“ To visit a modern Concentrated Animal Feeding Operation (CAFO) is to enter a world that for all its technological sophistication is still designed on seventeenth-century Cartesian principles: Animals are treated as machines—“production units”—incapable of feeling pain. Since no thinking person can possibly believe this anymore, industrial animal agriculture depends on a suspension of disbelief on the part of the people who operate it and a willingness to avert one’s eyes on the part of everyone else. Egg operations are the worst, from everything I’ve read; I haven’t managed to actually get into one of these places since journalists are unwelcome there. Beef cattle in America at least still live outdoors, albeit standing ankle-deep in their own waste eating a diet that makes them sick. And broiler chickens, although they are bred for such swift and breast-heavy growth they can barely walk, at least don’t spend their lives in cages too small to ever stretch a wing. That fate is reserved for the American laying hen, who spends her brief span of days piled together with half a dozen other hens in a wire cage the floor of which four pages of this book could carpet wall to wall. Every natural instinct of this hen is thwarted, leading to a range of behavioural vices that can include cannibalizing her cage mates and rubbing her breast against the wire mesh until it is completely bald and bleeding (the chief reason broilers get a pass on caged life; to scar so much high value breast meat would be bad business.) Pain? Suffering? Madness? the operative suspension of disbelief depends on the acceptance of more neutral descriptors such as vices and stereotypes and stress. But whatever you want to call what goes on in those cages, the 10% or so of hens cant endure it and simply die is build into the cost of production. And when the output of the survivors begins to ebb, the hens will be force-molted - starved of food and water and light for several days in order to stimulate a final bout of hen laying before their lifes work is done. -Michael Pollan- The Omnivores Dilemma
Posted on: Tue, 01 Apr 2014 14:38:08 +0000
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