TABLE C2 Effects of Eliminating Research and Marketing Subsidy (dollar amounts in billions)
The second support change affects the gross figure of $115.1 billion in food and nutrition assistance that the USDA provides to low-income Americans. My recommendation is to exclude animal foods from nutrition assistance programs. Applying the 32 percent multiplier introduced in chapter 5 (consumer spending on animal foods as a portion of total retail food spending) yields a total of $36.8 billion related to animal foods to be shifted to non-animal foods.6 In a Meat Tax economy, because consumption of animal foods is lower by 32.5 percent, excluding animal foods from nutrition support represents a net decline in animal food sales of 67.5 percent of $36.8 billion, or $24.8 billion. This figure represents 14.6 percent of the total retail sales under the Meat Tax of $169.4 billion.
TABLE C3 Effects of Excluding Animal Foods from Nutrition Support (dollar amounts in billions)
Drop in Consumption
This proposal would cause annual US consumption of animal foods to fall by an estimated 44.1 percent, from $251 billion to $140 billion. It's easiest to explain this drop as occurring in multiple steps. First, with demand elasticity at 0.65, the 50 percent tax and resulting price increase causes consumption to drop by 32.5 percent (0.5 x 0.65)—yielding an initial sales decline from $251 billion to $169 billion. Next, as we saw above, excluding animal foods from nutrition support causes these sales to decline by a further 14.6 percent, eliminating checkoffs causes a further sales decline of 1.8 percent,7 and eliminating the research and marketing subsidy causes sales to further decline by 1.2 percent. The net result is that retail sales fall to about $140.3 billion, 44.1 percent below their current level. Note that there is no particular importance in the order of these steps; the net result of $140.3 billion is the same regardless of how the steps are sequenced.
TABLE C4 Effects of Meat Tax and Support Changes on Quantity Demanded (dollar amounts in billions)
New Tax Burden
The Meat Tax will impose a new tax burden on Americans. We can calculate this burden by determining consumption levels under the Meat Tax, and then determining the tax paid by consumers at those consumption levels. The US Bureau of Labor Statistics estimates that on average, American family units spend between $1,468 and $2,651 yearly on meat, eggs, dairy, and fish.8 Table C5 shows the Meat Tax's estimated burden on Americans by family unit type, after accounting for projected declines in consumption.
TABLE C5 Meat Tax Burden on American Family Units
Tax Credits
The proposal includes providing tax credits to offset the cost of the Meat Tax to individual taxpayers. Rounding each family unit's Meat Tax–related burden up to the nearest multiple of $10 to determine the appropriate credit amount, the proposed credits and projected tax relief are as shown in table C6.
TABLE C6 Tax Credits and Burdens by Family Unit
Using the Internal Revenue Service's figures for taxpayers by family unit type, the proposed tax credits would cost an estimated $78.4 billion, as shown in table C7.
TABLE C7 Cost of Tax Credits9
Lower Government Payments Under Medicare and Medicaid Programs
Another effect of the proposed changes is to lower state and federal expenditures on Medicare and Medicaid programs. Of all US health care expenditures, Medicare pays an average of 20 percent and Medicaid an average of 15 percent.10 Accordingly, reductions in direct US health care costs associated with animal food consumption will lead to lower government payments under these programs, as shown in table C8. The federal government pays all Medicare costs and roughly two-thirds of Medicaid costs, yielding total annual federal savings of $22.4 billion. The total annual state savings are $3.6 billion. (Note that because these savings relate to gains in wellness that will be achieved only as individual eating habits lead to fewer health care problems, it may take several years of improvement in diet and health before these gains are fully realized each year.)
TABLE C8 Reduced Government Payments to Medicare and Medicaid Programs (dollar amounts in billions)
(Note that the direct health care costs itemized above are significantly lower than the total health care costs attributable to these three diseases. That's because the total costs include indirect costs such as lost wages, which are excluded from the above calculations as they do not affect Medicare or Medicaid.)
