The repugnant truth

In April of 1996, Oprah Winfrey declared that she would never have another hamburger. Her decision was sparked by Howard Lyman, a cattle rancher who described in detail some of the disgusting — but routine — practices of the cattle industry. Like many of us, Winfrey had numerous unrealized opportunities to learn about the conditions on factory farms but had allowed a combination of denial and apathy to prevent her from obtaining this disturbing knowledge.

The conditions on factory farms are pertinent to our lives because the farm conditions make the difference between being able to continue eating meat in good conscience and being compelled to change our ways. For most people, the default assumption is that eating meat is morally acceptable: If Mommy and Daddy and everyone else are doing it, it can't be wrong. Yet most of us have given some thought to the morality of diet: Applying the Golden Rule, we imagine ourselves in the 'shoes' of the animals we have eaten. Would we want to be eaten? Clearly not. Can our interests in enjoying the taste of flesh outweigh the interests of the animals to keep that flesh to themselves? Most people would also reject this possibility.

But the sophisticated flesh-eating apologist will point out that considering only the harms to livestock is unfair because if people did not eat livestock, there would not be any. Thus, he or she wants to compare the balance of drawbacks and benefits to livestock against the pleasure we gain from eating them. On this level, one could plausibly defend flesh-eating so long as the 'happy lives' of the cows could outweigh their gruesome slaughterhouse deaths. (Such a comparison ignores the fact that fewer cows would eat less corn, leaving more land for natural habitat and wild animals; cropland for feeding livestock comprises the majority of farmland on this continent.) Since everyone eats meat, livestock can't be treated all that badly, can it?

Anyone who has ever seen the inside of a factory farm will dismiss as farcical any claim of 'happy' industrial livestock. Anyone who has ever glanced over the pages of Peter Singer's "Animal Liberation" will similarly reject this hopeful delusion. Once a person with a serious concern for the suffering of animals is aware of the horrific conditions in factory farms, he or she is generally unable to remain complicit with this institutional torture of billions of animals. This awareness need not force those compassionate souls to forego meat-eating altogether: Free-range and organic meat is free of the most egregious affronts to animals.

Recent public spectacles are providing an inside view of some of these distasteful practices, bringing the beastly conditions of industrial agriculture into the public focus. The side effect of this media attention is that the public has been confronted with the facts into which we implicitly agreed not to delve.

The sheer number and concentration of pigs in industrial farms — and the insult they pose to the greater environment — was revealed to the public by the 1999 flooding of the hog-manure lagoons in North Carolina, which spilled waste all over the countryside, poisoning land, lakes and rivers. The revolting practice of grinding up leftover pieces of cows to feed them to their assembly-line compatriots was revealed by the rising controversy concerning mad cow disease. These two unsavory aspects of industrial agriculture are small potatoes considering the repulsive practices commonplace in today's conventional farms.

Most recently, the moral dimension of the attitude of farming has been colored by globally televised images of hundreds of cattle being led to massive pyres of burning corpses. The graphic nature of this controversy has led people to question the justification for slaughtering countless thousands of animals for the sake of economic advantage: Foot-and-mouth disease reduces production but neither kills animals nor poses a health risk to people. But if we cannot accept this mass slaughter of sentient beings for the sake of profit margins, then how can we condone so many of the other practices of these industries, where the welfare of the animals is routinely sacrificed for the sake of mere economic efficiency?

Take, for example, daily injections of recombinant bovine growth hormone, which have been accepted by conventional dairy farmers all across the United States for the resulting 20 percent increase in milk production. These injections naturally come at some cost to the cows, for whom the injections greatly increase risk of mastitis — a painful inflammation of the udder. This kind of efficiency technique is the very kind that fuels another controversy about factory farms: the regular application of antibiotics as a prophylactic and a growth-promoter. The advantage to using antibiotics in this fashion largely results from the susceptibility to disease caused by dense crowding and otherwise stressful conditions. The disadvantage of the practice — and the source of the controversy — is the threat to human health: the addition of antibiotics into animal feed has been shown to contribute to the rise of antibiotic-resistant bacteria in people.

Each of these disturbing issues is merely a symptom of a deeper problem. The deep problem is the industrial attitude that treats sentient beings as mere machines. Having seen the symptoms, how far are we willing to go to address the cause? Now that the public spectacles have brought our attention to the issue, can the new knowledge breach our wall of denial and cultivate empathy for fellow sentient beings? Will it motivate you to spend a little extra money to ensure that the meat and dairy you eat comes from organic animals not subjected to the deepest kinds of economic tyranny? Can it motivate you even further to embrace the notion that eating the flesh of other sentient beings is not the kind of activity whose enjoyment we should cherish? Recognise that taking either step makes you a social critic — a rebel of sorts — who refuses to accept that the widespread societal acceptance of the brutal treatment of animals gives any level of defensibility to such behavior. (Kai M.A. Chan is an ecology and evolutionary biology graduate student from Toronto, Ontario. He can be reached at kaichan@princeton.edu)The repugnant truth.