Eating Animals

by Jonathan Safran Foer

  And of course it isn’t just the young at risk. A study by the European Commission’s Scientific Veterinary Committee documented that pigs in crates showed weakened bones, higher risks of leg injuries, cardiovascular problems, urinary infections, and a reduction in muscle mass so severe it affected the pigs’ ability to lie down. Other studies indicate that poor genetics, lack of movement, and poor nutrition leave 10 to 40 percent of pigs structurally unsound due to such conditions as buckling of the knees, bowed legs, and pigeon toes. An industry periodical, National Hog Farmer, has reported that 7 percent of breeding sows typically die prematurely from the stress of confinement and intensive breeding — in some operations the mortality rate exceeds 15 percent. Many pigs go insane due to the confinement and obsessively chew on their cage bars, incessantly press their water bottles, or drink urine. Others exhibit mourning behaviors that animal scientists describe as “learned helplessness.”

  And then come the babies — the justification for the suffering of the mothers.

  Many piglets are born with deformities. Common congenital diseases include cleft palate, hermaphroditism, inverted nipples, no anus, splayed legs, tremors, and hernias. Inguinal hernias are common enough that it is routine to surgically correct them at the time of castration. In their first weeks of life, even those piglets without such defects endure a barrage of bodily insults. Within the first forty-eight hours their tails and “needle teeth,” often used to deliver sideward bites to other piglets, are cut off without any pain relief in an attempt to minimize the wounds pigs inflict upon one another while competing for their mother’s teats in factory settings where pathological tail biting is common and weaker pigs cannot escape the strong. Typically, the piglets’ environment is kept warm (72 to 81 degrees) and dark, so they are more lethargic and less likely to enact “social vices” like biting and sucking one another’s navels, tails, or ears out of frustration. Traditional husbandry, as is practiced on Paul Willis’s farm, avoids such problems by giving animals more space, providing environmental enrichment, and fostering stable social groups.

  Also within these first two days, factory-farmed piglets often will be injected with iron because of the likelihood that the rapid growth and intensive breeding of their mother has left her milk deficient. Within ten days males have their testicles torn out, again without pain relief. This time the purpose is to alter the taste of the meat — consumers in America currently prefer the taste of castrated animals. Nickel-sized swatches of flesh may also be cut out of the pigs’ ears for identification purposes. By the time farmers begin weaning them, 9 to 15 percent of the piglets will have died.

  The sooner the piglets start feeding on solid food, the sooner they will reach market weight (240 to 265 pounds). “Solid food” in this case often includes dried blood plasma, a by-product from slaughterhouses. (This does indeed fatten the piglets up. It also badly damages the mucosa of their gastrointestinal tracts.) Left alone, piglets tend to wean at around fifteen weeks, but on factory farms they will typically be weaned at fifteen days and increasingly as young as twelve days. At these young ages, the piglets are unable to properly digest solid food, so additional pharmaceuticals are fed to them to prevent diarrhea. The weaned pigs will then be forced into thick-wire cages — “nurseries.” These cages are stacked one on top of the other, and feces and urine fall from higher cages onto the animals below. Growers will keep piglets in these cages as long as possible before moving them to their final destination: cramped pens. The pens are deliberately overcrowded because, as one industry magazine says, “overcrowding pigs pays.” Without much room to move, the animals burn fewer calories and get fatter on less feed.

  As in any kind of factory, uniformity is essential. Piglets that don’t grow fast enough — the runts — are a drain on resources and so have no place on the farm. Picked up by their hind legs, they are swung and then bashed headfirst onto the concrete floor. This common practice is called “thumping.” “We’ve thumped as many as 120 in one day,” said a worker from a Missouri farm.

  We just swing them, thump them, then toss them aside. Then, after you’ve thumped ten, twelve, fourteen of them, you take them to the chute room and stack them for the dead truck. And if you go in the chute room and some are still alive, then you have to thump them all over again. There’ve been times I’ve walked in that room and they’d be running around with an eyeball hanging down the side of their face, just bleeding like crazy, or their jaw would be broken.

  “They call it ‘euthanasia,’ ” said the Missouri worker’s wife.

  A barrage of antibiotics, hormones, and other pharmaceuticals in the animals’ feed will keep most of them alive until slaughter despite the conditions. These drugs are most needed to combat the respiratory problems that are ubiquitous on hog factory farms. The humid conditions of confinement, dense quantities of animals with stress-weakened immune systems, and the toxic gases from the accumulating shit and piss make these problems practically inescapable. Fully 30 to 70 percent of the pigs will have some sort of respiratory infection by the time of slaughter, and mortality from respiratory disease alone can be 4 to 6 percent. Of course this constant sickness promotes the growth of new influenzas, so entire hog populations of entire states have sometimes had infection rates of 100 percent from deadly new viruses created among these densely packed sick animals (increasingly, of course, these viruses are infecting humans).

  In the world of factory farming, expectations are turned upside down. Veterinarians don’t work toward optimal health, but optimal profitability. Drugs are not for curing diseases, but substitutes for destroyed immune systems. Farmers do not aim to produce healthy animals.

