We described the area in front of us, and Adam told us we were looking at the holding pens, the first stop for the cows once they were off-loaded. He then directed our attention to the chutes that led up to the kill box—the lip of the large plant where the dismembering and packaging started. I gazed at a covered area where, as I recalled, workers had tormented one downer cow by placing a stream of water in her mouth to make her feel like she was drowning. What kind of man would do that to such a helpless, unoffending creature, and what sort of industry instills such a spirit?
Maggie had a few more questions for Adam. She wondered, for example, how he got through the day given his strong feelings about animals and their suffering. Adam was characteristically modest and replied that personal sacrifices were required to bring animal cruelty to light. We signed off with Adam and jumped down from the wall.
As we walked back to the car, I told Maggie that Steve Mendell’s indignant denials about his company’s animal-handling practices before the House committee were par for the course for industry executives. Many had convinced themselves that all was okay, because the whole industry now depended on the denial of doubts and the concealment of facts. Their industry faced very limited regulatory oversight, and their very friendly relations with the USDA would make sure things stayed that way. One brave soul with a small camera was their worst enemy, and their greatest fear was an informed public.
President Obama’s announcement of a permanent ban in March 2009 was a triumph, but it was long in the making. HSUS, along with the animal-protection group Farm Sanctuary, had long warned Congress and the USDA that they were endangering public health by tolerating downer cows in the food supply. We had championed legislation to ban the processing of downer cows for human consumption, but faced resistance at every turn from the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association and its allies on Capitol Hill. In 2001, the House and Senate each passed amendments to ban the slaughter of downers, but a conference committee led by leaders of the agriculture committees dumped the language from the 2002 Farm Bill.
We picked ourselves up and tried again. The U.S. Senate again approved a downer ban in 2003. This time, agribusiness made its stand in the House, sparking a debate on the floor over the provision during consideration of the agriculture department’s spending bill. Representative Gary Ackerman, a Democrat from New York and the author of the amendment, showed his colleagues an enlarged photograph of a sick downer cow and warned that this was all it would take to disrupt worldwide beef markets and to shake consumer confidence in the American beef supply—one sick cow sent to slaughter. Congressman Ackerman argued that it made no sense to slaughter two hundred thousand or so downer cows, when thirty-four million cattle were going to slaughter every year, and that it was inhumane and wrong to allow these stricken animals into the food supply.
The chairman of the House agriculture committee, Republican Bob Goodlatte of Virginia, argued strenuously against the amendment, as did Texas Republican Henry Bonilla. Their colleague Charles Stenholm, also of Texas and the ranking Democrat on the agriculture committee (who lost a reelection bid and then moved to where he belonged anyway, in the meat industry as a lobbyist), protested against any talk of a downer ban, assuring members of the House, “That sick animal [in Rep. Ackerman’s photo] will never find its way into the food system. Period.”
With at least some House members trusting the assurances of their colleagues most allied with agriculture, the House defeated the Ackerman amendment by the narrowest of margins—202 votes to 199. If just two members had switched their votes from “Nay” to “Yea,” the amendment would have carried and downed animals would not have legally gotten into the food system.
It was just before Christmas of that year that USDA announced that a downer cow had tested positive for mad cow disease, or BSE, in Washington State. It was the first known case of mad cow disease in the United States. The sick animal had been processed for human consumption, and meat from that plant was distributed around the country. It was front-page news for two weeks.
In the United Kingdom, there had been more than one hundred deaths due to mad cow disease since the first outbreak occurred, with the disease having a frightening and ominously long latent phase. Mass culling of cattle and other livestock had ensued, with the bodies burned in huge pyres. It was a public health crisis and economic calamity, and the fear was that we in the United States might suffer the same fate. Nervous consumers started eating less meat, and more than fifty nations closed their borders to American beef.
In response to that crisis and to the fears of our trading partners, Ann Veneman, then agriculture secretary, announced a series of emergency policies, including a ban on downer cows in the food supply. If an animal was down on the ground and couldn’t get up, then that animal had to be euthanized on the spot. In its proposed rule on the subject, the USDA cited a Swiss study establishing that nonambulatory cattle are forty-nine to fifty-eight times more likely to have BSE than cattle identified through passive surveillance.
It required all of this to compel the enactment of a policy that had been debated in Congress for a decade, and even the industry went along with the new policy in the days after the crisis. Folks in the industry had wanted to settle down the public and our trading partners. But they wasted little time in trying to undermine even these minimal reforms. Not long after the story faded from the daily news cycle, the livestock industry began working the USDA to undo Secretary Veneman’s decree.
Undetected even by HSUS, much less by the American people, bureaucrats within the USDA were on the case, and in short order managed to revise the policy. It was July 2007 when the agency published a final rule on the downer cow issue, slipping in a loophole allowing some of these lame or sick cows to be processed for human consumption. Specifically, if a cow was approved for slaughter but then collapsed after the inspection, that animal could be slaughtered, as long as a USDA inspector recertified the animal as fit for processing.
