EATING ANIMALS
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER
BACK BAY BOOKS 2009
PART VII
Chapter 4: Influence/Speechlessness (Cont.)
The life and death of a bird
The second farm I saw with C was set up in a series of twenty sheds, each 45 feet wide by 490 feet long, each holding in the neighborhood of 33,000 birds.
- It’s hard to get one’s head around the magnitude of 33,000 birds in one room. In its Animal Welfare Guidelines, the National Chicken Council indicates an appropriate stocking density to be eighth-tenths of a square foot per bird.
- The muscles and fat tissues of the newly engineered broiler birds grow significantly faster than their bones, leading to deformities and disease.
- Somewhere between 1% and 4% of the birds will die writhing in convulsions from sudden death syndrome, a condition virtually unknown outside of factory farms.
- Another factory-farm-induced condition in which excess fluids fill the body cavity, ascites, kills even more (5% of birds globally).
For your broilers, leave the lights on about 24 hours a day for the first week or so of the chick’s lives. This encourages them to eat more. Then turn the lights off a bit, giving them maybe 4 hours of darkness a day – just enough sleep for them to survive. Of course chickens will go crazy if forced to live in such grossly unnatural conditions for long – the lighting and crowding, the burdens of their grotesque bodies. At least broiler birds are typically slaughtered on the 42nd day of their lives (or increasingly the 39th), so they haven’t yet established social hierarchies to fight over.
Needless to say, jamming deformed, drugged, overstressed birds together in a filthy, waste-coated room is not very healthy. Beyond deformities, eye damage, blindness, bacterial infections of bones, slipped vertebrae, paralysis, internal bleeding, anemia, slipped tendons, twisted lower legs and necks, respiratory diseases, and weakened immune systems are frequent and long-standing problems on factory farms. Scientific studies and government records suggest that virtually all (upwards of 95% of) chickens become infected with E. coli (an indicator of fecal contamination) and between 39% and 75% of chickens in retail stores are still infected. Around 8% of birds become infected with salmonella (down from several years ago, when at last 1 in 4 birds was infected, which still occurs on some farms). 70% to 90% are infected with another potentially deadly pathogen, campylobacter. Chlorine baths are commonly used to remove slime, odor, and bacteria.
- The birds are injected with “broths” and salty solutions to give them what we have come to think of as the chicken look, smell, and taste.
- A recent study by Consumer Reports found that chicken and turkey products, many labelled as natural, ballooned with 10% to 30% of their weight as broth, flavoring, or water.
It’s now time for “processing.” First, you’ll need to find worker to gather the birds into crates and “hold the line” that will turn the living, whole birds into plastic-wrapped parts. You will have to continuously find the workers, since annual turnover rates typically exceed 100%.
- Be sure to hire those who won’t be in a position to complain.
- According to the National Chicken Council – representatives of the industry – about 180 million chickens are improperly slaughtered each year. When asked if these numbers troubled him, Richard L. Lobb, the council’s spokesman, sighed, “The process is over in a matter of minutes.”
- Since feces on skin and feathers end up in the tanks, the birds leave with pathogens that they have inhaled or absorbed through their skin (the tanks’ heated water helps open up the birds’ pores.)
- The high-speed machines commonly rip open intestines, releasing feces into the birds’ body cavities.
- Once upon a time, USDA inspectors had to condemn any bird with such fecal contamination. But about 30 years ago, the poultry industry convinced the USDA to reclassify feces so that it could continue to use these automatic eviscerators.
- Once a dangerous contaminant, feces are now classified as a “cosmetic blemish.”
- The USDA inspector has approximately two seconds to examine each bird inside and out, both carcass and the organs, for more than a dozen different diseases and suspect abnormalities, looking at about 25,000 birds a day.
Journalist Scott Bronstein wrote a remarkable series for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution about poultry inspection, which should be required reading for anyone considering eating chicken. He conducted interviews with nearly a hundred USDA poultry inspectors from 37 plants. “Every week,” he reports, “millions of chickens leaking yellow pus, stained by green feces, contaminated by harmful bacteria, or marred by lung and heart infections, cancerous tumors, or skin conditions are shipped for sale to consumers.”
Next the chickens go to a massive refrigerated tank of water, where thousands of birds are communally cooled. Tom Devine, from the Government Accountability Project, has said that the “water in these tanks has been aptly named ‘fecal soup’ for all the filth and bacteria floating around. By immersing clean, healthy birds in the same tank with dirty ones, you’re practically assuring cross-contamination.”
While a significant number of European and Canadian poultry processors employ air-chilling systems, 99% of US poultry processors have stayed with water-immersion systems and fought lawsuits from both consumers and the beef industry to continue the outmoded use of water-chilling. It’s not hard to figure out why. Air-chilling reduces the weight of a bird’s carcass, but water chilling causes a dead bid to soak up water (the same water known as “fecal soup”). One study has shown that simply placing the chicken carcasses in sealed plastic bags during the chilling stage would eliminate cross-contamination. But that would also eliminate an opportunity for the industry to turn wastewater into tens of millions of dollars’ worth of additional weight in poultry products.
