die during
transport every year in Canada and another 11 million arrive at their
destination injured or diseased.

“It’s a nightmare, a horror story,” says Stephanie Brown, director of the
Canadian Coalition for Farm Animals. “These are thinking, feeling,
inquisitive creatures – and their destiny is suffering and misery. It’s
legitimized animal cruelty.”

Lesli Bisgould, an adjunct professor in U of T’s Faculty of Law, who
established the first animal-rights practice in Canada, puts it just as
bluntly: “If they’re arriving dead, why? What’s the problem? What’s
happening before they get there that they can’t even make it to the
ultimate destination?”

Or, to put it another way, if millions of animals are in a state of
suffering, what does that say about us? A growing number of biologists,
ethicists and other thinkers are criticizing the ways animals are treated
on factory farms. They are contemplating what we need to change in our
behaviour and our laws; what our moral obligations are to those who depend
on our goodwill; and examining quality-of-life issues concerning animals.
As industrial agriculture has only been around for about 65 years – a mere
blink in the several-thousand years of human agricultural history – we are
still playing catch-up in our moral reflections. “I think new technologies
have always raised new ethical questions, and usually the ethics and the
spiritual response is much slower than the technology,” says John Berkman,
a professor of moral theology at U of T’s Regis College whose expertise is
in animal ethics.

***

The days when Descartes saw animals as furry machines (they are not
rational, he argued, and therefore not conscious), and people claimed that
animals couldn’t feel pain, are long gone. If we ever really did believe
that, biologists have since proven that mammals and birds are sentient
creatures with a wide range of physical, emotional, psychological and
social needs. “Whenever we do studies, we find out that they are more
sensitive, more aware, and more vulnerable to stress than we think. It’s
almost never in the opposite direction,” says Monika Havelka, a biologist
at U of T Mississauga. “We always seem to find out that they suffer more
than we think that they do.”

Scientists have known for several decades that animals – from humans, to
pigs, to chickens, to dogs – have almost identical central nervous systems,
meaning we all experience stress, fear and pain in very similar ways. When
something or someone in our environment upsets us, for example, we have the
same fight-or-flight responses: our heart rate accelerates and our adrenal
gland releases stress hormones (known as cortisols). Cows, for instance,
hate the sound of loud voices and will get extremely anxious when people
yell, says Havelka. “[Farm animals] certainly feel a tremendous amount of
stress. We know that they can have very high cortisol levels, and we know
that transportation, crowded conditions, noises and changes in temperature
can all send their cortisol levels skyrocketing.”

When people talk about animals having emotions, they are often criticized
for “anthropomorphizing” – but the assumption that humans are the only
animals with feelings is a human-centric prejudice, a fallacy. All mammals
have a limbic system (the site of basic emotions in our brain) and can all
experience fundamental emotions, such as fear and happiness, says Professor
Marc Bekoff, a world-renowned ethologist and conservationist who spoke at U
of T in May. Bekoff is the author of The Emotional Lives of Animals, and
cites example after example of observed animal emotion: from pigs suffering
from depression, to cows holding grudges, to elephants experiencing joy
while playing. “To say animals don’t have a rich emotional life, or they
can’t feel pain – that’s just nonsense,” he says. He employs scientific
evidence and evolutionary theory, as well as common sense, when it comes to
assessing animal experience. While speaking about how it is legal in many
parts of the world to castrate pigs without anaesthesia, he says, “When an
animal is struggling to get away from something, you don’t have to be the
brightest light on the block to know they feel.”

“If we analyze our emotions, they’re not that different in kind,” adds
Havelka. “Most of what [humans and animals] feel are the fundamental, basic
emotions. We’re scared to be alone, we’re scared of new situations, we can
be angry if we feel we’re being mistreated, we like to be around others who
make us feel calm and accepted. We want to feel secure.”

