Most of us fail to recognize the face on our plate. When we salivate over “chicken wings,” we do not associate our meal with what was once a living chicken. And this disconnect is critical: Acknowledging the face on one’s plate might mean acknowledging the cruel reality of the animal agriculture industry behind it. While cats and dogs in American culture are often seen as ‘part of the family,’ U.S. farm animals face physically and psychologically traumatizing conditions on factory farms and in industrial slaughterhouses, where they have been butchered while conscious.
While this gross mistreatment of farm animals rarely has legal consequences, applying the same conditions to pets would not only provide grounds for prosecution but also incite public outrage. The seminal Animal Welfare Act, passed in 1960, along with many additional animal anti-cruelty statutes, excludes farm animals from protection. This exclusion, a product of factory farms’ strategic lobbying efforts and the expansion of Ag-gag laws, preserves practices that would otherwise constitute explicit animal cruelty. Beyond the industry’s political power, the complicity of American consumers continues to perpetuate farm animal suffering. Even with a growing movement for veganism, Americans are consuming a record-breaking amount of meat per year — literally buying into a manufactured distinction between farm and non-farm animals.
Improving the lives of U.S. farm animals requires widespread cultural and legal change: Along with greater public awareness of the costs of industrial animal agriculture and a collective dietary shift away from its products, the law must recognize farm animals’ capacity for pain and protect them accordingly.
The Politics of the Plate
Eight-point-five by 11 inches: a letter-sized piece of paper. This is the amount of space that the average chicken or “broiler” will have to herself while living in warehouses holding up to 20,000 of her kin on a factory farm. Living in these dense quarters can take a severe physical toll, inhibiting proper bodily development and causing respiratory problems. Upon reaching the slaughterhouse, broilers are often dropped into electric water baths prior to being butchered. All of this is legal.
When it comes to the law, farm animals have little-to-no recourse. Excluded from the protections of the Animal Welfare Act, farm animals are denied minimal animal welfare standards in commercial and research settings, and are seen as legal property. Although all states now have felony provisions for severe acts of animal cruelty, many of these animal anti-cruelty laws do not include farm animals in their definitions of a protected “animal.”
Most of the legal protections farm animals receive only come into effect when they meet their end. Under the Humane Methods of Slaughter Act, protected livestock must be “rendered insensible to pain” by a “rapid and effective” single blow or gunshot prior to the slaughter process. In addition to a glaring flaw — the legislation excludes poultry entirely from its provisions — the Act lacks any general enforcement mechanism. Section 1903, which barred the federal government from purchasing meat not produced in accordance with the Act’s standards, has not been replaced since its repeal in 1978. Although USDA inspectors can freeze the operations of slaughterhouses failing to meet these standards, there is a well-documented history of recurring violations.
Due to limited legal protections, farm animals’ treatment is often left to the discretion of factory farms and what they consider “standard industry practice.” As Lori Kettler, vice president and deputy general counsel for regulatory affairs at People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, told the HPR in an interview, “the industry defines what’s cruel.” And standard practices include confining breeding sows to waste-covered gestation crates that damage their feet.
For industrial producers, any effort at advancing protections for farm animals — even bolstering anti-bestiality laws — poses a threat. David Rosengard, a staff attorney in the Animal Legal Defense Fund’s criminal justice division, told the HPR that the industry’s eagerness to squash such efforts reflects a recognition of the “thin and arbitrary” nature of the distinction made between farm and non-farm animals. Without this superficial distinction, however, “standard industry practice” would constitute animal cruelty: Differentiating pigs kept as pets from pigs raised on farms means “one of them can be castrated without anesthesia, one of them can be killed … for convenience, and the other gets the full gamut of [legal] protections.”