- More than 99% of all chickens sold for meat in America live and die like this.
- All birds come from similar Frankenstein-like stock; all are confined; none enjoy the breeze or the warmth of sunlight; none are able to fulfil all (or usually any) of their species-specific behaviors like nesting, perching, exploring their environment, and forming stable social units; illness is always rampant; suffering is always the rule; the animals are always only a unit, a weight; death is invariably cruel.
- Today 6 billion chickens are raised in roughly these conditions each year in the European Union, over 9 billion in America, and more than 7 billion in China.
- All told, there are 50 billion factory-farmed birds worldwide.
Influence
- Should we consider the contribution of 50 billion sickly, drugged birds – birds that are the primordial source of all flu viruses – an underlying influence propelling the creation of new pathogens that attack humans?
- What about the 500 million pigs with compromised immune systems in confinement facilities?
In 2004, a collection of the world’s experts on emerging zoonotic diseases gathered to discuss the possible relationship between all those compromised and sick farm animals, and pandemic explosions. Before getting to their conclusions, it is helpful to think about the new pathogens as two related but distinct kinds of public-health concerns. The first concern is a more general one about the relationship between factory farms and all kinds of pathogens, like new strains of campylobacter, salmonella, or E. coli. The second public-health concern is the more particular one: humans are setting the conditions for the creation of the superpathogen of all superpathogens, a hybrid virus that could cause a repeat, more or less, of the Spanish flu of 1918. These two concerns are intimately related.
- Each case of food-borne illness cannot be traced, but where we do know the origin, or the “vehicle of transmission,” it is, overwhelmingly, an animal product. Poultry is by far the largest cause.
- According to a study published in Consumer Reports, 83% of all chicken meat (including organic and antibiotic-free brands) is infected with either campylobacter or salmonella at the time of purchase.
- “Twenty-four-hour flus” may be among the 76 million cases of food-borne illness the CDC estimates occur in America each year. In all likelihood that bug was created by factory farming.
- We know that factory farms are contributing to the growth of antimicrobial-resistant pathogens simply because these farms consume so many antimicrobials. Microbes eventually adapt to antimicrobials.
- On a typical factory farm drugs are fed to animals with every meal. Farmed animals are fed antibiotics nontherapeutically (that is, before they get sick).
- The Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) has shown that the industry underreported its antibiotic use by at least 40%.
- The UCS calculated 24.6 million pounds of antibiotics were fed to chickens, pigs, and other farmed animals, only counting nontherapeutic uses.
- They further calculated that fully 13.5 million pounds of those antimicrobials would currently be illegal within the EU.
- Study after study has shown that antimicrobial resistance follows quickly on the heels of the introduction of new drugs on factory farms.
- A broader study in the New England Journal of Medicine showed an eightfold increase in antimicrobial resistance from 1992 to 1997, and, using molecular subtyping, linked this increase to the use of antimicrobials in farmed chickens.
- The reason that the needed total ban on nontherapeutic use of antibiotics hasn’t occurred is that the factory farm industry (in alliance with the pharmaceutical industry) currently has more power than public-health professionals.
- We give it to them. We have chosen, unwittingly, to fund this industry on a massive scale by eating factory-farmed animal products (and water sold as animal products) – and we do so daily.
The same conditions that lead 76 million Americans to become ill from their food annually and that promote antimicrobial resistance also contribute to the risk of a pandemic. This brings us back to the remarkable 2004 conference in which the Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations, the World Health Organization, and the World Organization for Animal Health (OIE) put their tremendous resources together to evaluate the available information on “emerging zoonotic diseases.” At the time of the conference, H5N1 and SARS topped the list of feared emerging zoonotic diseases. Today H1N1 would be pathogen enemy number one.
- First in a list of four main risk factors was “increasing demand for animal protein”. The demand for meat, eggs, and dairy is a “primary factor” influencing emerging zoonotic deseases. Poultry factory farms are singled out.
- Breeding genetically uniform and sickness-prone birds in the overcrowded, stressful, feces-infested, and artificially lit conditions of factory farms promotes the growth and mutation of pathogens.
- Our choice is simple: cheap chicken or our health.
- The primary ancestor of the recent H1N1 swine flu outbreak originated at a hog factory in North Carolina, and then quickly spread throughout he Americas.
- It was in these factory farms that scientists saw, for the first time, viruses that combined genetic material from bird, pig, and human viruses.
- Scientists at Columbia and Princeton Universities have actually been able to trace 6 of the 8 genetic segments of the (currently) most feared virus in the world directly to US factory farms.