One way animals feel secure is through their social groups, and many form
hierarchies and cliques. This is easily observed in herd animals such as
cows, who have evolved to move in large groups. Havelka cites one study
that shows sister cows like to hang out together, proving that they care
not only about having company, but who that company is – and making it
profoundly at odds with their nature to be constantly penned or separated.
The opposite extreme, of overcrowded living conditions, prevents animals
from establishing a social hierarchy – which leads to aggression. “It’s
like people trapped in a crowded elevator,” says Stephanie Brown.
“Eventually, they are going to start to fight.”

***

Although we are now more scientifically fluent about the inner lives of
animals, we are more likely to treat them like, well, Descartes’ furry
machines. Legally, all animals are property (and always have been), meaning
we own them and can use them for our own purposes, says Lesli Bisgould, who
is currently writing a book on animals and the law. Whether one looks at
the Criminal Code’s general anti-cruelty laws or at legislation that
applies to agricultural animals, one finds the same qualifiers –
prohibiting “unnecessary” or “undue” or “prolonged” pain and suffering, she
says. “That means we have permitted ourselves to cause necessary pain and
suffering. And what does that mean? When is it necessary?” asks Bisgould.
“You’d never use the word ‘necessary’ in that context with another human
being.”

While in the eyes of the law, an animal is property, a corporation can be
granted rights of personhood – making, legally, an animal an “it” and a
corporation a “he” or “she.” (Corporations, of course, also have privacy
rights – their facilities are private property, making it next to
impossible to see how any animals they own are treated.) Animals –
displaced from their natural environments and deprived of acting out many
of their instincts – are essentially rendered into units of production.
“Corporations, by law, are required to maximize profits. That’s their
obligation to their shareholders,” says Bisgould. “Every penny spent on
animal welfare is a penny that doesn’t go into profits.”

When it comes to legal rights for animals, Bisgould advocates for a
large-scale shift in thinking: if corporations can have legal personhood,
why would we not extend the same rights to living entities other than
humans? She adds, “It’s a bit of a circular problem, because if animals
were legal persons – meaning not that they have human rights, all the same
rights we have, but the basic rights to their lives and to have their
interests considered before we do things that are going to hurt them – if
it ever got to that point, it’s unlikely we’d be eating them. Because their
interests in their lives would conflict with our relatively trivial
interest in eating them.”

***

“What does it do to your psyche and to your spiritual well-being if you are
part of this system of violence?” asks Stephen Scharper, a professor of
anthropology at U of T Mississauga and U of T’s Centre for Environment, who
focuses on issues of religion, ethics and the environment. Scharper views
factory farming as a “seamless garment of violence”– one that violates the
dignity of animals, contributes to environmental destruction, and often
employs non-unionized workers and pays them minimum wage for work that can
be both emotionally troubling and physically dangerous.

Scharper points to several religious traditions concerned with the
peaceful, respectful treatment of animals. Followers of the Jain and Hindu
religions abstain from meat entirely, believing that the cycle of violence
brings with it bad karma – which would affect their salvation. He also
cites Judaism’s kosher dietary laws and the Islamic tradition of halal,
both of which have strictures on how animals are to be treated during their
lives and slaughter. Scharper, a Christian himself, is the co-editor of The
Green Bible, which interprets Christian scriptures through an environmental
lens. He notes that one of the first injunctions in Genesis – to take care
of the garden – can pertain to both the environmental crisis and animal
welfare. “If we are defacing God’s creatures and God’s creation, we are
rupturing our friendship with God, living a life of sin and therefore
affecting our future salvation,” he says.

Professor John Berkman of Regis College ties the notions of non-violence
and respect for other beings into an even broader theological framework. He
notes that every animal (human or non-human) deserves the opportunity to
live well and to flourish according to his or her own abilities, within his
or her own community – whether the animal is a dolphin in a school of
dolphins or a cow grazing in a pasture with a herd. And respecting the
natures of others, and recognizing our place within the larger picture,
shows up in many religions. “This gets to a theological vision that
ultimately the world is not to be disposed of however humans deem, but each
creation has its own end, its own telos, its own purposes, and part of
human life is to understand and respect those various purposes – not only
those of human beings,” he says.

