Many people have heard of factory farming but what is it and why is it really so bad? Isn't it basically just farmers providing food for millions of people and isn't that a good thing? Sure, I can agree that feeding millions of people is great, but when it comes to doing it at the expense of billions of animals, the environment and even people, I must disagree. Furthermore, the current factory farming system is actually totally inefficient, utilizing a tremendous amount of resources for a very small output of food, but I'll explore that in detail some other day.
Let's investigate the CAFO (Concentrated animal feeding operation) or factory farm. Actually let's first just look at the "AFO" (animal feeding operation) part of that. According to the EPA, "AFOs congregate animals, feed, manure and urine, dead animals, and production operations on a small land area. Feed is brought to the animals rather than the animals grazing or otherwise seeking feed in pastures, fields, or on rangeland." I don't know about you, but my mouth is watering already at the thought of animals, their poo, and their dead friends all congregating in the production of human food! Remember folks, that last quote came straight from the Environmental Protection Agency, a government agency, not an animal rights group.
The only difference between the AFO and the CAFO is the number of animals stuffed into one facility. According to the EPA this CAFOs fall into 3 categories: small, medium and large. Just to give you a sense of exactly what these standards are, a small CAFO would house fewer than 3000 swine, 16,500 turkeys or 37,500 chickens. Doesn't sound very small, does it? However, a large CAFO would house more than 10,000 swine, 82,000 laying hens or more, and a whopping 125,000 chickens or more. Of course, they also have numbers listed for cows, veal calves, ducks, and other animals.
So what do all of these numbers mean exactly? Let's look into it a little further. CAFOs, commonly referred to as "factory farms" are defined by wikipedia.com as "a term referring to the process of raising livestock in confinement at high stocking density, where a farm operates as a factory--a practice typical in industrial farming by agribusinesses." The goal of a factory farm is to squish as many animals into the smallest space possible in order to produce the most "product" and of course, make the most profit. Essentially, it's an assembly line of live animals that can feel pain. According to wikipedia "confinement at high stocking density requires antibiotics and pesticides to mitigate the spread of disease and pestilence exacerbated by these crowded living conditions". Basically what you have is a huge number of animals living in total confinement, often unable to turn around or even rest comfortably, usually forced to stand on concrete or wooden slats, sometimes stacked on top of one another or squished into small pens or cages next to each other, living in their own excrement oftentimes among dead animals who were too sick or injured to survive in these squalid conditions. In order to remedy this filthy and miserable situation, agribusiness employs the use (overuse) of antibiotics and pesticides. So rather than clean up these miserable animal concentration camps, they use chemicals, which, needless to say, come with their own host of resulting problems, but again, I'll explore that issue later.
I'll discuss the plights of specific animals on factory farms in later entries, I just wanted to give a brief overview of the disgusting and miserable conditions of factory farms. If it doesn't sound that bad now when I get into details you'll really understand the horror and severity of the situation. Not to mention there are literally 10 billion animals who live, die, and suffer in factory farms in the U.S. every year.
I'd like to leave this entry off with a video of factory farming. This is actually what happens in factory farms. Watching it is really the best way to fully understand the barbarity inflicted on these "farms". You can stop the video, turn away in horror, and try to forget all about it, or you can allow yourself to see firsthand the suffering these animals endure and find out what you can do to help alleviate the misery and pain. I hope you will choose the latter--educating ourselves about this matter is truly the first step to living a compassionate life that sets an example for others. As Gandhi said, you have to "be the change you want to see in the world."
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