Out of sight, out of mind: our attitude to factory farms
Why are we blind to the reality of intensive meat production?
TODAY, more than ever before, our pets are treated as a part of the family. We feed them specially developed diets, provide them with memory-foam beds and lavish them with expensive treats. The quality of life of these pampered creatures is far better than that of many human beings.
The animals we share our homes with have a very different experience to the ones we breed to consume. Their lives are mostly nasty, brutish and short. But we block our ears and eyes to the realities of factory farming because it’s easier that way.
We get to have our meat, and eat it too.
Conveniently, a sanitised, sterile-looking piece of chicken, in its sealed polystyrene tray on the supermarket shelf, bears no obvious relation to the bird it came from, or the miserable, stunted existence it may have had.
We chuck the tray in the trolley and move on to the canned foods aisle, with no upsetting thoughts about animal suffering to bother us.
If more people knew what was involved in industrial-scale farming, maybe the cheap meat it produces would stick in their craw.
Consider the horrible practice of keeping female pigs in narrow metal cages, known as farrowing crates, for up to seven weeks before and after giving birth.
Imprisoned in the cage, the sow is prevented from building a nest for her piglets, as instinct prompts her to do. She gnaws and bites at the cage in frustration, and there may be sores on her feet and legs from contact with the hard slatted floor.
Then she is forced to give birth and to feed her young through the metal bars of the crate.
How is such cruel treatment legal? The answer is because we allow it to be so.
Although we may profess to despise cruelty to animals, what we really mean is that we hate to witness cruelty to animals. When it’s done out of sight, and thus out of mind, it seems we don’t actually care at all. We’re happy to tuck in, regardless of where the meat came from.
Luckily, some people do care. Thanks in part to the efforts of the actor Joanna Lumley, who has long campaigned for the charity Compassion in
World Farming, pig farmers in England will be banned from confining sows in cages under new government plans to improve animal welfare.
Sweden, Switzerland and Norway have already banned these hateful crates.
Will Northern Ireland follow England’s lead and ban them too?
It’s a vital question, because intensive pig farming is big business in Northern Ireland, and it’s getting bigger. The number of breeding sows has shot up to nearly 48,000 and 83% of all pigs are kept in 60 so-called ‘super-farms’, which can contain more than 9,000 animals per farm.
This has huge consequences, and not only for animal welfare. Friends of the Earth has warned that pollution from factory farms is harming the health of Northern Ireland’s people, habitats and ecosystems.
Globally, the consequences could be still more severe. The farmer and author John Lewis-stempel says that “factory farms are ticking time-bombs of zoonotic disease — those which leap from animals to humans — and petri-dishes of bacterial infections”.
He points out that between 1997 and 2006, the H5N1 virus, which was transmitted from poultry to humans, had a 59% mortality rate among people affected. The mortality rate for Covid, by contrast, is about 1%.
It doesn’t have to be this way. Personally, I’ve made the decision to only eat naturally farmed, outdoor-reared meat.
I buy mine from a rare-breed farm in Co Down where the pigs are free to roam and forage the way nature intended.
They have long, happy, healthy lives. They get to stretch out in the sun, or wallow in glorious muck. There is no need for the routine antibiotics which are pumped into intensively reared animals, crammed together indoors, where stress and overcrowding often leads to illness.
Spending time with these free-range pigs has made me realise what sensitive, intelligent, social and highly active creatures they are. To imprison them, cheek by jowl, in huge forcing houses is, in my view, morally indefensible.
Faced with this ethical dilemma, some people choose not to eat meat at all. I respect that.
For me, eating only free-range meat is about supporting humane, traditional and sustainable farming methods, as well as enjoying delicious sausages and bacon, of course.
It is wrong, full stop, for sentient animals to live and die without ever seeing daylight. As Joanna Lumley says, “life in a cage is no life at all”.