Eating Animals

by Jonathan Safran Foer

  Imagine it. Imagine if, instead of the massive waste-treatment infrastructure that we take for granted in modern cities, every man, woman, and child in every city and town in all of California and all of Texas crapped and pissed in a huge open-air pit for a day. Now imagine that they don’t do this for just a day, but all year round, in perpetuity. To comprehend the effects of releasing this amount of shit into the environment, we need to know something of what’s in it. In his tremendous Rolling Stone article on Smithfield, “Boss Hog,” Jeff Tietz compiled a useful list of shit typically found in the shit of factory-farmed hogs: “ammonia, methane, hydrogen sulfide, carbon monoxide, cyanide, phosphorus, nitrates and heavy metals. In addition, the waste nurses more than 100 microbial pathogens that can make humans sick, including salmonella, cryptosporidium, streptococci and girardia” (thus children raised on the grounds of a typical hog factory farm have asthma rates exceeding 50 percent and children raised near factory farms are twice as likely to develop asthma). And not all of the shit is shit, exactly — it’s whatever will fit through the slatted floors of the factory farm buildings. This includes but is not limited to: stillborn piglets, afterbirths, dead piglets, vomit, blood, urine, antibiotic syringes, broken bottles of insecticide, hair, pus, even body parts.

  The impression the pig industry wishes to give is that fields can absorb the toxins in the hog feces, but we know this isn’t true. Runoff creeps into waterways, and poisonous gases like ammonia and hydrogen sulfide evaporate into the air. When the football field–sized cesspools are approaching overflowing, Smithfield, like others in the industry, spray the liquefied manure onto fields. Or sometimes they simply spray it straight up into the air, a geyser of shit wafting fine fecal mists that create swirling gases capable of causing severe neurological damage. Communities living near these factory farms complain about problems with persistent nosebleeds, earaches, chronic diarrhea, and burning lungs. Even when citizens have managed to pass laws that would restrict these practices, the industry’s immense influence in government means the regulations are often nullified or go unenforced.

  Smithfield’s earnings look impressive — the company had sales of $12 billion in 2007 — until one realizes the scale of the costs they externalize: the pollution from the shit, of course, but also the illnesses caused by that pollution and the associated degradation of property values (to name only the most obvious externalizations). Without passing these and other burdens on to the public, Smithfield would not be able to produce the cheap meat it does without going bankrupt. As with all factory farms, the illusion of Smithfield’s profitability and “efficiency” is maintained by the immense sweep of its plunder.

  To take a step back: shit itself isn’t bad. Shit has long been the farmer’s friend, fertilizer for his fields, from which he grows food for his animals, whose meat goes to people and whose shit goes back to the fields. Shit became a problem only when Americans decided we wanted to eat more meat than any other culture in history and pay historically little for it. To achieve that dream, we abandoned Paul Willis’s dream farm and signed on with Smithfield, allowing — causing — husbandry to leave the hands of farmers and become determined by corporations that positively strove (and strive) to pass their costs on to the public. With consumers oblivious or forgetful (or, worse, supportive), corporations like Smithfield concentrated animals in absurd densities. In that context, a farmer can’t grow nearly enough feed on his own land and must import it. What’s more, there’s too much shit for the crops to absorb — not a little too much, and not a lot too much, but a shitload too much. At one point, three factory farms in North Carolina were producing more nitrogen (an important ingredient in plant fertilizers) than all the crops in the entire state could absorb.

  So back to the original question: What happens to this massive amount of massively dangerous shit?

  If all goes according to plan, the liquefied waste is pumped into massive “lagoons” adjacent to the hog sheds. These toxic lagoons can cover as much as 120,000 square feet — as much surface area as the largest casinos in Las Vegas — and be as deep as 30 feet. The creation of these lake-sized latrines is considered normal and is perfectly legal despite their consistent failure to actually contain the waste. A hundred or more of these immense cesspools might loom in the vicinity of a single slaughterhouse (factory hog farms tend to cluster around slaughterhouses). If you were to fall into one, you would die. (Just as you would die of asphyxiation, within minutes, if the power went out while you were in one of the hog sheds.) Tietz tells a haunting story about one such lagoon:

  A worker in Michigan, repairing one of the lagoons, was overcome by the smell and fell in. His 15-year-old nephew dived in to save him but was overcome, the worker’s cousin went in to save the teenager but was overcome, the worker’s older brother dived in to save them but was overcome, and then the worker’s father dived in. They all died in pig shit.