It was this mysterious revision in policy that cleared the way for all that followed at the Hallmark meat plant: If the plant could just get the downers up, even for a few moments, then they might pass inspection after all and be slaughtered. If the weakened animals went down after passing inspection, that was no longer disqualifying. All that was needed was another okay by the inspector—assuming the plant even bothered to call out the vet. If he came out again and took another look at the animal, he could send her to slaughter.
In both cases, the meat industry was driven by a short-term mind-set and habit of corner cutting that didn’t even serve its own long-term business interests. Here were animals so lame and sick as to be unable to walk to their own deaths, and still the industry leaders could see only the potential of lost profits. They disregarded even the safety of millions of people, and in the end brought on themselves troubles and losses far worse than the ones they were trying to avoid.
It’s hard to summon much sympathy for an industry that lets cows live and die without even a touch of human kindness. To allow employees to drag these creatures to slaughter with ropes and chains, or to push them along the cement floor with forklifts—all for a few extra dollars in a multibillion-dollar industry—is beneath us all. And though the Hallmark folks probably still feel aggrieved, being run out of business is the least punishment anyone should expect for that kind of ruthlessness.
Even if minimal compassion fails to motivate the ranching and dairy industry trade groups and the slaughter plant operators, then in the case of downers, at least, enlightened self-interest should have been enough. The industry could have avoided the Washington State mad cow incident and the Hallmark fiasco had its leaders just accepted a sensible no-downer policy. A 2008 report revealed that slaughtering the downer cow in Washington State ultimately cost the industry $11 billion. The Hallmark case certainly cost a couple of billion more. Since that time more than a dozen BSE-positive animals have been found in Canada and the United States—nearly three-quarters of which were downer cow
s—confirming commonsense assumptions that the livestock industry once dismissed as ridiculous.
“The New Agriculture”: The Ways of Industrial Farming
IN RESPONSE TO OUR 2008 campaign to pass Proposition 2, the meat industry would trot out some familiar arguments. They said everything was just fine on veal, hog, and egg farms. We asserted that systematic cruelty occurred on these factory farms, and that it just wasn’t safe for the public, much less decent and fair to the animals, to cram tens of thousands of creatures into harsh confinement.
The industry treated our arguments in favor of Prop. 2 with the same disdain and disregard as they had our admonition that downed animals shouldn’t go into the food supply—saying we were naive, misunderstood basic economics, and should mind our own business and just work on dog and cat issues.
I had brought Maggie to Hallmark to give her just one glimpse of an arrogant, cruel, and often corrupt industry. With all those awards and commendations from its peers and its regulators, this one meat plant had been held up as a model for the industry. It turned out to be exactly that.
From the Hallmark plant, Maggie and I headed farther east to Yucaipa, in Riverside County, for another snapshot of modern animal farming—what the industry likes to call “the new agriculture.” We drove into a subdivision with a patchwork of neat and well-manicured homes, alongside others that were a bit rougher around the edges. We turned right into a dirt driveway and came to a stop where Dave Long greeted us.
My colleague Paul Shapiro had read about Dave in a small Riverside County paper, which reported on testimony he’d given at a local hearing complaining about the number of chickens at the egg farm next to his home. Paul called him, learned more about him, and told him about our campaign to crack down on the egg factory farms. Dave agreed to meet with Maggie and me to share his experiences.
He had a small home that was part ranch house, part trailer house, with motors and metal parts strewn all around his yard. He was obviously a guy who worked with his hands. By the looks of his place, I guessed that he traded in junk metal, spare parts, and machinery. Dave’s work was outside, so he could not escape the factory farm next door and its dreadful effects.
He was a trim yet sturdy fellow, probably in his early fifties, with flecks of gray hair on the sides, and that day was dressed in jeans and a T-shirt. He had lived on this property for more than thirty years, and when he moved there, the egg farm had about 40,000 birds. Now it had 763,000, and he told Maggie and me that it was ruining everything he liked about the area. When the wind blows in his direction, his property is overtaken with blackflies. “I am a Republican, I am a gun enthusiast, and I eat meat,” he said. “I am supporting Proposition 2 because it is just not right to cram those birds in there.”
Maggie and I chatted with Dave for a while, and I asked if we could take a closer look at the farm. “Absolutely,” he replied, and we headed over to his John Deere ATV.
Dave jumped in the driver’s seat, Maggie took the passenger seat, and I stood up in the rear holding on to the cross frame. Dave gunned it, and Maggie and I held on for dear life as we listened to him recall how the chicken farm grew house by house, until finally he found himself living across a fence from three-quarters of a million closely confined birds.
We sped down the driveway, took a few quick turns, and passed the side of the egg farm opposite Dave’s place. We went up a dirt road, crossed a small field, feeling every bump, and then came to an abrupt stop. From there we had a clear view of the egg farm.
Dave pointed to two large barns and said that they were modern hen confinement buildings, with the birds kept entirely inside. It was a battery cage facility, and it had football-field-length rows of cages stacked four or five high. Six to eight birds were stuffed into each cage, and each bird, under industry standards, got about sixty-seven square inches of living space—roughly two-thirds the size of a standard sheet of paper. Dave guessed 150,000 or so birds were in that building alone, and he pointed to the huge fans that regulated the temperature.
