Many people believe that animals raised for food must be treated well because sick or dead animals would be of no use to agribusiness. This is not true.

The competition to produce inexpensive meat, eggs, and dairy products has led animal agribusiness to treat animals as objects and commodities. The worldwide trend is to replace small family farms with “factory farms”—large warehouses where animals are confined in crowded cages or pens or in restrictive stalls.¹

Bernard Rollin, PhD, explains that it is “more economically efficient to put a greater number of birds into each cage, accepting lower productivity per bird but greater productivity per cage…individual animals may ‘produce,’ for example gain weight, in part because they are immobile, yet suffer because of the inability to move…Chickens are cheap, cages are expensive.”²

In an article recommending space be reduced from 8 to 6 square feet per pig, industry journal National Hog Farmer suggests that “Crowding pigs pays.”³

See also: video; Meet Your Meat (order).

Birds

Chickens raised for meat (click for larger image; courtesy of PETA).

In the United States, virtually all birds raised for food are factory farmed.⁴ Inside the densely populated buildings, where they are confined their entire lives, enormous amounts of waste accumulate. The resulting ammonia levels commonly cause painful burns to the birds' skin, eyes, and respiratory tracts.⁵

As reported in “Settling Doubts About Livestock Stress,” published in the March 2005 issue of Agricultural Research magazine (USDA ARS), "Farmers trim from a third to a half of the beaks off chickens, turkeys, and ducks to cut losses from poultry pecking each other." This causes severe pain for several weeks.⁸ Some, unable to eat after being debeaked, starve.²

See also: “Enter the Chicken Shed” (PDF); ducks; the life of a broiler; the turkey industry (2006); photos; more photos.

Egg-Laying Hens

Packed in wire cages (the industry average is less than half a square foot of floor space per bird),⁶ hens can become immobilized and die of asphyxiation or dehydration. Decomposing corpses are found in cages with live birds. Tens of millions (approximately 14%) of egg-laying hens die during production each year.^6,7

Laying hens in battery cages (click for larger image; courtesy of Farm Sanctuary).

Those who survive are removed from the farms when deemed no longer economically viable. Some of these “spent hens” (the industry term for layers who have completed their egg production cycles) are sold for slaughter; the rest are rendered, composted, or destroyed by other means (e.g., on two California farms, workers fed 30,000 live hens into wood chippers). By the time spent hens are removed for low production, their skeletons are so fragile that many suffer broken bones during catching, transport, or shackling.³⁶

Male chicks, of no economic value to the egg industry, are typically gassed² or macerated (ground up alive).⁹ Maceration is becoming a common method for disposing of male chicks.

See also: “Act of God”; Ban Battery Cages; Egg Industry; Search for Humane Eggs; more photos.

Pigs

In the September 1976 issue of the industry journal Hog Farm Management, John Byrnes advised: “Forget the pig is an animal. Treat him just like a machine in a factory.”

Piglet biting cage (click for larger image; courtesy of PETA).

Today’s pig farmers have done just that. As Morley Safer related on 60 Minutes: “This [motion picture Babe] is the way Americans want to think of pigs. Real-life ‘Babes’ see no sun in their limited lives, with no hay to lie on, no mud to roll in. The sows live in tiny cages, so narrow they can’t even turn around. They live over metal grates, and their waste is pushed through slats beneath them and flushed into huge pits.”

See also: “When Pigs Cry”; investigation; more photos.

Dairy Cows

Veal calf (click for larger image; courtesy of PETA).

From 1940 to 2004, average per-cow milk production rose from 2.3 to 9.5 tons per year;⁷ some cows have surpassed 30 tons.⁹ High milk production often causes udder breakdown, leading to early slaughter.¹

It is unprofitable to keep cows alive once their milk production declines. They are usually killed at 5 to 6 years of age,¹ though their normal life span exceeds 20.

Dairy cows are rarely allowed to nurse their young.¹ Many male calves are slaughtered immediately, while others are raised for “special-fed veal”—kept in individual stalls and chained by the neck on a 2–3 foot tether for 18 to 20 weeks before being slaughtered.⁹

See also: How does drinking milk hurt cows?; Tour a Dairy Farm; and this Q&A explaining the fate of cows on an organic dairy farm.