Rosengard contrasted the “grim and brutal reality” of industrial animal agriculture, which accounts for over 95 percent of the almost 10 billion farm animals raised in the United States, with the popular “Old MacDonald” myth of small-scale farmers tending to livestock. The industry’s vested interest in maintaining this myth and limiting public knowledge of its practices — its fear of people “looking behind glass doors” — has motivated so-called Ag-gag laws criminalizing the documentation of abuses at factory farms and industrial slaughterhouses by animal activists.
Both Kettler and Rosengard also lamented the discretion of individual prosecutors and regulatory agencies in addressing violations of animal welfare statutes. Ambiguous statutory language, such as a section excusing the mistreatment of farm animals when that conduct is “justifiable,” allows for disparate legal interpretations of when farm animal treatment constitutes criminal behavior.
A Culture of Animal-Eating
Why do we love some animals and eat others? Americans invest a lot in their pets’ lives, and tend to brand themselves as animal lovers even as they are complicit in subjecting billions of farm animals to the horrors of industrial animal agriculture. It seems like a glaring hypocrisy. For author and psychologist Melanie Joy, this hypocrisy is driven by a culture of carnism, the popular belief system that justifies eating animals. Joy maintains that carnism is so internalized that most Americans do not even realize eating meat is a choice, nor recognize that in eating meat, they implicitly endorse violence against animals that they would never openly support. Philosopher and author Peter Singer attributes a culture of farm animal exploitation and consumption to speciesism, the belief in humans’ superiority to animals. Speciesism promotes a false conception of animal suffering as less significant than human suffering, making it appear more defensible.
Even for those who agree that American farms are mistreating animals, a fundamental question over the culture of animal-eating remains: Can it ever be justified? Although both aim to advance farm animals’ wellbeing, animal welfare and animal rights activists’ views on the matter differ substantially. The former tend to endorse animal-eating when coupled with improved conditions for farm animals, while the latter oppose consuming animals and animal products entirely.
For Joy, improving animal treatment is important but insufficient: There can be no justice for farm animals so long as they are used to satisfy people’s tastes. As founder and president of the Beyond Carnism organization, Joy promotes veganism as the only solution to escaping the “carnistic box.” However, she also believes that animal welfare and animal rights activism can complement one another, and finds that the popular narrative of the two camps as oppositional is both misleading and counter-productive. The difference between the two groups is not ideological, Joy told the HPR, but strategic. Joy noted the value of animal welfare campaigns in reaching those who would not otherwise engage in pro-vegan movements like her own, exposing more people to the flaws of carnism and even inspiring an eventual end to their participation in the system.
While animal rights and animal welfare activists may work in tandem, the growing marketplace for “humane meat” remains a source of tension between the two, reinforcing this fundamental split over whether animal-eating is inherently unethical. For Mike Beretta, CEO of humane meat producer Beretta Farms, eating animals is a natural process; it is the anthropomorphized treatment of pets — dressing up dogs in human outfits, for instance — that he finds inhumane. He told the HPR that he views humane animal product labels like Certified Humane as “requirements of the marketplace” rather than as comprehensive guides for the treatment of farm animals, setting a “minimum bar” for animal welfare that farmers must charge themselves with surpassing. He believes that animal rights activists often fail to recognize farmers’ dedication to their work and to their animals, as well as how meat can be respectfully handled and consumed post-slaughter.
Both Kettler and Singer, however, view “humane meat” as a contradiction in terms. For Kettler, the concept is “a myth … fabricated by the meat industry to make people feel better about eating meat.” Singer worries that the concept obscures the importance of reducing meat consumption overall, giving consumers the false impression that meat is necessary for their diets and that raising animal welfare standards justifies meat consumption. Singer, who posits the ultimate goal of what he terms “the Animal Liberation movement” as granting “equal consideration” to animals’ interests, aims to bring people as close to veganism as possible while raising awareness of the harms of speciesism. He urges activists to advocate for avoiding factory-farm products, instead encouraging people to turn to plant-based alternatives. Campaigns like the emerging Reducetarian movement have made progress in this regard, even while failing to fully meet Singer’s ethical standards.