Change in US Treasury's Cash Flow
Using data from tables C2, C4, C7, and C8, we can estimate the annual impact these proposed changes will have on cash in the US Treasury. With adjusted retail sales of animal foods at $140.3 billion and a tax rate of 50 percent, the Meat Tax will generate tax revenue of about $70.2 billion. Combining this with the other estimated figures yields a total annual federal cash surplus of about $32.4 billion, as shown in table C9.
TABLE C9 Changes in US Treasury's Cash Flow (in billions)
Declines in Externalized Costs
Finally, the Meat Tax and other proposed changes would greatly reduce the externalized costs of meat and dairy production. As shown in table C10, the total annual reduction in externalized costs is estimated at roughly $184 billion. With the exception of subsidies, all externalized costs would be reduced by 44.1 percent, which is the factor by which the policy changes are estimated to reduce consumption and hence production. Subsidies are reduced by the amount of the research and marketing subsidy proposed to be eliminated.
TABLE C10 Annual Reduction in Externalized Costs of Animal Foods Resulting from Meat Tax and Other Changes (dollar amounts in billions)
Appendix D
Factory Farming Practices
There is a common belief, at least among animal food producers, that technological progress in farming helps the animals whose lives it affects. Efficiency is good for economic markets, and as Dickens wrote, “A good thing can't be cruel.”1 Like most business operators, animal farmers welcome almost any innovation that improves efficiency and boosts profits. Just as it has for the car industry, repeated tinkering to improve processes and increase outputs has yielded significant productivity gains over the past century for animal agribusiness. As noted, the last century saw a tripling in per-cow dairy production and a doubling in per-hen egg production. These efficiency gains have been driven by advances in areas like feeding, handling, selective breeding, and of course, confinement methods. Yet while humans associate innovation and efficiency with progress and improvement, the animals, if they could talk, would almost certainly disagree. This appendix explores the production methods which prevail in factory farms across the United States and are routinely used in raising hogs, dairy cows, veal calves, broiler chickens, and laying hens.
It's a Hog's Life
In his wonderful nonfiction book The Pig Who Sang to the Moon, Jeffrey Masson reports the story of Lulu—a two-hundred-pound pig living at an animal sanctuary:
Joanne Altsmann was in her kitchen one afternoon, feeling unwell, when Lulu charged out of a doggie door made for a 20-pound dog, scraping her sides raw to the point of drawing blood. Running into the street, Lulu proceeded to draw attention by lying down in the middle of the road until a car stopped. Then she led the driver to her owner's house, where Altsmann had suffered a heart attack. Altsmann was rushed to the hospital, and the ASPCA awarded Lulu a gold medal for her heroism. Altsmann knows in her bones that Lulu's sixth sense saved her life.2
Pigs, Masson says, are sensitive, loyal, and intelligent. They're capable of forming complex social relationships, and they wag their tails like dogs when they're happy.
But in factory farms, where virtually all pigs in the United States are raised, hyper-confinement means that these and other animals lack the space or outdoor access to engage in instinctive behaviors. How do the animals like living in these conditions? Matthew Scully, former speech writer for George W. Bush and author of the book Dominion: The Power of Man, the Suffering of Animals, and the Call to Mercy, sought a firsthand answer to that question. Through Scully, we learn from North Carolina pig farmer F. J. �
��Sonny” Faison how pigs feel about spending their lives in what Faison calls “state-of-the-art confinement facilities.” According to Faison, the animals “love it. . . . They don't mind at all. . . . The conditions . . . are much more humane than when they were out in the field.”3
Another North Carolina pig farmer, Jerry Godwin, also extolled his plant's modern methods to Scully: “If you want to look at an animal in one of our systems, at the way it is housed, you look at that and say, ‘Oh my gosh, that's terrible.’ Well, the fact is that to that animal it may not be so bad. That animal seems to live longer, to prosper, to do well. Its comfort is there.”4
But Scully's impressions while touring a hog farm didn't support pig farmers' claims that innovation in porcine agriculture benefits the animals. At a supposedly state-of-the-art hog factory in North Carolina, Scully saw “sores, tumors, ulcers, pus pockets, lesions, cysts, bruises, torn ears, swollen legs everywhere. Roaring, groaning, tail biting, fighting, and other ‘vices,’ as they're called in the industry. Frenzied chewing on bars and chains, stereotypical ‘vacuum’ chewing on nothing at all, stereotypical rooting and nest building with imaginary straw.”5 Scully was invited to tour that particular facility by Sonny Faison, the pig farmer who said his animals “love” their living conditions. In truth, as we see repeatedly in this example and others in this appendix, innovation in animal farming often means a backward step in the animals' quality of life. Notwithstanding claims to the contrary by factory farm operators, the evidence shows that when the focus turns to raising an animal faster, on cheaper feed, or in less space, the animal invariably loses.
