In November of 2006, a coalition of organizations, including the HSUS, passed an initiative in Arizona to ban the confinement of pigs in gestation crates. For that fight, we were lucky to have a formidable friend in Maricopa County sheriff Joe Arpaio, who helped make the case in our TV ads. The self-described toughest sheriff in America, he was an unlikely ambassador for our message. He’s a stern man in his treatment of felons and has no tolerance for cruelty to animals. With Joe’s tough-guy reputation and his great love for animals, he was just the man to blow past all the stereotypes about overly sentimental animal lovers and get people to take an honest look at a serious issue.
With Arpaio making our case in the ads, we won big in Arizona, capturing more than 62 percent of the vote and sweeping thirteen of fifteen counties, including a county hosting a farm with seventeen thousand pigs crowded into gestation crates.
After that victory, even Smithfield Foods, the world’s largest factory farmer of pigs, with 1.2 million of America’s 5 million sows in gestation crates, announced it would begin phasing out the crates on company-owned farms over the next decade or so. Soon after, Canada’s largest pig producer, Maple Leaf Foods, announced it would do the same. And within just a few months, the American Veal Association, a trade group emblematic of animal abuse in agriculture, pledged that its producers would eliminate veal crates within a decade.
“Meat Science”: Turkeys Who Can’t Walk, Pigs Who Can’t Move, and Other Victims of Agribusiness
ALL OF THIS SHOWS the possibilities of change in livestock agriculture, at least when the people themselves are given a say in the matter. A few serious blows at the ballot box, and suddenly we have the industry’s attention. Up to this point, industry executives and their lobbyists had it all wired; with the right people in the right spots on the relevant legislative committees, they could brush us off and dismiss any talk of reform as ridiculous and out of the question. It’s harder to treat the electorate that way, and clearly they’re just now adjusting to the inconveniences of democratic debate and majority rule.
It’s fair to say that when the industry started losing the good opinion of men like Joe Arpaio and Dave Long, it was losing Middle America. The ground was shifting, and it turned out many people had gotten their fill of “the new agriculture” the industry was so proud of. Like Dave, millions of citizens now have their own stories to tell of corporate abuse, arrogance, and complete disregard for the standards and character of rural communities. Agribusiness used to take the political support of these people for granted, but those days are passing as factory farming spreads. For good reason, these same rural citizens now count themselves as victims of industrial farming, and they are among the most compelling witnesses against the whole corrupt business.
As we parted, I told Dave that if we won this fight in California over Proposition 2, it would be in part because of guys like him, who stood up in what had seemed a hopeless cause and saw a better way. I reminded him that he wasn’t alone in the fight, though it might have felt that way for a while, and we stood a good chance of winning this thing. Even better, victory here would send a message to all America, and more reforms would surely follow. I said we’d be back in touch, and Dave promised he’d keep spreading the word about Prop. 2.
We said our good-byes and hit the road. Maggie and I had another long drive ahead of us. After seeing Hallmark and this monstrosity of an egg factory farm, I wanted Maggie to understand that this is the “new normal.” And if one place like Hallmark could cause national outrage and panic, how would Americans feel to learn that this same crass and merciless spirit was at work at factory farms and slaughterhouses everywhere—that Hallmark was the face of modern agriculture.
THE PROBLEM ISN’T JUST intensive confinement, although that is one of the worst animal-welfare problems on factory farms. Really, the confinement system is only a symptom of the larger problem of agribusiness controlling every aspect of the animals’ lives and treating them like objects and commodities. Dave Long was right that for all the industry’s talk about “scientifically designed” farms, and greater efficiency, and all the rest of it, the only motive is maximum profit at the expense of every other consideration. This is an industry that has lost its bearings and is willing to inflict any degree of neglect and suffering on animals if it can shave more off the cost and add more to the profit.
