The federal government funnels 70 percent of farm subsidies—about $5 billion a year—to producers of just five crops: corn, cotton, rice, soybeans, and wheat. Given that more than 97 percent of soy meal and more than 60 percent of corn and barley are fed to farm animals, these subsidies are an enormous benefit to the livestock sector, because feed is their biggest cost and they get it at artificially low prices. According to a 2007 study by Tufts University, subsidized corn and soybeans provide a savings of $288 million a year to Tyson Foods. The same study found that the government pays a hidden subsidy of almost $10 to pork producers for every pig raised and killed.
In 2010, as it does every year, the USDA went on a spending spree with Americans’ tax dollars in buying up surplus animal products. Consumers obviously did not want these products, but the farm lobby pleaded. In response, the USDA doled out hundreds of millions more to buy up surplus pork, chicken, and eggs for the National School Lunch Program and other federal food-service plans. This was in addition to the billions of dollars’ worth of agricultural commodities that the USDA is obligated to buy for these programs each year.
Few people want to eat the meat from spent hens no longer needed by egg producers. Weakened by the enormous outputs needed to produce an egg almost every day of the week, the hens have fragile bones, which break easily and splinter into their flesh. The old cliché was that spent hens become Campbell’s soup. However, it’s been many years since major soup companies wanted any of this meat, apparently finding it unfit for their customers. As many as 24 percent of hens suffer broken bones following removal from their cages, and as many as 98 percent of carcasses have broken bones by the time they reach the end of the evisceration line.
Yet the U.S. government has “become the largest single buyer of spent hen meat,” according to the United Egg Producers (UEP). Based on the trade group’s estimates, the USDA purchases about 10 percent of all spent hens, and the UEP proudly notes that many of the carcasses are sent to the school lunch program. One study found that these hen carcasses are several times more likely to be contaminated with salmonella than the carcasses of chickens bred for meat production.
For all of their unwitting generosity, Americans don’t seem to get much of a break from the egg industry, which is now the target of a series of class-action lawsuits for illegal price-fixing. In 2008, it came to light that the UEP had set up an anemic animal-welfare program that seemed to serve to limit production and keep prices high. It also manipulated egg exports to the same end—to fix prices and increase profits. In June 2010, Land O’Lakes became the second major egg producer to settle the case, agreeing to pay $25 million to the plaintiffs.
The dairy and hog industries also rake in public support while resisting reforms at every turn. The Hallmark/Westland slaughter plant that closed in 2008 and that specialized in slaughtering spent dairy cows was the second-largest supplier of ground beef to the National School Lunch Program—providing cheap, possibly unsafe beef to kids in school districts in nearly every state. In 2009, the National Pork Producers Council (NPPC) asked Congress to provide more than a quarter of a billion dollars in subsidies to the industry, including tens of millions for direct purchases of surplus pork that consumers didn’t want. Governors of nine leading pork-producing states, presumably at the industry’s request, also wrote to Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack urging him to make the payout. When the House Agriculture Committee held a hearing on the subject, it did not invite a single witness to testify who did not represent industry.
In return for government payouts, the hog industry has degraded rural communities by releasing huge volumes of liquefied manure that foul waterways and kill aquatic life. It got so bad in North Carolina, the nation’s second-largest hog producer, that the state imposed a moratorium on new manure lagoons, essentially halting construction of new hog farms. The NPPC has also led efforts to block Congress from phasing out the use of antibiotics for nontherapeutic purposes—a practice that has hastened the spread of antibiotic-resistant bacteria that threaten public health. When the H1N1 swine flu pandemic hit, the industry claimed it was a victim of media hype, even in the face of overwhelming evidence that factory farms are the most dangerous incubators and mixing bowls for virulent strains of the flu that threaten the safety of tens of millions of people across the globe. A hog factory run by an American corporation in Mexico may have even played a central role in starting the pandemic in the first place. Now American factory farms threaten to create a new superbug through their routine crowding of thousands of pigs on giant farms.
With all of the public wealth directed at propping up industrial agriculture, you would expect at the very least that the federal government would make some provision for the animals caught up in this vast and often ruthless production system. But you would be mistaken. Laws to protect these billions of creatures during production or transport—the sum of their lives until almost the very moment of death at the slaughterhouse—are weak or nonexistent. Those final moments are regulated under the terms of the federal Humane Methods of Slaughter Act, and even there, the industry has managed to keep poultry excluded from any protection—and birds account for more than 95 percent of all slaughtered farm animals. As for the Act’s minimal protections for mammals, the Hallmark case showed how much those are worth.
Corporate welfare has a lot more pleaders in Washington than animal welfare, and lobbyists for agribusiness are unrivaled in their ability to extract public money for the advantage and enrichment of relatively few. But something has gone seriously wrong when the government of the United States basically contracts out agricultural policy, not only to the industry it is supposed to regulate, but to the worst elements in the industry. What they have built, literally at our expense, is a system that operates without the least respect or concern for the animals they exploit, and little regard for the people they claim to serve.