  For corporations like Smithfield, it is a cost-benefit analysis: paying fines for polluting is cheaper than giving up the entire factory farm system, which is what it would take to finally end the devastation.

  In the rare cases when the law begins to restrain corporations like Smithfield, they often find ways around regulations. The year before Smithfield built the world’s largest slaughter-and-processing plant in Bladen County, the North Carolina state legislature actually revoked the power of counties to regulate hog factory farms. Convenient for Smithfield. Perhaps not coincidentally, the former state senator who cosponsored this well-timed deregulation of hog factories, Wendell Murphy, now sits on Smithfield’s board and himself was formerly chairman of the board and chief executive officer of Murphy Family Farms, a factory hog operation that Smithfield bought in 2000.

  A few years after this deregulation in 1995, Smithfield spilled more than twenty million gallons of lagoon waste into the New River in North Carolina. The spill remains the largest environmental disaster of its kind and is twice as big as the iconic Exxon Valdez spill six years earlier. The spill released enough liquid manure to fill 250 Olympic-sized swimming pools. In 1997, as reported by the Sierra Club in their damning “RapSheet on Animal Factories,” Smithfield was penalized for a mind-blowing seven thousand violations of the Clean Water Act — that’s about twenty violations a day. The US government accused the company of dumping illegal levels of waste into the Pagan River, a tributary of the Chesapeake Bay, and then falsifying and destroying records to cover up its activities. One violation might be an accident. Even ten violations might. Seven thousand violations is a plan. Smithfield was fined $12.6 million, which at first sounds like a victory against the factory farm. At the time, $12.6 million was the largest civil-penalty pollution fine in US history, but this is a pathetically small amount to a company that now grosses $12.6 million every ten hours. Smithfield’s former CEO Joseph Luter III received $12.6 million in stock options in 2001.

  How has the eating public responded? In general, we make a bit of noise when pollution reaches near-biblical proportions, then Smithfield (or whatever corporation) responds with an “oops,” and, accepting their apology, we go on eating our factory-farmed animals. Smithfield not only survived the legal action, but thrived. At the time of the Pagan River spill, Smithfield was the seventh-largest pork producer in the United States; two years later it was the biggest, and its increasing domination of the industry has not abated. Today, Smithfield is so large that it slaughters one of every four pigs sold commercially in the nation. Our present way of eating — the dollars we daily funnel to the likes of Smithfield — rewards the very worst conceivable practices.

  Conservative estimates by the EPA indicate that chicken, hog, and cattle excrement has already polluted 35,000 miles of rivers in twenty-two states (for reference, the circumference of the earth is roughly 25,000 miles). In only three years, two hundred fish kills — incidents where the entire fish population in a given area is killed at once — have resulted from factory farms’ failures to keep their shit out of waterways. In these documented
kills alone, thirteen million fish were literally poisoned by shit — if set head to tail fin, these victims would stretch the length of the entire Pacific coast from Seattle to the Mexican border.

  People who live near factory farms are rarely wealthy and are treated by the industry as dispensable. The fecal mists they are forced to breathe usually do not kill humans, but sore throats, headaches, coughing, runny noses, diarrhea, and even psychological illness, including abnormally high levels of tension, depression, anger, and fatigue, are common. According to a report by the California state senate, “Studies have shown that [animal waste] lagoons emit toxic airborne chemicals that can cause inflammatory, immune, irritation and neurochemical problems in humans.”