All farm animals with commercially valuable parts have been caught up in a system that more than ever disregards their well-being. I told Maggie that the turkey provides the sharpest contrast in terms of the basic architecture of the animal—a classic before-and-after case that shows how the industry has transformed animals to suit its designs.
Wild turkeys can run twenty-five miles an hour and, in short bursts, fly faster than fifty miles an hour. They live in flocks and forage more than twelve hours a day before retiring at night to roost in trees. They are so alert and fast that hunters dress in camouflage and face paint and use a device that mimics mating calls to lure the birds within shooting range. Despite these technological and strategic advantages, hunters often return home empty-handed because of the birds’ awareness and elusiveness.
Contrast that with the genetically manipulated turkeys designed and used by agribusiness. With their massive breasts of fat and muscle, they are caricatures of wild turkeys. They are so bulky that toms have difficulty mating without harming the hens, so breeding facilities “milk” the males for their semen and artificially inseminate the females.
Their legs, so well adapted for agility and speed in the wild, can barely support their unnaturally enormous bodies. Walking and standing can be painful. They suffer joint and hip problems, and their tendons and ligaments can even rupture. Even if they were not confined in buildings at a “stocking density” of two and a half to four square feet per bird (compared with the five hundred acres they might call home in the wild), flight is impossible for these grossly obese and heavily muscled birds. They live sedentary lives in overcrowded sheds, crammed wing to wing atop ammonia-laden excrement.
And it’s not only their physical form that’s so exaggerated compared with wild turkeys. Their growth rate is insanely accelerated too. Factory-farmed turkeys now weigh three times more than their wild brethren and reach that size by just four months of age. A more compact “grow-out” period means producers can raise and process more turkey flocks within a year—which means more profits.
The welfare of farmed turkeys is so compromised that mortality rates of 7 to 10 percent are expected and accepted. Summing up agribusiness’s priorities, an industry scientist wrote that the “use of highly selected fast-growing strains is recommended because savings in feed costs and time far outweigh the loss of a few birds.” The “few” birds he referred to were actually eighteen to twenty-six million turkeys dying on factory farms in 2007 alone.
It’s not much different for chickens raised for meat. They, too, are confined in massive, filthy sheds and are selectively bred for enlarged breasts and fast growth. These birds are slaughtered at less than seven weeks of age—down from twelve weeks seventy years ago. Just think of it. They now reach “market weight” in half the time they used to. According to researchers at the University of Arkansas Division of Agriculture, “If you grew as fast as a chicken, you’d weigh 349 pounds at age 2.”
This rapid growth places further stress on their already distorted bodies, producing not only tendon strains, joint ailments, and crippling leg deformities, but also respiratory, circulatory, and pulmonary disorders in birds who are the age equivalent of juveniles. Diseases often associated with old age are widespread in animals just a few weeks into their lives. Poultry scientist Dr. Ian Duncan notes that “without a doubt, the biggest welfare problems for meat birds are those associated with fast growth.”
The numbers are beyond belief. Aided in part by today’s ever-faster rates of growth, U.S. producers now raise about nine billion chickens a year, killing one million individual birds every hour to serve the average American’s diet
of thirty birds per year.
The billions of birds killed for meat each year in the United States must be caught and crated before they’re stacked on massive slaughter-bound trucks. “Catchers” manually gather the birds by physically grabbing them, carrying several at a time by their legs and even wings, and throwing them into crates. A single chicken catcher may lift and crate as many as fifteen hundred birds in an hour. With workers moving at such a frenzied pace, the animals often sustain severe injuries, including broken legs and wings, internal hemorrhaging, ruptured tendons, and dislocated hips. A number of studies report that as many as 20 to 30 percent of chickens suffer injury during the collection process.
Crated in the truck, the birds are denied food, water, and even protection from the elements. Wholly unfamiliar with the outdoors—wind, sunlight, rain, and the chaotic noises of transit—the birds experience shock and fear. Some even die en route from infectious disease, heart and circulatory disorders, and trauma experienced during catching and crating. Dead-on-arrival estimates for chickens range from 0.19 to 0.46 percent, which means an incredible seventeen to forty-one million birds die during transport every year.