The egg farm also had about twenty smaller, old-style chicken houses, long structures open on all four sides, and with five columns of cages running the length of each long barn. The columns were stacked two high, with two wire cages on each row, and two birds in each cage. The birds had hardly any room to move. Dave estimated each structure had about twenty thousand birds, so with about twenty in all, there were more than four hundred thousand birds in these older-style cages.
Inside, the floors tilted slightly to allow the eggs to roll onto a constantly running conveyor belt that took them away for processing. In the open-air structures, the floors also tilted, but there was no conveyor belt—the eggs were manually collected.
In any modern laying hen building, a conveyor belt removed the waste that fell through the bottom of each cage. But in the older confinement system, the cages were on stilts and the manure just piled up beneath them. The birds in the top cages were whiter than the birds below, not because those below were of a different breed with a darker plumage, but rather because manure dropped on them day after day from the birds confined above, falling through their wire cages, soiling them, and collecting on the ground. Beneath some of the cages, the manure climbed three feet high, to within just inches of the birds.
The manure piles drew the flies. And they were everywhere, in thick, dark clouds. These were the flies that ruined Dave Long’s days. When the wind blew in his direction, the stench could make you gag. Any gusts in the other direction brought a brief respite, except for the neighbors on the other side of the bird factory.
Dave has an uncomplicated view of the problem here, shaped mainly by a basic sense of fairness. “When I look into the chicken houses and see the manure piled high, I feel like it shouldn’t be done that way,” Dave said. “The manure should be removed a lot more frequently, and the chickens should have a little more stomping area, as they don’t have enough room to maneuver inside those cages.”
Dave had us get back on the ATV and then took us over to the other barns. It was more of the same. Massive numbers of birds, with no people around. He said there were a handful of workers, with a ratio of about one worker for eighty thousand hens. He said they cleaned the manure only when it was bumping up against the cages, but that it wouldn’t take long for the piles to build back up. Basically, they get around to cleaning away the manure when it becomes a problem for them, when it gets in the way of operations, and not out of even the least concern for the birds or the neighbors. “The reason they cram so many chickens into those cages is for profit. It has nothing to do with anything else.”
Dave drove us back to his place, and we discussed Prop. 2. I asked if he had other neighbors who were upset about the factory farms. He said many had problems with it, but that they just kept their complaints to themselves. He was one of the few to speak out, and he didn’t think he could help us attract any outspoken support. He had some fight in him, but he clearly didn’t expect to win, and he was tired and frustrated. How could I blame him for feeling almost powerless, with a megacity of birds right next door, and corporate neighbors who couldn’t care less whether he liked it or not?
I thought about telling Dave that though this egg factory was a disaster, things could have been worse. He could have found himself next to a hog factory. The average hog excretes three times as much waste as a person, and the waste goes untreated, typically funneled into massive, toxic lagoons. Rural residents are dealing with this all over the country—from North Carolina to Missouri to Ohio. And if Dave thinks his corporate neighbors are impossible to deal with, he should meet some of the characters running these animal factories.
During the second half of the twentieth century, the pig industry went through changes similar to those in the egg industry—with traditional farming practices supplanted by an industrial model and massive numbers of animals packed into sheds and barns. The breeding sows have it the worst, confined in individual gestation crates—two-by seven-foot cages—that
prevent them from turning around, stretching, or even comfortably lying down.
These curious, social animals—who in the outdoors would root around with their noses, forage, build nests, and wallow in the mud—cannot engage in almost any of their normal, instinctive behaviors. For nearly their entire four-month pregnancies, they can do nothing but stand and lie on concrete slatted floors, breathing in toxic ammonia emanating from massive waste pits beneath. There is no positive stimulation and no social interaction. In such extreme confinement, sows’ muscles atrophy, they lose bone strength, and they are often afflicted with lesions that are indicators of their terrible health, their unsanitary living conditions, and the psychological torment they experience from such severe restriction.
Before giving birth, the sow is moved to a farrowing crate—an iron enclosure much like the gestation crate, except that it curves out at the base so that piglets can squeeze under the bars and not be crushed by their immobilized and often lame mothers. In that modified cage, the sow nurses her babies for a fraction of the time that nature intended, until they are prematurely weaned and begin to get fattened for slaughter. The sow, meanwhile, is reimpregnated and hauled back to the original crate for another four months of confinement. Whatever the name for the crate or the process, for the sow it’s always the same—a life of privation and unrelieved misery.
Although pigs can live to fifteen years or more, breeding sows are summarily culled when their usefulness has passed, or else sent to slaughter like the spent dairy cows. The sows who can still keep the piglets coming escape culling for a while. And the reward for that is to endure seven or eight cycles of pregnancy, being dragged back and forth from one small crate to another, without any relief, any time to rest or recover, any chance to move freely or be outdoors, or anything resembling human care or even pity.
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