Less than 18 months after one of their own chicken farmers spoke out on video against industry practices, Purdue — one of the largest suppliers of chicken meat in the United States with an estimated* 14,300,000 chickens —has announced concrete steps it’s taking to improve the lives of the chickens they raise. It’s a big deal, and it wasn’t just the damning video that prompted their actions; it was ever-increasing public demand that farmed animals be treated better.

It is no longer any secret that the vast majority (about 98%) of farmed animals of every species are raised and housed in horrific conditions. With anywhere between tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of animals living in intensive confinement in massive, windowless sheds, each animal, regardless of species, is born to a life of misery. They are thinking, feeling beings. Their sentience is indisputable. Mutilated in infancy, denied the ability to express every basic, natural behaviour, their lives are filled with pain and fear and little else. They have no space to move around. They are repeatedly forcibly impregnated, only to have their children taken from them. They cannot live in family units as they would naturally do. They cannot choose with whom they live or when they eat. Their food is loaded with antibiotics simply so they may survive the horrendous conditions in which they live. They live with one another’s illnesses, feces, and urine, every single day. They go blind and develop serious respiratory problems. (Those cows you see on pasture when you’re driving outside the city? Those are the other 2%.)

But change is, slowly, coming.  Most people agree that animals, even the ones “destined” for our plates, should not be made to suffer. Most people want “happy meat.”

To that end, some in the industry are beginning to respond. More and more restaurant chains are committing to cage-free eggs. Smithfield, one of the largest “pork” suppliers in the U.S., is phasing out gestation crates for pigs by 2022 (though they previously said 2017). On a political level, several U.S. states have banned the use of gestation crates: Arizona in 2012, California in 2015, Colorado in 2018, Florida in 2008, Maine in 2011, Oregon in 2013, with Michigan, Rhode Island, and Ohio (who is including battery cages and veal crates in the ban) all in progress. Canada made it illegal for newly built or renovated facilities to include gestation crates after July 1, 2014; established operations must convert to open-housing systems by July of 2024.

 

So yes, the tide is turning.

But treating the animals marginally, or even somewhat, better than they were before should not be seen as an excuse by omnivores to go about gustatory business as usual. The so-called “humane myth” is just that — a myth.  Everyone knows about gestation crates, but no one’s talking (yet) about the farrowing crates: a very similar confining device where sows lie for weeks on cement, with bars separating them from their offspring so they don’t roll over on them (not something they’re really all that prone to doing, by the way).  There’s nothing humane about picking up the runt of the litter, knowing she’ll take too long to reach market weight, and slamming her head into the floor under the guise of “euthanasia,” only to leave her lying twitching and in agony. (One of the industry terms for this, incidentally, is PACing — Pounding Against Concrete.) There’s nothing humane about cramming chickens in a shed where the air is so thick with ammonia from their urine that your eyes burn and you can’t breathe without a mask — an option the birds don’t have. There’s nothing humane about breeding birds to be so prolific in their egg-laying that they become too weak to push an egg out and successive eggs build up and rot inside them. There’s nothing humane about a “farmer” restraining a cow and ramming his arm up her vagina to the elbow to impregnate her (the restraining device, incidentally, is called a “rape rack” by the industry), and then removing her baby from her almost immediately after birth. There’s nothing humane about cutting off an animal’s tail and testicles without anesthetic or pain relief. There’s nothing humane about branding. There’s nothing humane about cutting off a bird’s toes so that when they fight (a result of intensive confinement), they don’t scratch up the “meat.” There’s nothing humane about the way hatcheries — from whence egg-laying hens come — throw the male chicks in garbage bags to suffocate amongst one another, or into a macerator to be ground alive (there’s the “chicken meal” you see on ingredient lists).

In the vast majority of U.S. states, the animal cruelty laws specifically exempt any practice deemed to be common on farms, making everything I’ve listed above, and more, perfectly legal. In Canada, the Canadian Food Inspection Agency (you’ll notice this comes under “food inspection,” not an anti-cruelty act) has a Code of Recommended Practice. If you read it, and it’s pretty easy to find online, it sounds good, all things considered. No mutilations are to be performed without anaesthetic, no downed animal is to be treated with anything but kindness, no undue loud noises are to be made which might frighten an animal, you can’t hasten one along the chute towards slaughter with an electric prod in the eye or the anus, and no animal is to be slaughtered while conscious. It’s a very comprehensive document. But it’s not law, it’s recommended practice, and it’s massively unenforceable — as evidenced by every single undercover investigation ever conducted in Canada.

 

I am really pleased to see the plight of farmed animals becoming more and more part of the public consciousness. We simply must treat farmed animals much better than we do, because they are individuals with personalities and preferences. While I personally wish we didn’t raise them for food at all, I still have to applaud incremental improvements in their welfare even while the tiny increments frustrate me no end…because those increments still matter to the animals.

I do not want people to interpret these small improvements in the lives of farmed animals as a pass to continue eating them. If you eat meat or eggs or dairy, do not let these little changes lull you into thinking the animals had a nice life. They still didn’t, believe me. Their lives will be only marginally better than they were before. The abuses I’ve written of here and in the past still continue every day. Sheep are punched in the face. Pigs are beaten with pipes. Chickens are scalded alive. Downed cows are still poked in the eyes and rectum with electric prods.  Betterments in animal welfare are not a free pass to participate in the system. Every time you pay money for meat, eggs or dairy, you are telling someone somewhere, “Do it again.”

I do believe people care how animals are treated. But we also don’t like to change, and we have cultural and emotional attachments to certain foods that seem to transcend our sense of compassion. We are positively expert when it comes to cognitive dissonance, skilled at emotionally distancing ourselves from a piece of knowledge.

Here’s a little thought to take with you and remember when you read about improvements to farmed-animal welfare. It’s a quote from Andrea Kladar, a Canadian animal advocate:

“To examine whether something is humane, first determine if you would want it done to you.”

 

*Estimated by me, based on: Purdue has 2200 farmers contracted. Each farm has approximately 4000 to 10,000 chickens. I split the difference at 6500 chickens x 2200 farms.