Está en la página 1de 7

DeCilla 1 Michaela DeCilla ENG 101 Professor Bolton 15 April 2014 Lets Take the Factory out of Factory

Farms Animal abuse is neglect, intentional cruelty, maliciously torturing, maiming, mutilating, or killing an animal, and it is a growing problem in our world. Billions of animals are getting abused every day. Over the past decades, the rise of animal consumption has grown so much that factory farms have gone to extreme measures to supply this demand for food. There are over one hundred million cows, pigs, and sheep that are slaughtered every year, just in the United States, and for poultry the numbers are five billion (Singer 95). Many people in this world are blinded as to what goes on with the food they eat. We go to the grocery store and pick out meats and poultry, and never ask ourselves, what did this animal have to endure to get in this package? Although this may seem of concern to only a small group of animal activists, it should in fact concern anyone who cares about living creatures. The ASPCA claims, More than 99% of farm animals nationwide are raised in factory farms. Factory farms are large, industrial operations that raise large numbers of animals for food. These farms focus on profit and efficiency, rather than animal welfare. These farms are inhumane places that have no regard for the animals that live there. Many procedures take place on these animals such as, debeaking, dehorning, and castration, which are horrible, painful and not needed if the animals are correctly taken care of. It has become common today to dismiss these happenings because they go on behind closed doors. Here, many farmers would probably object that in order to

DeCilla 2 supply the demand that the world has put on the meat industry, many of these procedures have to be done. According to Tadlock Cowan, USDAs Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service is responsible for enforcing the Animal Welfare Act, which requires minimum standards of care for certain warm-blooded animals bred for commercial sale, used in research, transported commercially, or exhibited to the public. Conversely, this act does not include farm animals that are raised for food. The abuse that farm animals face every day of their life can be taken away or lessened if certain laws were revised or passed that would include the animals that humans eat. When it comes to the topic of animal cruelty laws, most of us will readily agree that more of them should exist. Where this agreement usually ends, however, is on the question of what type of animals should they protect. Whereas some are convinced that all animals should be created equal, others maintain that when it comes to the animals we eat, protection over them doesnt matter as much. I chose to do this research paper on the topic of animal abuse among farm animals because when I was eleven years old I decided to become a vegetarian. I had been an avid meat eater my whole childhood but I had always had a strong compassion for animals and felt guilty for eating them. So for the past twenty-one years I have not eaten meat and I have also been against animal cruelty. While it is true that I chose to stop eating meat because of this reason, it doesnt necessarily mean that all people will stop buying or eating meat based solely on the fact of animal cruelty. Dena Jones, in her article Crimes Unseen, wrote, To satisfy the public's ever-growing appetite for meat, slaughterhouses in the United States killed ten billion animals last year. That's 27,397,260 animals every day, 1,141,553 every hour, 19,026 every minute. Most Americans, largely disconnected from their food supply, assume these animals met a

DeCilla 3 painless end, if they think about it at all (60). With this being said, it is clear that inhumane treatment of animals is a separate issue all together. For this reason, laws must be created to protect the animals because humans are never going to stop eating them. A specific law that should be adjusted, is a forty-five year old federal law called the Humane Methods of Slaughter Act. This law requires humane handling of animals killed in federally inspected slaughterhouses, which is supposed to make the animals insensible to pain before slaughter. The most common method of this is stunning. This can be done by using electricity or gas to stun the pigs, sheep, and goats unconscious so they dont feel the pain of the slaughter. Even with this law in place, the Humane Society of the United States has had reports that cattle are being skinned alive. Jones wrote, Even if the meat industry were able to consistently meet the highest standards it has set for itself--properly stunning between 95 and 99 percent of animals--the remaining 1 to 5 percent represents millions of animals every year that would still suffer some of them tremendously, when slaughtered. Knowing this, many animal advocates have concluded that the only way to be assured one is not contributing to the suffering of animals is by not eating them. (67) Essentially, Jones is saying that because there is such a large amount of animal killing going on, the only true way to get away from animal abuse all together is to stop eating the animals, which is what I chose to do. The Humane Farming Association, which focuses on investigations within slaughterhouses, suggested that the best way for the slaughter of animals be less inhumane would be to increase the funding for government inspectors. Even after congress directed the association to make such improvements, there were only a