Because Berkman believes respecting the natures of other animals and giving
them the opportunity to flourish is so important, a pure reduction-of-pain
model concerns him. “Reducing suffering is the project of modernity,” he
says. “That is a good thing in itself, though there are certain
intellectual limitations and problems with a pure suffering approach…
somehow, then it would seem to be OK to do whatever you want to do with
animals as long as you kind of keep them in a half-drugged state where
they’re not experiencing any suffering.”

***

If one accepts that there are ethical and spiritual concerns surrounding
the treatment of animals on factory farms, what then, is the answer? Is it
a radical overhaul of the system? Not eating animals? Changing a few
regulations?

Bisgould is not convinced there are any laws that can really improve things
for animals used in industrial agriculture (although she would like to see
a change in privacy laws, which would allow people to see where their food
comes from). One can ask for bigger cages or make anaesthesia mandatory
before castration, but these improvements are minimal in the grand scheme
of the suffering the animals endure, she says. The demand to produce vast
amounts of meat for human consumption means there’s no room for animals to
live well, she adds.

“When there’s no market, we’ll stop producing them,” says Bisgould,
pointing to the cosmetic industry, which began to make massive changes
after people found out their products were being tested on animals. “In
that sense, all of us have a lot of power, but we have to be willing to
re-examine our own behaviours because a lot of us love to eat animal
products – and I totally get that, but we have to be open to a little bit
of change if we want these harms to go away.”

Wayne Sumner, a professor emeritus of philosophy at U of T, points to
vegetarianism as the moral ideal. (A vegetarian himself for several
decades, he says, “I’ve backslid a bit since then. I don’t live up to my
own ideals.”) “For most of us living in big cities in Canada, we can get by
perfectly well without eating animals or eating animal products. I think
that’s ethically admirable, but I would take a harder line as far as animal
suffering is concerned,” says Sumner. “It’s not just admirable not to cause
animals to suffer, it’s an obligation not to cause them to suffer.”

Scharper favours a “context of consumption” approach, which takes into
account quality-of-life issues for animals and humans, and environmental
concerns, when choosing what meat to eat. Of factory farming in particular,
he adds, “This is a crisis of imagination and of the way we think. And
because we’ve allowed ourselves to be colonized by a pragmatic, endsdriven
model, rather than to other ways of looking at the world – of integration,
of deep empathy, of deep participatory solidarity – we can’t think of other
ways to be human. That’s what we are challenged to do now.”

Berkman, a vegetarian himself, references a modern Mennonite poster that
reads: A Modest Proposal for Peace: Let the Christians of the World Agree
That They Will Not Kill Each Other. “People asked, ‘Why just Christians?
Why shouldn’t everybody not kill each other?’ Well, this is a modest
proposal for peace. At least people who are supposed to agree,
fundamentally, about what life is about, should be able to not kill each
other,” he says. He relates this back to animal suffering, arguing for at
least eating free-range meat: “Ultimately, I would like to see a much
broader vision where we come to an agreement about respecting the goodness
and the inherent dignity of animals, and that unless we absolutely need to
we should let them live according to their natures and peaceably. The
modest proposal for change is let’s not be engaged in institutionalized
cruelty, which almost everybody knows is wrong.”

***

Before ending the conversation, Bisgould makes one important distinction
between humans and other animals. “We’ve tried for a long time to
distinguish ourselves from other animals to justify hurting them. And all
of the distinctions that we’ve drawn over time have been disproven by our
own science. They don’t think, they don’t reason, they don’t feel, they
don’t form social bonds. So we don’t have the factual premise for this
entitlement that we continue to claim,” she says. “If there is perhaps one
difference, it might be this second-order thinking that we do, this thought
about thought. And since we have that capacity, aren’t we obliged to use
it? Instead of saying, we’re better than you, therefore we get to hurt you,
let’s use our morality and say, I have a choice between sustaining myself
in a way that causes profound pain and suffering, or a way that doesn’t.
How do I justify choosing pain and suffering? How do I justify it?”

Stacey Gibson is managing editor of U of T Magazine.

*************************************************************************
Stephanie Brown Toronto, Canada
e-mail: brown@idirect.com
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