by Annette Wood
For her animal welfare audit, Temple came up with five key measurements that inspectors need to take to ensure cows receive humane treatment at a meatpacking plant:
1. Percentage of animals stunned or killed correctly on the first attempt has to be at least 95 percent of animals.
2. Percentage of animals that remain unconscious after stunning must be 100 percent.
3. Animals that vocalize, squeal, bellow, or moo during handling and stunning should be no more than three cattle out of one hundred. Handling includes walking through alleys and being held in the restraining device for stunning.
4. Animals that fall down, which terrifies them, should be no more than one out of one hundred.
5. Electric prod usage should be no more than 25 percent.
Consideration of employees is also important. Employees should not be constantly involved in killing, bleeding, or driving animals, so they need to be rotated. No one should constantly breathe the tainted air or be around so much death. “Complete automation of the actual killing procedure is good for employee well-being,” Temple says. “Automation of killing is especially important in high-speed plants with rates of over 150 cattle per hour.”9
Turnover in slaughter plant employees is understandably high, but it’s “200 percent lower than it was in the 1980s,” according to Temple. “It is essential not to overwork animal handlers or put them in a situation that is understaffed. Tired people will abuse animals. Internal unpublished data from large pig and poultry companies have shown that death and injuries doubled after crews had worked more than six hours.”10 Temple urges governments, non-government organizations (NGOs), animal activist groups, and livestock companies to support and educate fieldworkers and researchers. These people are essential to make real change, and then improvements take place.11
Ideally, management walks through the stunning area, constantly observing. “Well-designed facilities provide the tools that make humane handling possible. They are useless unless supervision and management go with them,” said Temple.
Management attitude is the most important variable. The manager who enforces good animal handling is usually most effective if he is at the plant manager level.
“Grandin’s battles in the slaughter industry have nearly all been waged with higher management, not with workers or floor managers, simply because they’re office bound, their thinking determined more by the paper that surrounds them than by living animals and working plant,” Verlyn Klinkenborg reported.12
For much of her career, Temple has been involved with pigs, probably the smartest animals among livestock. Winston Churchill said, “I like pigs. Dogs look up to us. Cats look down on us. Pigs treat us like equals.”
Along with being highly intelligent, pigs are very social. They enjoy each other’s company, but pigs also search for positive and close interaction with humans.
Mark Deesing, the only employee of Grandin Corporation, lives on a thirty-acre farm. He raises pigs, which he names. When I was there, he had Dick Cheney and George Bush.
“Mark loves his pigs,” Conny Flörcke, Temple’s graduate assistant, told me. When they’re ready to slaughter, he puts both pigs in the stun box and gives them treats, so they’ll be comfortable when it’s time. He puts them in for a short time each day for several weeks before he actually kills them.
He stopped letting one boar watch while he slaughtered the other when he saw the watching pig shudder. “Now I put a blanket over the stun box so he can’t see me as I butcher the other one,” said Mark.
Pigs are obsessed with straw. “No one has found anything that can compete with straw for a pig’s interest and attention,” Temple noted.13 “Each little flake of straw is different and fascinating, and the pigs are driven to explore and chew their straw until it’s all gone. Both pigs and children with autism are obsessed with the things they like to manipulate.”14 Temple recalled how as a child she endlessly ran grains of sand through her fingers, examining each one.
Sows produce a large litter for such a large animal. I remember seeing sows at the state fair nursing sixteen or more piglets.
A pig’s pregnancy lasts three months, three weeks, and three days. When a sow lives in the wild, she leaves the group before farrowing and finds a suitable place to build a nest.
“At first when sows build a nest for their babies, it’s a sloppy mess. Later it gets better,” said Mark Deesing. “Maternal behavior starts with nest-building to provide the piglets with shelter, comfort, and to keep them warm, especially important for small piglets.”15 Sows have to learn to build nests.