Free-Range Farms

A growing number of people are looking to free-range products as an alternative to factory-farmed animal products. Poultry meat may be labeled “free-range” if the birds were provided an opportunity to access the outdoors. No other requirements—such as the stocking density, the amount of time spent outdoors, or the quality and size of the outdoor area—are specified by the USDA.³⁷ As a result, free-range conditions may amount to 20,000 birds crowded inside a shed with a single exit leading to a muddy strip, saturated with droppings.

The free-range label applies only to birds raised for meat, not eggs. There is a cage-free label for eggs; but it is not regulated by the USDA, nor does it guarantee that the hens were provided access to the outdoors. Neither label requires third-party certification. Even for USDA Organic, the most extensively regulated label, minimum levels of outdoor access have not been set and specific rules do not apply to stocking density or flock size.³⁷

Male chicks, of no value to the egg industry, are killed at birth; and female chicks, whether destined for cages or not, are typically debeaked at the hatchery. Although hens can live more than 10 years, they’re killed after a year or two.

Free-range and cage-free farms vary greatly, and while they may be an improvement over conventional farms, they are by no means free of suffering. Visiting the farms and slaughterhouses is the only way to know how the animals are being raised and killed before the meat hits your plate.

For more information, see this page.

“To visit a modern CAFO (Confined Animal Feeding Operation) is to enter a world that, for all its technological sophistication, is still designed according to Cartesian principles: animals are machines incapable of feeling pain. Since no thinking person can possibly believe this any more, industrial animal agriculture depends on a suspension of disbelief on the part of the people who operate it and a willingness to avert your eyes on the part of everyone else. Chick being debeaked (click for larger image; courtesy of PETA). “From everything I’ve read, egg and hog operations are the worst. 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…at least don’t spend their eight-week lives in cages too small to ever stretch a wing. That fate is reserved for the American laying hen, who passes her brief span piled together with a half-dozen other hens in a wire cage whose floor a single page of this [New York Times] magazine could carpet. Every natural instinct of this animal is thwarted, leading to a range of behavioral ‘vices’ that can include cannibalizing her cagemates and rubbing her body against the wire mesh until it is featherless and bleeding.… [T]he 10 percent or so of hens that can’t bear it and simply die is built into the cost of production. And when the output of the others 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 egg laying before their life’s work is done.… Many breeding sows spend their adult lives in gestation and farrowing stalls where they cannot turn around (click for larger image; courtesy of PETA). “Piglets in confinement operations are weaned from their mothers 10 days after birth (compared with 13 weeks in nature) because they gain weight faster on their hormone- and antibiotic-fortified feed. This premature weaning leaves the pigs with a lifelong craving to suck and chew, a desire they gratify in confinement by biting the tail of the animal in front of them. A normal pig would fight off his molester, but a demoralized pig has stopped caring. ‘Learned helplessness’ is the psychological term, and it’s not uncommon in confinement operations, where tens of thousands of hogs spend their entire lives ignorant of sunshine or earth or straw, crowded together beneath a metal roof upon metal slats suspended over a manure pit. So it’s not surprising that an animal as sensitive and intelligent as a pig would get depressed, and a depressed pig will allow his tail to be chewed on to the point of infection. Sick pigs, being underperforming ‘production units,’ are clubbed to death on the spot. The USDA’s recommended solution to the problem is called ‘tail docking.’ Using a pair of pliers (and no anesthetic), most but not all of the tail is snipped off. Why the little stump? Because the whole point of the exercise is not to remove the object of tail-biting so much as to render it more sensitive. Now, a bite on the tail is so painful that even the most demoralized pig will mount a struggle to avoid it.… “More than any other institution, the American industrial animal farm offers a nightmarish glimpse of what capitalism can look like in the absence of moral or regulatory constraint. Here in these places life itself is redefined—as protein production—and with it suffering. That venerable word becomes ‘stress,’ an economic problem in search of a cost-effective solution, like tail-docking or beak-clipping or, in the industry’s latest plan, by simply engineering the ‘stress gene’ out of pigs and chickens. Our own worst nightmare such a place may well be; it is also real life for the billions of animals unlucky enough to have been born beneath these grim steel roofs, into the brief, pitiless life of a ‘production unit’ in the days before the suffering gene was found.” Michael Pollan, “An Animal’s Place,” The New York Times Magazine, 11/10/02

Transport & Stockyards