“The Rising Plague” and the Veterinary Oath
THE PEW COMMISSION’S 2008 report on industrial farm animal production was a small victory all by itself, reflecting an understanding by serious thinkers in agriculture, including a few people close to the industry, that reform of some kind is urgently needed. Among those thinkers was the commission’s vice chairman, Dr. Michael Blackwell, who hardly fits the industry’s caricature of its critics.
Dr. Blackwell was raised in Idabel, a small town in the far southeast corner of Oklahoma, wedged between Arkansas and Texas. Farming was a way of life there, as was hunting. Rodeo was a form of family entertainment, and the area was for decades a hotbed of cockfighting, until the practice was finally banned in the state in 2002. Growing up in the 1950s, his father was one of the few rural veterinarians in the tristate area, and he covered a huge expanse of territory to treat animals large and small. The younger Blackwell grew up dealing with farmers and farm animals, and he inherited his father’s deep disapproval of animal abuse of any kind.
After obtaining a degree in veterinary medicine from Tuskegee and then a master’s in public health, he ran two private veterinary clinics. He was then called to public service, eventually becoming the chief veterinarian for the U.S. Public Health Service, deputy director of the FDA’s Center for Veterinary Medicine, and chief of staff to the U.S. surgeon general. He left government in 2000 to become dean of the College of Veterinary Medicine at the University of Tennessee, overseeing an expansion of a range of veterinary programs at the school until his departure in 2008.
When we spoke in my office in downtown Washington in June 2010, nearly two years after the Pew Commission had completed its report, Dr. Blackwell explained why he agreed to sit on the commission. He told me that agriculture is as fundamental an enterprise as there is, with implications for animal welfare, public health, and rural communities—subjects that he’s examined and seen from many angles throughout his life. He’s seen things take a bad turn, and he accepted the assignment as a chance to help.
Reflecting two years of debate, study, and public hearings, held all acro
ss the country, the Pew report was filled with informed analysis about modern agriculture and its troubles. In its conclusions, the report offered sweeping recommendations to restore rational limits and humanity to livestock agriculture. When the industry rejected the report out of hand, Dr. Blackwell was not surprised. Harder to understand was the reaction within the leadership ranks of his own profession—of fellow veterinarians who had taken the same oath he did.
The American Veterinary Medical Association, the largest professional association in the field, dismissed the report, saying it “contains significant flaws” and major departures “from both science and reality.” In particular, the AVMA attacked the commission’s recommendations to phase out the nontherapeutic use of antibiotics on farm animals and slammed the recommendation that the intensive confinement of laying hens, breeding sows, and other animals be phased out. They were, said the AVMA, “dangerous and under-informed recommendations about the nature of our food system.”
Some years ago, I assumed, along with most Americans, that veterinarians and their professional associations would be strong advocates for animal protection. But through the years, I’ve seen AVMA align itself with big agribusiness on issue after issue. The harsh and defensive reaction to the Pew report was hardly an aberration, but just the latest evidence that agribusiness and the AVMA have intersecting economic interests and nearly indistinguishable positions on many animal-welfare issues.
People rightly look to their individual veterinarian as an expert on the care of their companion animals, and this faith is generally well placed. Veterinarians invest years to learn their art, and they take a professional oath to alleviate animal suffering. Veterinary medicine is generally not a lucrative profession, and most veterinarians are in the field because they believe in their vocation and honor its purposes. Collectively, veterinarians brandish a remarkable set of tools and skills, treating cancer and bone disorders and extending the lives of animals who would have suffered or been euthanized in years past.
Medical assistance for dogs and cats accounts for three-quarters of veterinary income, against a little more than 10 percent for horses and another 10 percent for farm animals. But it is the specialists in agricultural animals—equine, swine, bovine, and avian—who continue to exert influence beyond their numbers within the profession. The vets in these fields typically work for farms, government, or agricultural research centers and share the industry’s mind-set. They are generally not focused on healing individual animals, as are companion-animal veterinarians, but rather on maintaining the collective health of the population, even if that means leaving particular animals to suffer, and even if 5 or 10 percent of all the animals die before reaching the slaughterhouse. In this view, it doesn’t matter if the individual animals are in misery, just so long as they are sufficiently productive and the whole operation is profitable.
The American Association of Swine Veterinarians publishes a professional journal, and its sponsors are primarily pharmaceutical companies, such as Alpharma, Bayer Animal Health, and Pfizer Animal Health. It’s no surprise then that swine vets generally favor the routine dosing of pigs with antibiotics on large, industrial farms. The American Society of Laboratory Animal Practitioners objects to the political efforts of animal-welfare groups to ban the use of random-source dogs in experiments. The American Association of Bovine Practitioners still won’t endorse a legislative ban on tail-docking dairy cows, expressing a reluctance to impose its views on dairy producers.