Today sows are generally kept on cement. “A gestation stall is where a sow is kept confined during her entire pregnancy. The sow can lie down and stand up, but she cannot turn around,” Temple explains.16 Since pigs like to explore, these animals live in an environment that is extremely boring.
However, thanks to animal rights activists, things are changing. “Cargill Pork, based in Wichita, said … that its sow operations will use only group housing…. Group housing allows the sows to walk around and interact. Animal rights groups have convinced the public to demand that retailers and restaurant chains buy pork produced by farms that don’t use gestation crates,” the Wichita Eagle reported.17
The relationship between pigs and stockpersons is important in the plants, too. “The main aversive properties of humans for pigs include hitting, slapping, and kicking by the stockperson while rewarding acts include patting, stroking, and a hand of the stockperson resting on the back of the animal.”18
“Human-animal interactions may markedly affect the behavior, productivity, and welfare of pigs. It’s possible that the stockperson may be the most influential factor affecting pig-handling and animal welfare,” Temple wrote.19 Choosing stock people who relate well to animals and care about them is vital to plant operations.
Animals, processing industries, and plant employees have all benefitted from Temple’s insights.
CHAPTER 16
MORE ABOUT ANIMAL WELFARE
My paternal grandmother, a chubby lady, always wore a print dress covered with an apron. Every morning and evening she walked to the henhouse to feed the chickens. She carried a pan with grain in it, which she generously distributed. Clucking and pecking chickens gathered around her.
During the day the chickens roamed freely, eating grasshoppers and various other bugs. They defecated wherever they wanted, so you had to be careful when stepping in the barnyard. If you weren’t, you might be sorry.
At night Grandma shooed the hens into the chicken house and locked the door. A rooster always crowed early in the morning, signaling time to get up. The next day the routine repeated.
My immediate family also had chickens. When I was four, I watched my mother lay the head of a chicken on a tree stump and chop the head off with an ax. Blood spattered everywhere. The chicken flapped around, but Mama assured me it was dead. After all, the head was off. Then she dipped the chicken into boiling water and plucked off the feathers. The foul-smelling next step involved holding the chicken over the flame on a gas cooking stove to singe the remaining pin feathers.
When I was in third grade, I gathered eggs in the henhouse and sold them to buy my first bicycle. I used a long stick to pry a cantankerous hen off her egg, so I could grab it.
In the early 1960s, nearby neighbors farmed chickens commercially. I first glimpsed factory farming on their property. They had several huge chicken houses with caged chickens inside. The caged chickens had no freedom to wander. They were so crowded they stumbled over each other. They performed well in their job, laying eggs.
Temple Grandin doesn’t have the fuzzy feelings for chickens that she has for cows, but she’s concerned about the welfare of all animals. She said, “A factory farm is a huge outdoor facility or warehouse where the animals are treated like machines instead of thinking, feeling creatures.”1
Factory farms have appeared because farming is too expensive for small farmers today. Daddy was concerned
about giant corporate entities taking over the small farmers. “There’s no way to compete,” he said. “They’re going to run the small farmer out of business.” Small farms are rapidly disappearing. Most of our food animals are raised on factory farms. In the United States alone, there are ten billion food animals. Most of them are birds.
The chief aim of intensive egg producers is to make the chicken into a superefficient machine for laying more and more eggs in a given time. Intensive egg producers show a blatant disregard for the well-being of their chickens. Laying hens are spent in two years.
Temple wrote, “Laying hens probably have the worst welfare of any farm animal. Birds aren’t covered by any federal humane slaughter laws. On most factory farms, hens are confined to a cage with other birds that is so cramped, each bird has less space than a sheet of paper.”2
“Some of the farms just throw the hens when they are old ladies into dumpsters live. Others get rid of spent hens by sucking them up in a vacuum truck that is used to clean sewers,” Temple reports.3
“Chickens are cheap, cages are expensive, so one crowds as many chickens into each cage as physically possible. Concentration of chickens requires huge amounts of antibiotics and other drugs to prevent wildfire spread of disease in overcrowded conditions,” reports Bernard Rollin, an author writing about animal welfare.4
Drugs are used automatically in small quantities in the compounded chicken food to allow uninhibited growth, and in larger quantities to suppress disease when it appears. Synthetic hormones are used for fattening. As a result, food safety often suffers.