Dairy's Dark Side
As a child visiting his uncle's farm in Wisconsin, physician Michael Klaper saw a dairy cow separated from her newborn calf. The incident left a lasting impression. Years later, he wrote:
The mother was allowed to nurse her calf but for a single night. On the second day after birth, my uncle took the calf from the mother and placed him in the veal pen in the barn—only ten yards away, in plain view of the mother. The mother cow could see her infant, smell him, hear him, but could not touch him, comfort him, or nurse him. The heartrending bellows that she poured forth—minute after minute, hour after hour, for five long days—were excruciating to listen to. They are the most poignant and painful auditory memories I carry in my brain.6
There's a popular belief, long outdated, that dairy cows lead blissful lives. But as this and other examples show, life on a dairy farm is anything but easy.
Centuries or even decades ago, life might have been different for a dairy cow. But with the typical dairy farm's footprint changing from pastoral to industrial, production methods have changed too. Today, while dairy cows would otherwise live past twenty, they're generally killed for beef before the age of four.7 Further, contrary to the conventional wisdom, cows don't routinely make milk and they don't need to be milked—like humans, they lactate only after giving birth. Unlike most humans, however, they're forcibly inseminated a number of times during their lives.8
As Klaper saw as a child, calves must be separated from their mothers within hours of birth; otherwise, the maternal bond grows too strong and makes separation especially difficult. Of course, even an immediate separation is painful for a mother whose mammary glands are designed to feed her own young and whose most basic instinct is to do so. And what happens next, following separation, depends on the calf's sex.
Veal Calves
Most males born in the dairy industry are destined for veal crates—tiny stalls banned in the European Union but permitted in most of the United States. As John Robbins, author of Diet for a New America, observed, “The veal calf would actually have more space if, instead of chaining him in such a stall, you stuffed him into the trunk of a subcompact car and kept him there for his entire life.”9 For the connoisseur, veal's appeal lies in its softness and paleness. Thus, calves are tethered to prevent any but the slightest movement—this immobility keeps the infants' flesh tender by preventing muscle development. To keep them anemic and maintain their flesh's characteristic pink color, newborns are denied their mothers' milk and instead fed formula without iron. The young males are typically slaughtered at four months.
The inhumane treatment of veal calves is no mystery to most American consumers, who, since learning about veal in the mid-1970s, have responded by dramatically reducing their consumption of the anemic flesh. From 1975 to 1998, annual US per capita veal consumption fell 77 percent from almost 4 pounds to less than 1.10 Yet in counterpoise to the veal industry's decline, dairy consumption provides this dying industry with endless rebirth. Almost one in two calves born to dairy cows every day lands in a confinement crate, destined to be marketed to veal eaters in the United States or abroad. This seems a particularly bizarre irony for the millions of US consumers who would not dream of eating veal but who, by consuming dairy, power an industry that many believe should have died long ago.