Where there is no large, organized industry with a professional veterinary presence, as on the issue of animal fighting, the AVMA often takes the proanimal position. But if vets are in the employ of a legal and established animal-use industry, they can usually be counted on to endorse the corporate line. Whatever degrees might hang on their office walls, these vets are in the same business as the factory farmers, with a powerful financial interest in keeping things just the way they are. This unnatural alignment of interests helps explain the long list of positions shared by the AVMA and agribusiness, and why the veterinary association is so deeply estranged from widely accepted animal-welfare principles.
To give just a few examples: the AVMA sat on the sidelines during the debate over the slaughter of lame or sick downer cows until the industry itself finally conceded the point. The veterinary association has refused to take a stand against foie gras production, which involves forcing a pipe down the throat of a duck or goose as a standard feeding practice until the liver is as much as ten times its normal size. The AVMA admits that this practice induces lipidosis, a painful disease of the liver, but neither that fact, nor the other obvious abuses of foie gras production has been enough to warrant the group’s disapproval. And until just a few years ago, the AVMA supported the egg industry’s routine practice of starving hens for days to extend their laying cycle—a practice known as forced molting. It disavowed this cruelty only after the industry had stopped doing it anyway. Likewise, for years the AVMA supported confining calves in narrow veal crates—once again changing its position only to conform to changes already afoot in the industry.
On most issues of animal welfare, the industry will not relent at all, and the AVMA won’t either. One of the support systems of hyperintensive animal agriculture is the routine feeding of antibiotics to farm animals. Dosing the animals with these drugs helps factory farmers keep them alive and productive in overcrowded and profoundly unnatural conditions. It is a classic case of the whole mind-set that drives the industry: the antibiotics are introduced as a solution to serious problems of their own making—the confinement of thousands of animals in small buildings. But rather than address those underlying problems, by giving the animals more space, the industry layers on a supposed “corrective”—the massive, nontherapeutic use of antibiotics—that only compounds the original error and creates a whole new set of problems that now gravely threaten public health.
If anyone should recognize that this is the wrong prescription for a fundamentally rotten system of agriculture, it’s the men and women at the AVMA. But no, not even here, are they willing to contradict the factory farmers. The AVMA defends the mass use of antibiotics as perfectly acceptable and as “science based.” But it’s not the science of animal welfare or of public health that now shapes their thinking; it’s the science of economics, and it’s never been more dismal.
As columnist Nicholas Kristof related in the New York Times, because of the overuse of antibiotics in livestock, “now we’re seeing increasing numbers of superbugs that survive antibiotics. One of the best-known—MRSA, a kind of staph infection—kills about 18,000 Americans annually. That’s more than die of AIDS.” This is just one example of the threat that superbugs pose, and serious scientists were warning of it long ago. Donald Kennedy, a former FDA commissioner, recalls how the agency tried to control the use of antibiotics on farm animals back in the early 1980. “Even back then,” he writes, “this nontherapeutic use of antibiotics was being linked to the evolution of antibiotic resistance in bacteria that infect humans. To the leading microbiologists on the F.D.A.’s advisory committee, it was clearly a very bad idea to fatten animals with the same antibiotics used to treat people. But the American Meat Institute and its lobbyists in Washington blocked the F.D.A. proposal.”
Today, serious scientists are more alarmed than ever about what one author calls “the rising plague.” The best-known public-health organizations in the country—including the American Medical Association, the American Academy of Pediatrics, the Infectious Diseases Society of America, and the American Public Health Association—have urged the Congress to act before it’s too late by banning nontherapeutic uses of antibiotics on farms. Only one major medical group opposes this public-health reform, and that’s the AVMA.
As widespread as the mass confinement of farm animals has become, there are still vets in practice who can remember a day when it wasn’t so—a time when animals not only knew the feel of soil and sunshine, but also the caring touch of a veterinarian. Michae
l Blackwell saw that spirit at work when as a boy he tagged along with his father, who brought the healing arts to animals because they were in need or distress, and not just because he viewed them as broken-down production units. With his colleagues on the Pew Commission, he tried to call fellow veterinarians back to that noble standard of care and compassion for all farm animals. “Federal standards for farm animal welfare,” said the Pew report, “should be developed immediately based on a fair, ethical, and evidence-based understanding of normal animal behavior.”
Having lost all sense of what is normal in the treatment of farm animals, much less what’s fair, the AVMA has endorsed the mass-confinement system. AVMA leaders are so caught up in the industry and its peculiar logic that “normal,” for them, is a confined animal who can scarcely move and never sees the light of day. And this doctrinaire adherence to the mechanics of mass confinement has put them at odds, not just with traditional animal-welfare organizations, but also with the growing ranks of veterinarians not steeped in the ways of the livestock industry. In the 2008 fight over Proposition 2, for example, we actually had the support of the California Veterinary Medical Association, whose president, Jeff Smith, put the matter very simply in a piece for the Modesto Bee: confinement systems are “clearly not defensible from a welfare perspective.” The group hung its decision on its eight principles of animal care, including the principle that “animals are sentient beings with wants and needs that may differ from those of humans and are worthy of respect from individuals and society.” The AVMA operates without these detailed animal-welfare principles and leaned hard on the CVMA to reverse its stance in favor of reform—but to no avail.
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