This raises a question: Do we know enough about these potent drugs to risk the hazard that some residue, however slight, will remain in the flesh or egg we then consume? We’ve heard a lot from medical authorities about only using antibiotics when necessary so they’ll work when we really need them, but some agricultural authorities are encouraging ever wider use.
“We need to be selective about the drugs we use in animals and when we use them,” said William Flynn of FDA’s Center of Veterinary Medicine. “Antimicrobial resistance may not be completely preventable, but we need to do what we can to eliminate them.”
* * *
For thousands of years, humans have used selective breeding to improve production of crops and livestock. This practice has rapidly increased recently. “The productivity of domestic livestock and poultry has almost tripled in the last hundred years through the use of both improved feeding methods and genetic selection,” Temple Grandin and Mark Deesing report.5 This benefits the owners, but the animals suffer.
“Breeders choose the most productive animals, the fastest-growing, the heaviest, the best egg layers and selectively breed just these animals. Bad things always happen when an animal is overselected for any single trait,” Temple writes.6
“Whereas in traditional agriculture a milk cow could remain productive for ten and even fifteen years, today’s milk cow lasts slightly longer than two lactations, a result of metabolic burnout and the quest for ever increasingly productive animals hastened by the hormone bovine estrogen (BST),” Bernard Rollin reports.7 The cow lives in a confined animal feeding operation (CAFO) and leads a miserable life: crowded conditions, surrounded by manure, with nothing to do all day.
“In 1923 it took 16 weeks to produce a broiler chicken. In 1993 only 6.5 weeks were required,” Temple and Mark Deesing reported.8 “If you grew as fast as a chicken, you’d weigh 349 pounds at age two,” they continue.9
Temple Grandin and Mark Deesing are both concerned that “the most serious animal welfare problems in the future may be caused by overselection for production traits such as rapid growth, leanness, and high milk yield.”10
Another concern is the loss of genetic diversity. “Bill Muir, a genetics specialist at Purdue University, found that commercial lines of poultry have lost 90 percent of their genetic diversity compared to noncommercial poultry,” Bernard Rollin reports.11 This is alarming because genetically similar animals are more susceptible to disease. There are still farms where owners are concerned with the welfare of its animals. Good Shepherd Turkey Ranch, owned by Frank Reese, is dedicated to marketing Heritage Turkeys whose inherited traits are acceptable and diverse.
Reese defines a Heritage Turkey three ways. First, the turkey must be the result of naturally mating pairs of both grandparents and parents. Second, the Heritage Turkey must be able to reproduce for five to seven years for hens, and three to five years for toms. They also live outside. Although the turkeys are free to roam outside during the day, they’re brought inside at night because of predators. Third, they reach a marketable weight in about twenty-eight weeks, comparable to growth rates of the twentieth century. The varieties raised by Good Shepherd include Standard Bronze, Bourbon Red Narragansett, Black Turkey, and White Holland.
Reese lives in Lindsborg, Kansas, though due to Kansas weather concerns, his turkeys are raised in several places. Turkeys are omnivores, so tall grass pastures provide a rich environment for the birds’ food searches. Frank rotates the pastures to maintain healthy soil and grass. Outdoor and indoor nest boxes are provided for hens.