Fifty years ago, animals were raised on small, diverse, family-run farms, and agricultural students learned “animal husbandry.” Gradually, independent farmers lost out to corporate factories, and animal husbandry gave way to “animal science” or even “meat science”—a change in terminology that signaled the new industrial ethos in the way we view and treat animals. Animals became “production units,” and agribusiness’s goal shifted to “growing” billions of animals as cheaply and quickly as possible in the smallest amount of space—all at the expense of the welfare of these individual creatures who can suffer and experience joy just as surely as the companion animals with whom we share our homes.
Stirring the Silent Majority
HOW DID THESE CHANGES—IN the rural areas of the nation, in many agricultural schools, and within farming industries as a whole—come about? Some of the causes can be seen in the basic economic trends within animal agriculture, which has consolidated dramatically in recent decades. In 1970, more than 870,000 farms had pigs. By 2009, that number had fallen 90 percent to fewer than 72,000, while the number of pigs raised for food eclipsed 110 million. Likewise, in 1910, 870,000 farmers raised 3.7 million turkeys. By 2007, more than half of the nearly 265 million turkeys slaughtered in the United States were raised under contract in factory farms for only three companies.
It’s been the same story in the chicken, egg, and dairy industries. The beef cattle business is the rare exception; there are still three-quarters of a million cattle ranches that typically follow the formula of grazing cattle. The biggest change in the beef industry is that before slaughter, cows are now sent to feedlots and loaded up on massive amounts of corn, rather than their natural diet of grass.
Farming has changed to the point that the animals, the practices, and the whole ethic of it are virtually unrecognizable. Yet corporate farmers continue to claim they represent rural values, even as they impose the harshest industrial values on the countryside.
In California, the veal and hog industries are small. So the debate over Prop. 2 was bound to center on the confinement of the 20 million hens in battery cages—a good share of the 280 million egg-laying hens in the nation. Like other animals genetically manipulated for commercial advantage, laying hens now produce a mind-numbing yield. A century ago, a hen laid about 100 eggs per year; today’s factory-farmed hen produces 250 eggs per year, and some lay 300 or more. Their systems are depleted by calcium loss and taxed by near-daily egg laying; their bones are so weakened by the virtual immobilization imposed by restrictive battery cages that nearly 90 percent of laying hens suffer from osteoporosis. This makes the birds highly susceptible to painful and often deadly bone fractures. One study found that fractures were a main cause of mortality in caged hens.
While those of us leading the movement against factory farming had cause for optimism, I told Maggie Jones that with Prop. 2 way up in the latest polls, we also knew that all of that could change. It depended partly on what resources big agribusiness would invest in the effort to defeat the initiative. Our opponents were raising money throughout the campaign, but a month after Maggie and I met up for our trip through the Inland Empire, the major players in the egg and poultry industries gave $5 million in a single day to the campaign to defeat the ballot measure. A cross-check of contributing companies would show that many of them had made a habit of cutting corners and paying fines.
Pilgrim’s Pride, whose own whistle-blower employee had videotaped chickens being stomped on and thrown against the wall at one of its plants, donated $25,000 that day to Prop. 2’s opponents. The United Egg Producers, which had settled with seventeen state attorneys general a false advertising complaint about its fraudulent animal-welfare claims and had to pay a penalty, ponied up $185,000. Moark LLC, which had previously paid $100,000 to settle criminal animal-cruelty charges, shelled out $504,000 against Prop. 2. Cal-Maine Foods, the nation’s top egg producer, which had been cited for spilling chicken parts and manure into waterways and killing tens of thousands of fish, invested $600,000 in the effort to block reform.