  5.

  Our Underwater Sadism (A Central Aside)

  THE STORIES OF ANIMAL ABUSE and pollution I’ve related in the context of pig farming are, in most of the ways that matter, representative of factory farming as a whole. Factory-farmed chickens, turkeys, and cattle do not produce or suffer from the exact same problems, but they all suffer in fundamentally similar ways. So, it turns out, do fish. We tend not to think of fish and land animals in the same way, but “aquaculture” — the intensive rearing of sea animals in confinement — is essentially underwater factory farming.

  Many of the sea animals we eat, including the vast majority of salmon, come to us from aquaculture. Initially, aquaculture presented itself as a solution to the depletion of wild fish populations. But far from reducing demand for wild salmon, as some had claimed, salmon farming actually fueled the international exploitation of and demand for wild salmon. Wild salmon catches worldwide rose 27 percent between 1988 and 1997, precisely as salmon aquaculture exploded.

  The welfare issues associated with fish farms will sound familiar. The Handbook of Salmon Farming, an industry how-to book, details six “key stressors in the aquaculture environment”: “water quality,” “crowding,” “handling,” “disturbance,” “nutrition,” and “hierarchy.” To translate into plain language, those six sources of suffering for salmon are: (1) water so fouled that it makes it hard to breathe; (2) crowding so intense that animals begin to cannibalize one another; (3) handling so invasive that physiological measures of stress are evident a day later; (4) disturbance by farmworkers and wild animals; (5) nutritional deficiencies that weaken the immune system; and (6) the inability to form a stable social hierarchy, resulting in more cannibalization. These problems are typical. The handbook calls them “integral components of fish farming.”

  A major source of suffering for salmon and other farmed fish is the abundant presence of sea lice, which thrive in the filthy water. These lice create open lesions and sometimes eat down to the bones on a fish’s face — a phenomenon common enough that it is known as the “death crown” in the industry. A single salmon farm generates swarming clouds of sea lice in numbers thirty thousand times higher than naturally occur.

  The fish that survive these conditions (a 10 to 30 percent death rate is seen as good by many in the salmon industry) are likely to be sta
rved for seven to ten days to diminish their bodily waste during transport to slaughter and then killed by having their gills sliced before being tossed into a tank of water to bleed to death. Often the fish will be slaughtered while conscious and convulse in pain as they die. In other cases, they may be stunned, but current stunning methods are unreliable and can lead to some animals suffering more. As is the case with chickens and turkeys, no law requires the humane slaughter of fish.

  So are wild-caught fish a more humane alternative? They certainly have better lives before they are caught, since they do not live in cramped, filthy enclosures. That is a difference that matters. But consider the most common ways of catching the sea animals most commonly eaten in America: tuna, shrimp, and salmon. Three methods are dominant: longline fishing, trawling, and the use of purse seines. A longline looks something like a telephone line running through the water suspended by buoys rather than poles. At periodic intervals along this main line, smaller “branch” lines are strung — each branch line bristling with hooks. Now picture not just one of these multihook longlines, but dozens or hundreds deployed one after the other by a single boat. GPS locators and other electronic communication gear are attached to the buoys so that fishers can return to them later. And, of course, there is not one boat deploying longlines, but dozens, hundreds, or even thousands in the largest commercial fleets.

  Longlines today can reach seventy-five miles — that’s enough line to cross the English Channel more than three times. An estimated 27 million hooks are deployed every day. And longlines don’t kill just their “target species,” but 145 others as well. One study found that roughly 4.5 million sea animals are killed as bycatch in longline fishing every year, including roughly 3.3 million sharks, 1 million marlins, 60,000 sea turtles, 75,000 albatross, and 20,000 dolphins and whales.

  Even longlines, though, don’t produce the immense bycatch associated with trawling. The most common type of modern shrimp trawler sweeps an area roughly twenty-five to thirty meters wide. The trawl is pulled along the ocean bottom at 4.5 to 6.5 kmh for several hours, sweeping shrimp (and everything else) into the far end of a funnel-shaped net. Trawling, almost always for shrimp, is the marine equivalent of clear-cutting rain forest. Whatever they target, trawlers sweep up fish, sharks, rays, crabs, squid, scallops — typically about a hundred different fish and other species. Virtually all die.

  There is something quite sinister about this scorched-earth style of “harvesting” sea animals. The average trawling operation throws 80 to 90 percent of the sea animals it captures as bycatch overboard. The least efficient operations actually throw more than 98 percent of captured sea animals, dead, back into the ocean.

  We are literally reducing the diversity and vibrancy of ocean life as a whole recently learned to measure). Modern fishing techniques are destroying the ecosystems that sustain more complex vertebrates (like salmon and tuna), leaving in their wake only the few species that can survive on plants and plankton, if that. As we gobble up the most desired fish, which are usually top-of-the-food-chain carnivores like tuna and salmon, we eliminate predators and cause a short-lived boom of the species one notch lower on the food chain. We then fish that species into oblivion and move an order lower. The generational speed of the process makes it hard to see the changes (do you know what fish your grandparents ate?), and the fact that catches themselves don’t decline in volume gives a deceptive impression of sustainability. No one person plans the destruction, but the economics of the market inevitably lead toward instability. We aren’t exactly emptying the oceans; it’s more like clear-cutting a forest with thousands of species to create massive fields with one type of soybean.