Fortunately, Reese is only one of a number of small breeders in the United States today. Small breeders are valuable for at least two reasons: First, “Keeping the classic breeds alive is the only way to preserve genetic diversity and to save animals that have valuable genetic traits breeders may want to breed back into commercial lines in the future,” Temple writes, and second,12 “The meat from some of the old breeds is tenderer and better quality than from animals bred for rapid growth and the chickens are hardier too.”13
She concludes: “Many of the older breeds of poultry are being raised by local farmers and sold in farmer’s markets or to gourmet restaurants. If a serious disease kills commercial broilers or layers, the entire world will be thanking the small producers.”14
* * *
People concerned with the welfare of animals realize they need ways to motivate farmers and others to treat the animals better. One effective approach to persuade workers to treat animals better is by using economic incentives. “Reward animal handlers with extra pay for low levels of bruises, injuries, and deaths. In the U.S. and British poultry industries, broken wings were reduced from 5 percent to 1 percent by paying a bonus to chicken loaders when there were 1 percent or less broken wings, ” Improving Animal Welfare reports.15
Financial incentives work around the world with all kinds of animals. “Parennas de Costa in Brazil reported that when supermarkets audited bruises and made deductions from transporters’ pay, bruising was reduced from 20 percent to 1 percent of cattle,” Improving Animal Welfare continues.16 Carman Gallo in Chile also acknowledges that bruises were fewer when transporters received fines for injury to animals.
This financial incentive involves creative thinking. “One major chicken company has an interesting contract with the family farms that raise their chickens. The farms can’t turn their chickens over to hired help. The reason for this is that the primary caretaker will get the extra money for taking good care of the chickens,” one report states.17 This profit benefits both the farmer and the chickens.
Another method to improve the conditions for animals involves consumer demands. “One huge positive force for improving animal welfare is that consumers are demanding that animals be treated better. Corporations both large and small can be motivated to improve practices when consumers demand it,” reports Temple.18
Taking upper management on trips to see farms and slaughter plants can inspire improvement as well. “One executive became highly motivated to improve conditions after he saw an emaciated, sick old dairy cow going into his hamburger,” Temple wrote.19
Handling practices need to be constantly measured to prevent them from increasingly deteriorating. Temple has given many seminars on low-stress handling and quiet movement of pigs and cattle. But sometimes when she returned to a farm a year later “many employees had reverted back to their old ways,” she sai
d.20 As in many cases, the manager hadn’t even noticed.
Sometimes she sends Mark Deesing to visit pork slaughterhouses. He visited one where they were slaughtering 12,000 animals a day. The numbers were daunting and the handling was terrible. It was difficult for Mark to keep his cool.
“Temple is always politically correct,” he said. “She can close off emotional circuits in her brain. I can’t. She promised to keep me out of nasty slaughterhouses as much as possible.”21
Temple suggests using webcams to see what people are doing in plants and on farms when no one’s looking. “Transparency has a powerful psychological effect because people and animals behave differently when they know someone is watching,” she says.22 Evidence supports this.
As the population of the world increases, more food will be needed to feed all the people. And this means faster and more production of poultry and meat will be needed. Brazil is already gearing up.
“At Granja Mantiqueira in Brazil eight million hens lay fifty-four million eggs a day. Conveyor belts whisk the eggs to a packaging facility. Demand for meat has tripled in the developing world in four decades, while egg consumption has increased sevenfold, driving a huge expansion of large-scale animal operations,” National Geographic reports.23 “Each month some 4.5 million chickens are killed, plucked, cut, trimmed and packaged at this plant near Sidrolândia, Brazil. Their parts will travel the globe.”
Temple remains concerned about the welfare of animals, particularly as the need for more animals for food increases. In an excerpt from the Glass Wall Project, a video tour entitled Turkey Farm and Processing Plant with Temple Grandin, dated October 5, 2013, highlights the areas where she sees improvement.
Temple appears before us wearing a bouffant cap and gown. She explains that it’s not practical to take people on a real tour of the farm and processing plant because of biosecurity issues. Biosecurity means “persistent threats to animal and public health from foreign animal diseases and emerging foodborne pathogens have elevated the importance of implementing sound biosecurity measures during livestock production,” according to Temple.24 “I had to be away from all birds for a week and then wear these clothes to keep the germs off,” she says.