  There are even some good reasons to suspect a link between living near hog factory farms and contracting the so-called flesh-eating bacteria known formally as MRSA (methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus). MRSA can cause “lesions as big as saucers, fiery red and agonizing to touch,” and by 2005 was killing more Americans annually (18,000) than AIDS. New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof, who himself grew up on a farm, reports that an Indiana doctor was ready to go public with suspicions of this link when the doctor suddenly died of what may well have been complications related to MRSA. The MRSA–hog factory farm link is by no means proven, but, as Kristof points out, “the larger question is whether we as a nation have moved to a model of agriculture that produces cheap bacon but risks the health of all of us. And the evidence, while far from conclusive, is growing that the answer is yes.”

  The health problems that locals experience acutely ripple through the rest of the nation more subtly. The American Public Health Association, the largest body of public-health professionals in the world, has been so alarmed by these trends that, citing a spectrum of diseases associated with animal waste and antibiotic use, it has urged a moratorium on factory farms. After having a panel of renowned experts conduct a two-year study, the Pew Commission recently went further, arguing for the complete phaseout of several common “intensive and inhumane practices,” citing benefits to both animal welfare and public health.

  But the power brokers that matter most — those who choose what to eat and what not to eat — have remained passive. So far, we have demanded no national moratorium and certainly no phaseout. We have made Smithfield and its counterparts so wealthy that they can invest hundreds of millions to expand their operations abroad. And expand they have. Once operating only in the United States, Smithfield has now spread across the globe to Belgium, China, France, Germany, Italy, Mexico, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Spain, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom. Joseph Luter III’s stock in Smithfield was recently valued at $138 million. His last name is pronounced “looter.”

  4.

  Our New Sadism

  ENVIRONMENTAL PROBLEMS CAN BE TRACKED by doctors and government agencies whose assigned task is to care for human beings, but how do we find out about the suffering of animals on factory farms, which doesn’t necessarily leave any traces?

  Undercover investigations by dedicated nonprofit organizations are one of the only meaningful windows the public has into the imperfect day-to-day running of factory farms and industrial slaughterhouses. At an industrial pig-breeding facility in North Carolina, videotape taken by undercover investigators showed some workers administering daily beatings, bludgeoning pregnant sows with a wrench, and ramming an iron pole a foot deep into mother pigs’ rectums and vaginas. These things have nothing to do with bettering the taste of the resultant meat or preparing the pigs for slaughter — they are merely perversion. In other videotaped instances at the farm, workers sawed off pigs’ legs and skinned them while they were still conscious. At another facility operated by one of the largest pork producers in the United States, some employees were videotaped throwing, beating, and kicking pigs; slamming them against concrete floors and bludgeoning them with metal gate rods and hammers. At another farm, a yearlong investigation found systematic abuse of tens of thousands of pigs. The investigation documented workers extinguishing cigarettes on the animals’ bodies, beating them with rakes and shovels, strangling them, and throwing them into manure pits to drown. Workers also stuck electric prods in pigs’ ears, mouths, vaginas, and anuses. The investigation concluded that managers condoned these abuses, but authorities have refused to prosecute. Lack of prosecution is the norm, not the exception. We are not in a period of “lax” enforcement — there simply never has been a time when companies could expect serious punitive action if they were caught abusing farmed animals.

  Whatever farmed-animal industry we turn to, similar problems arise. Tyson Foods is a major KFC supplier. An investigation at one large Tyson facility found that some workers regularly ripped off the heads of fully conscious birds (with explicit permission from their supervisor), urinated in the live-hang area (including on the conveyer belt carrying birds), and let shoddy automated slaughter equipment that cut birds’ bodies rather than their necks go unrepaired indefinitely. At a KFC “Supplier of the Year,” Pilgrim’s Pride, fully conscious chickens were kicked, stomped on, slammed into walls, had chewing tobacco spit in their eyes, literally had the shit squeezed out of them, and had their beaks ripped off. And Tyson and Pilgrim’s Pride not only supplied KFC; at the time of writing they were the two largest chicken processors in the nation, killing nearly five billion birds per year between them.

  Even without relying on undercover investigations and learning about the extreme (though not necessarily uncommon) abuse that results from workers’ taking out their frustrations on animals, we know that factory-farmed animals have miserable lives.