DeCilla 4 few that enforced the Humane Methods of Slaughter Act. In 2002, the USDA inspected nine-hundred facilities, out of them, only six received any formal reprehension because of the occurrence of inhumane handling. There was an incident in Illinois where sixteen hundred pigs died from overheating while they were waiting to be slaughtered (Jones 63). After a few days of havoc, the inspector in charge finally shut down the plant. This is unacceptable and just plain wrong. If this law is adjusted to where there has to be x amount of inspectors in each slaughter house to be able to know what is going on in them, there will be less accidents like this that could happen. The government needs to start taking more action and fining these large companies so much money that they are forced to change the way they operate. At this point I would like to raise some objectives that farmers might have about certain laws that need to change. When animal consumption started booming a few decades ago because of the fast-food industry, farmers had to change the way they originally farmed because of the high demand. The farms that people think of with the cows and chickens grazing in the pasture are no longer. Some farmers say that with the amount of animals they have to house, such as chickens, many of them become very agitated and stressed. Most farmers choose to debeak their chickens, which stops them from plucking each other in stressful situations. Peter Singer states, The chicken tycoon, Frank Perdue, the fourth largest broiler producer in the United Stateskeeps his chickens in one-hundred and fifty yard buildings that house twenty-seven thousand birdshe cuts the beaks off his chickens in order to prevent them from becoming cannibals under the stress of modern factory life (105-106). Now many people will agree that chickens eating one another is not right and that debeaking them is a good way to prevent that but this

DeCilla 5 procedure is only a solution to stop cannibalism and to reduce the damage chickens can inflict on each other, it does not help with the problems of overcrowding and stressfulness these birds have. Debeaking first started in the 1940s. The farmers would use a blow torch and burn away the chickens upper beak. Now a guillotine like machine with hot blades is used, which can cut the beaks off of fifteen birds per minute. This can result in sloppy cutting and serious injury to the birds. A poultry scientist, Joseph Mauldin, from the University of Georgia reported, There are many cases of burned nostrils and severe mutilations due to incorrect procedures which unquestionably influence acute and chronic pain, feeding behavior and production factors. I have evaluated beak trimmings quality for private broiler companies and most are content to achieve 70% falling into properly trimmed categories. Replacement pullets have their beaks trimmed by crews who are paid for quantity rather than quality work. (Singer 101) Basically Mauldin is stating that most of the employees that work with these chickens are just caring about how much money they make, and are not at all concerned about the well-being of the animal. A solution to these problems will be to give the chickens more space to roam around. This is why there needs to be laws that can enforce these companies to stop debeaking chickens all together. The sad thing about the world today is that so many people are interested only in money and how much of it they can make. Chicken farms can start making a difference by giving their employees more incentive on the quality of these birds instead of how fast they can harm them. Currently, there is no law that bans the procedure of debeaking. It is proven that if the chickens had more room to

DeCilla 6 walk around, they will become less agitated. Hopefully one day our world will wake up and realize what we are doing to these helpless animals. In conclusion, if laws are passed or altered to better the lives of animals, their suffering can stop and the wellbeing of the animals will get better. Marcia Clemmitt puts it great when she argues, animals have a right to live free of suffering and brutality imposed by humans who raise and slaughter them for food (5). If people will take the laws that are already in place more seriously and the government will make new laws to enforce the welfare of the animals, think of how much better things can be. Next time a person is in the grocery store or driving past a farm, I hope they will take a moment to think about the animals, and maybe ask ones self if there is anything one can do that can better the world and the animals that live in it.

DeCilla 7 Works Cited

Clemmitt, Marcia. Animal Rights. CQ Researcher 8 Jan. 2010:1-24. Web. 26 Mar. 2014 Cowan, Tadlock. Humane Treatment of Farm Animals: Overview and Issues. Animal Welfare. Ed. E.B. Babb and L.C. Hare. Nova Science Publishers, 2013. Ebrary. Web. 8 Apr. 2014 Jones, Dena. Crimes Unseen. Orion Vol. No. 2004:60-67. SIRS Issues Researcher. Web. 10 Apr. 2014 Singer, Peter. Animal Liberation. Rev. ed. New York: Harper, 2009. Print. Fight Cruelty. ASPCA. 2014. Web. 24 March 2014

También podría gustarte