One vocal Minnesota pork producer laments: “If there is one term I am most frustrated with hearing people say, it is factory farms.” The Animal Agriculture Alliance, an industry public relations firm, insists that “factory farm” is “a catchy phrase created by the strategic public relations teams of the activist community.” The group complains that advocacy organizations use the term “factory farming” to portray pork and other products “as just another commodity coming off the assembly line with no thought given to safety or the health and wellbeing of workers and animals.” This would be funny if it didn’t require rewriting a lot of history in which factory farms openly focused on efficiency above all else—allowing animal mistreatment for the sake of the bottom of line. This industry’s revisionism ignores not only four decades of agricultural industrialization, but also what’s happening right now, this moment, in windowless barns across the country. The fact is, most animals in our food system live under dismal conditions, and the pitifully low bar for their treatment was set in directives from the same industry’s leaders who today are so upset about being vilified. “Forget the pig is an animal—treat him just like a machine in a factory,” recommended Hog Farm Management in 1976. Two years later, National Hog Farmer advised: “The breeding sow should be thought of, and treated as, a valuable piece of machinery whose function is to pump out baby pigs like a sausage machine.”
Posted on: Thu, 08 Jan 2015 20:54:38 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015