  Consider the life of a pregnant sow. Her incredible fertility is the source of her particular hell. While a cow will give birth to only a single calf at a time, the modern factory sow will birth, nurse, and raise an average of nearly nine piglets — a number that has been increased annually by industry breeders. She will invariably be kept pregnant as much as possible, which will prove to be the majority of her life. When she is approaching her due date, drugs to induce labor may be administered to make the timing more convenient for the farmer. After her piglets are weaned, a hormone injection makes the sow rapidly “cycle” so that she will be ready to be artificially inseminated again in only three weeks.

  Four out of five times a sow will spend the sixteen weeks of her pregnancy confined in a “gestation crate” so small that she will not be able to turn around. Her bone density will decrease because of the lack of movement. She will be given no bedding and often will develop quarter-sized, blackened, pus-filled sores from chafing in the crate. (In one undercover investigation in Nebraska, pregnant pigs with multiple open sores on their faces, heads, shoulders, backs, and legs — some as large as a fist — were videotaped. A worker at the farm commented, “They all have sores. . . . There’s hardly a pig in there who doesn’t have a sore.”)

  More serious and pervasive is the suffering caused by boredom and isolation and the thwarting of the sow’s powerful urge to prepare for her coming piglets. In nature, she would spend much of her time before giving birth foraging and ultimately would build a nest of grass, leaves, or straw. To avoid excessive weight gain and to further reduce feed costs, the crated sow will be feed restricted and often hungry. Pigs also have an inborn tendency to use separate areas for sleeping and defecating that is totally thwarted in confinement. The pregnant pigs, like most all pigs in industrial systems, must lie or step in their excrement to force it through the slatted floor. The industry defends such confinement by arguing that it helps control and manage animals better, but the system makes good welfare practices more difficult because lame and diseased animals are almost impossible to identify when no animals are allowed to move.

  The cruelty here is hard to deny — and the outrage hard to squelch — now that advocates have brought this reality into public discussion. Recently, three states — Florida, Arizona, and California — enacted the slow phasing-out of gestation crates through ballot initiatives. I
n Colorado, under threat of a campaign by the Humane Society, the industry itself agreed to draft and support legislation to outlaw the crates. This is an incredibly hopeful sign. A four-state ban leaves a lot of states where the practice continues to thrive, but it looks like the fight against the gestation crate is being won. This is a victory that matters.

  Increasingly, instead of being forced into gestation crates, sows live in small group pens. They can’t run in a field or even enjoy the sun like Paul Willis’s pigs do, but they have space to sleep and stretch. The sows don’t get sores all over their bodies. They don’t gnaw frantically at the bars of their crates. This change hardly redeems or reverses the factory system, but it meaningfully improves the lives of sows.

  Whether they are kept in gestation crates or small pens during pregnancy, when giving birth — what the industry calls “farrowing” — sows will almost invariably be confined in a crate just as constrictive as the gestation crate. One worker said it’s necessary to “beat the shit out of [the pregnant pigs] to get them inside the crates because they don’t want to go.” Another employee at a different farm described the routine use of rods to beat the sows bloody: “One guy smashed a sow’s nose in so bad that she ended up dying of starvation.”

  Those who defend pig factory farms argue that the farrowing crate is necessary because sows can sometimes accidentally crush their piglets. In the same way that the risk of a forest fire can be reduced by preemptively clearing the forest of all its trees, there is a cockeyed logic to this claim. The farrowing crate, like the gestation crate, confines the mother in a space so small she cannot turn around. Sometimes she will also be strapped to the floor. These practices do make it harder for mother pigs to crush their infants. What defenders of such practices don’t point out is that at farms like Willis’s, the problem doesn’t arise in the first place. Not surprisingly, when farmers select for “motherability” when breeding, and a mother pig’s sense of smell is not overpowered by the stench of her own liquefied feces beneath her, and her hearing is not impaired by the clanging of metal cages, and she is given space to investigate where her piglets are and exercise her legs so that she can lie down slowly, she finds it easy enough to avoid crushing her young.