  Trawling and longline fishing aren’t only ecologically worrisome; they are also cruel. In trawlers, hundreds of different species are crushed together, gashed on corals, bashed on rocks — for hours — and then hauled from the water, causing painful decompression (the decompression sometimes causes the animals’ eyes to pop out or their internal organs to come out their mouths). On longlines, too, the deaths animals face are generally slow. Some are simply held there and die only when removed from the lines. Some die from the injury caused by the hook in their mouths or by trying to get away. Some are unable to escape attack by predators.

  Purse seines, the final fishing method I’m going to discuss, are the main technology used for catching America’s most popular seafood, tuna. A net wall is deployed around a school of target fish, and once the school is encircled, the bottom of the net is pulled together as if the fishers were tugging on a giant purse string. The trapped target fish and any other creatures in the vicinity are then winched together and hauled onto the deck. Fish tangled in the net may be slowly pulled apart in the process. Most of these sea animals, though, die on the ship itself, where they will slowly suffocate or have their gills cut while conscious. In some cases, the fish are tossed onto ice, which can actually prolong their deaths. According to a recent study published in Applied Animal Behaviour Science, fish die slowly and painfully over a period as long as fourteen minutes after being tossed fully conscious into an ice slurry (something that happens to both wild-caught and farmed fish).

  Does all this matter — matter enough that we should change what we eat? Maybe all we need is better labels so we can make wiser decisions about the fish and fish products we buy? What conclusion would most selective omnivores reach if attached to each salmon they ate was a label noting that 2.5-foot-long farmed salmon spend their lives in the equivalent of a bathtub of water and that the animals’ eyes bleed from the intensity of the pollution? What if the label mentioned the explosions of parasite populations, increases in diseases, degraded genetics, and new antibiotic-resistant diseases that result from fish farming?

  There are some things, though, we don’t need labels to know. Although one can realistically expect that at least some percentage of cows and pigs are slaughtered with speed and care, no fish gets a good death. Not a single one. You never have to wonder if the fish on your plate had to suffer. It did.

  Whether we’re talking about fish species, pigs, or some other eaten animal, is such suffering the most important thing in the world? Obviously not. But that’s not the question. Is it more important than sushi, bacon, or chicken nuggets? That’s the question.

  6.

  Eating Animals

  OUR DECISIONS ABOUT FOOD ARE complicated by the fact that we don’t eat alone. Table fellowship has forged social bonds as far back as the archaeological record allows us to look. Food, family, and memory are primordially linked. We are not merely animals that eat, but eating animals.

  Some of my fondest memories are of weekly sushi dinners with my best friend, and eating my dad’s turkey burgers with mustard and grilled onions at backyard celebrations, and tasting the salty gefilte fish at my grandmother’s house every Passover. These occasions simply aren’t the same without those foods — and that matters.

  To give up the taste of sushi or roasted chicken is a loss that extends beyond giving up a pleasurable eating experience. Changing what we eat and letting tastes fade from memory create a kind of cultural loss, a forgetting. But perhaps this kind of forgetfulness is worth accepting — even worth cultivating (forgetting, too, can be cultivated). To remember animals and my concern for their well-being, I may need to lose certain tastes and find other handles for the memories that they once helped me carry.

  Remembering and forgetting are part of the same mental process. To write down one detail of an event is to not write down another (unless you keep writing forever). To remember one thing is to let another slip from remembrance (unless you keep recalling forever). There is ethical as well as violent forgetting. We can’t hold on to everything we’ve known so far. So the question is not whether we forget but what, or whom, we forget — not whether our diets change, but how.

  Recently my friend and I started eating veggie sushi and going to the Italian restaurant next door. Instead of the turkey burgers my dad grilled, my children will remembe
r me burning veggie burgers in the backyard. At our last Passover, gefilte fish held a less central place, but we did tell some stories about it (I haven’t stopped, apparently). Along with the story of Exodus — that grandest of stories about the weak prevailing over the strong in the most unexpected of ways — new stories of the weak and the strong were added.

  The point of eating those special foods with those special people at those special times was that we were being deliberate, separating those meals out from the others. Adding another layer of deliberateness has been enriching. I’m all for compromising tradition for a good cause, but perhaps in these situations tradition wasn’t compromised so much as fulfilled.

  It seems to me that it’s plainly wrong to eat factory-farmed pork or to feed it to one’s family. It’s probably even wrong to sit silently with friends eating factory-farmed pork, however difficult it can be to say something. Pigs clearly have rich minds and just as clearly are condemned to miserable lives on factory farms. The analogy of a dog kept in a closet is fairly accurate, if somewhat generous. The environmental case against eating factory-farmed pork is airtight and damning.