av98m is right. I think we should be
aware...
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Food for thought: The ethics of eating
meat
The Straits Times
June 17, 2006
By Peter Singer
GLOBAL meat consumption is predicted to double by 2020. Yet in
Europe and North America, there is growing concern about the ethics
of the way meat and eggs are produced. The consumption of veal has
fallen sharply since it became widely known that to produce
so-called 'white' - actually pale pink - veal, newborn calves are
separated from their mothers, deliberately made anaemic, denied
roughage and kept in stalls so narrow they cannot walk or turn
around.
In Europe, mad cow disease shocked many people, not only because it
shattered beef's image as a safe and healthy food, but also because
they learnt that the disease was caused by feeding cattle the
brains and nerve tissue of sheep. People who naively believed that
cows ate grass discovered that beef cattle in feed lots may be fed
anything from corn to fish meal, chicken litter - complete with
chicken droppings - and slaughterhouse waste.
Concern about how we treat farm animals is far from limited to the
small percentage of people who are vegetarians or even vegans -
eating no animal products at all. Despite strong ethical arguments
for vegetarianism, it is not yet a mainstream position. More common
is the view that we are justified in eating meat, as long as the
animals have a decent life before they are killed.
The problem, as Jim Mason and I describe in our book, The Way We
Eat, is that industrial agriculture denies animals even a minimally
decent life. Tens of billions of chickens produced today never go
outdoors. They are bred to have voracious appetites and gain weight
fast, then reared in sheds that can hold more than 20,000 birds.
The level of ammonia in the air from their accumulated droppings
stings the eye and hurts the lungs. Slaughtered at only 45 days
old, their immature bones can hardly bear the weight of their
bodies. Some collapse and soon die, their fate irrelevant to the
economics of the enterprise as a whole.
Conditions are even worse for laying hens crammed into wire cages
so small that even if there were just one per cage, she would be
unable to stretch her wings. But there are usually at least four
hens per cage, and often more.
In such crowded conditions, the more dominant, aggressive birds are
likely to peck to death the weaker hens in the cage. To prevent
this, producers sear off all birds' beaks with a hot blade. A hen's
beak is full of nerve tissue - it is, after all, her principal
means of relating to her environment - but no anesthetic or
analgesic is used to relieve the pain.
Pigs may be the most intelligent and sensitive of the animals we
commonly eat.
When foraging in a rural village, they can exercise that
intelligence and explore their varied environment. Before they give
birth, sows use straw or leaves and twigs to build a comfortable
and safe nest in which to nurse their litter.
But in today's factory farms, pregnant sows are kept in crates so
narrow they cannot turn around or even walk more than a step
forward or backward. They lie on bare concrete. The piglets are
taken from the sow as soon as possible, so she can be made pregnant
again, but they never leave the shed until they are taken to
slaughter.
Defenders of these production methods argue that they are a
regrettable but necessary response to a growing population's demand
for food.
On the contrary, when we confine animals in factory farms, we have
to grow food for them. They burn up most of that food's energy just
to breathe and keep their bodies warm, so we end up with a small
fraction - usually no more than one-third and sometimes as little
as one-10th - of the food value we feed them. By contrast, cows
grazing on pasture eat food we cannot digest, which means they add
to the amount of food available to us.
It is tragic that countries like China and India, as they become
more prosperous, are copying Western methods and putting animals in
huge industrial farms to supply more meat and eggs. If this
continues, the result will be animal suffering on an even greater
scale, as well as more environmental damage and a rise in heart
disease and cancers of the digestive system. It will also be
grossly inefficient.
As consumers, we have the power - and moral obligation - to refuse
to support farming methods that are cruel to animals and bad for
us.
The writer is professor of
bioethics at Princeton University.