Battery Cows
Female calves, on the other hand, are destined for a life of milk production. Dairy's innovative answer to the battery cage is zero grazing, a system of intensive confinement that keeps cows tethered in stalls—usually of steel and concrete—for most of their lives. Unlike conventional dairy farming, which relies on pasture, zero grazing requires little land and is thus scalable in ways that pasture grazing is not. The rise of zero grazing over the past several decades has led to a heavy drop in the number of dairy farms and a sharp increase in the cow population at those that remain. Between 1970 and 2006, the number of US farms with dairy cows fell from 648,000 to 75,000. With this consolidation in the industry, the majority of US milk is now produced on farms with five hundred or more cows—nearly all of which are zero grazing.11
Yet cows, just like people and other animals, enjoy the wind in their hair and the grass under their feet. Research shows that given a choice, cows spend the majority of their time outdoors and choose to come inside only to escape high temperatures.12 As one dairy worker observed, “The thing you notice with zero grazing is how depressed and uptight the cows are. The eyes are dull.”13 Because of the parallels to intensely confined laying hens, some call these living milk machines “battery cows.”
Cows might look dull, but don't be fooled. In fact, research shows cows are smarter than we thought. It also finds they're capable of feeling deep emotions and forming complex social relationships. In one study, cows were challenged to open a door to find food while their brain waves were measured. When they solved the problem, they felt a thrill, according to Donald Broom, the Cambridge University professor who led the study. “The brainwaves showed their excitement; their heartbeat went up and some even jumped into the air. We called it their Eureka moment,” Broom said.14 In another study, researchers at Bristol University found that cows typically form friendships with two to four other animals and spend most of the time with their friends.15 Like many people, they may dislike others of their species and bear grudges for years.
The Chicken and the Egg
“If you grew as fast as a chicken,” according to the University of Arkansas Division of Agriculture, “you'd weigh 349 pounds at age two.”16 Broiler chickens—so-called because they yield meat, not eggs—are bred to get as big as possible as fast as possible. They now grow twice as fast and get more than twice as big as they once did, prompting the awful pun “double broiler.” The rapid growth and distorted body size of broiler chickens means their legs and organs can't keep pace with the rest of their body, often leading to disease and deformity. According to one published study, “Broilers now grow so rapidly that the heart and lungs are not developed well enough to support the remainder of the body, resulting in congestive heart failure.”17
They can't walk so well either. Ninety percent of broiler chickens have abnormal gaits caused by genetic bone deformities.18 The pain of these deformities leads chickens to dose themselves with pain medicine (if available), by consistently choosing feed containing anti-inflammatory drugs over regular feed.19 “Broilers
,” wrote Professor John Webster of the University of Bristol School of Veterinary Science, “are the only livestock that are in chronic pain for the last 20 percent of their lives. They don't move around, not because they are overstocked, but because it hurts their joints so much.”20 Six-week-old broilers have such a hard time supporting their abnormally heavy bodies that they spend up to 86 percent of the time lying down.21 And their constant contact with ammonia-laden litter leads to burns, breast blisters, and foot pad dermatitis.22
Yet for all the difficulties in a broiler chicken's life, conditions are no better for their hardworking cousins—laying hens. In fact, because of the way hens and their offspring are treated, eggs—a dietary staple for even many a vegetarian—are surprisingly inhumane. As factory farm critic Erik Marcus writes, “A bite of egg involves more animal suffering than a bite of hamburger or bacon.”23
Life in the Industrial Henhouse
For chickens in the laying industry, life starts inauspiciously. Male chicks are useless because they cannot lay eggs and, unlike genetically engineered broiler chickens, are not bred for the rapid growth that makes it profitable to produce chicken meat. With no laws or humane standards mandating how unwanted chicks must be handled, farm operators are left to discard the day-old birds in whatever manner is most cost-effective. This could mean shredding them alive in a meat grinder or wood chipper, dumping them in a garbage can to starve to death, or stuffing them in a garbage bag to suffocate. Egg producers kill 270 million unwanted male chicks each year, enough tiny dead birds to circle the contiguous United States.24 Nevertheless, if they knew what was in store for their sisters, these baby roosters might be grateful for their early deaths.
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