On that day especially, when agribusiness interests laid down so much money, there was no doubting that they had a lot to lose and knew it. But our coalition had a pretty impressive campaign of its own, with a broad coalition of groups and thousands of volunteers proudly making the case for humane farming to neighbors and to church and civic groups. Whatever the financial means of the opposition, it came down to a contest between raw self-interest and moral aspiration, between fear and idealism, and voters could tell the difference. The industry could feed suspicion with attack ads, warn of higher costs at the supermarket, and try to cast reform as somehow hopelessly impractical and unrealistic. But the one thing our opponents could not do was to speak to the hearts of the people. There is no such thing as an eloquent, crowd-stirring case for factory farming.
By the time I delivered Maggie to her hotel, I’m sure she’d had her fill of all the details and had heard enough of Wayne Pacelle holding forth to last for a while. We spoke a few more times by phone, and her piece appeared a week before the election. Maggie reported that we were likely to win, but that “in a way, win or lose, [Pacelle] already had a victory in hand. Proposition 2 had helped push his overall message about farm-animal welfare well beyond California. In late September, the comedian Ellen DeGeneres—who held a fund-raiser that brought in $1 million for Proposition 2—had Pacelle on her show to talk about the ballot initiative. Then, in mid-October, Oprah Winfrey devoted an entire show to Proposition 2, with Pacelle and members of the opposition as guests. Instead of baby seals and whales as the darling cause of two of TV’s most popular daytime shows, it was America’s pigs, calves and chickens.”
That was a generous sentiment, and much appreciated. But we were playing to win—and would have been devastated by a defeat. Our opponents had employed public relations firm Golin Harris to lead a $9 million campaign against Prop. 2. As predicted, they argued that egg prices would surge, food would become unsafe, and farmers would be driven out of business and out of California.
We countered that egg prices would rise only slightly, safety would improve, and family farmers would regain market share. In fact, our lawyers and economists found that the United Egg Producers had been running a massive price-fixing scheme. While they were lamenting the costs consumers would have to pay if the animals got more space, they had been controlling flock size to artificially inflate egg prices. We showed that they had jacked up prices more than 40 percent. After we turned over our findings to the Department of Justice, it launched an investigation, and more than a dozen class action lawsuits were filed on behalf of consumers throughout the country.
We struck back in other ways too. Our videos and advertisements included footage that one of our investigators had taken of massive numbers of flies buzzing around the egg farm next to Dav
e Long’s place. And we included a brief scene from Hallmark, to remind voters of agribusiness’s callous attitude toward animals.
I spent Election Day handing out leaflets at a precinct in Los Angeles. The polls had us winning more than 60 percent of the vote, but we know never to relax at such moments and wanted to persuade as many individual voters as we could. Eventually, I made my way over to the Hyatt Regency Hotel, where we had our election night gathering. California’s Democratic Party happened to choose the same hotel to celebrate Barack Obama’s election victory, so the atmosphere was electric.
As the secretary of state posted results from precincts and counties across California, our early numbers came in at about 60 percent and then slowly climbed throughout the evening. And when the last ballots were counted, we had won with 63.5 percent of the vote. In fact, we got more votes than any ballot initiative in American history. We won not only in coastal California, but throughout much of the state’s agricultural interior. We took majorities in forty-seven of fifty-eight counties.
The first county returns I looked for were those of the Inland Empire. In the end, Prop. 2 got 62.5 percent of the vote in Riverside and 62 percent in San Bernardino. They proved to be the bellwethers we thought they’d be.
Agribusiness leaders had mounted a strong campaign, but they had failed to convince the public it was okay to cram animals in cages for their entire lives. The images did not comport with popular notions of what agriculture should be. Across the Golden State, we saw that the bond between humanity and animals is more than a nice thought or phrase; it is something real and deeply felt. If animals are going to be raised for food, and be slaughtered for us, then we owe them something in return, and it starts with a little more respect and kindness.
The Bond Page 14