“Calling for the abolition of the meat industry and … for people to be vegan is going to be a very slow process of change, if it’s a process at all,” Singer told the HPR. “I would rather reduce the suffering of animals now, especially as I don’t see that as in any way weakening the campaigns for more far-reaching changes. On the contrary, I think you do take these changes step by step.”
Justice for Farm Animals
In the courtroom, new and innovative approaches are already being developed to defend farm animals against the violence of factory farm life. Some animal advocates are seeking a “private right of action,” allowing individuals and organizations to bring lawsuits on farm animals’ behalf when the law does not explicitly provide for them to do so. Others hope to establish a system of legal guardianship for farm animals, analogous to the one in place for children and people with disabilities. Legal guardians could be appointed by courts or by animal guardianship boards.
There is also growing support for granting animals legal “personhood,” a status held by corporations that would provide animals with the right to sue their abusers. The Nonhuman Rights Project previously sought to extend this status to chimpanzees in order to enable them to challenge the legality of their imprisonment under habeas corpus law. Now, the ALDF is appealing the decision of a case whose success would establish groundbreaking legal precedent in this area. The case names Justice, a rescued horse, as a plaintiff and seeks financial compensation for the ongoing medical care needed to address the severe and permanent physical injuries he suffered due to neglect by his former owner.
While employing legal tactics typically unavailable to animals may prove more challenging, animal advocates are also working to extend protections currently reserved for cats and dogs to farm animals. “We can change the way [farm] animals are situated in the world and … improve the conditions they live in … in a substantively meaningful way” without having a “drag-down fight on whether animals are persons or property,” explained Rosengard.
Among the protections Rosengard and the ALDF hope to extend to farm animals is their recognition as “crime victims.” This would provide for sentencing based on the number of individual animals victimized — in the current system, defendants can, in effect, abuse one animal and get the rest “free.” This move could help deter factory farms’ mass abuse of farm animals. Rosengard and the ALDF are also working to establish Courtroom Animal Advocate Program laws in multiple states that would entitle animals protected by criminal laws to an advocate who can represent their interests in legal proceedings, as is done with human victims. The first law of this kind, Connecticut’s Desmond’s Law, enables courts to appoint advocates for the “interests of justice” in cases around cats and dogs’ welfare. To inform prosecutors on how to apply such laws, the ALDF is also developing farm animal prosecution guides for each state.
The law can also provide a powerful tool for exposing industrial meat’s “hidden costs.” With the average American spending over twice as much on their pets as on meat every month, the low price of U.S. meat prevents consumers from facing the externalities of its production. In addition to animal suffering, these include major costs to the environment and public health, as well as to the wellbeing of factory farm workers. While difficult to quantify, accounting for these consequences would likely entail a significant price increase for industrial animal products.
Voters can be a crucial vehicle for changing the economic calculus of meat consumption. Last November, California voters passed Proposition 12 requiring more space for egg-laying hens, calves raised for veal, and breeding pigs while prohibiting the sale of eggs and meat respectively when produced by animals confined to spaces that fail to meet the new requirements. Increasing animal welfare standards in this way can make animal products more expensive, which Singer hopes will make plant-based substitutes for meat more economically competitive. He sees promise in the growing popularity of products such as Beyond Meat and Impossible Foods, now expanding onto college campuses, and in the development of cultured or in vitro meat.
For advocates of ethical meat-eating, humane meat is an increasingly accessible option. Beretta emphasizes small-scale farmers’ responsibility to communicate their work’s value to consumers: “We all own our stories as brands so … it’s up to us to … share and educate people through it.”
While changes in the law can help mitigate factory farms’ influence by extending farm animal protections and creating a marketplace for alternative products, whether farm animals’ wellbeing takes precedence over cheap meat and dairy remains largely up to consumers. On a collective scale, personal dietary change can have great impact. Individuals can also help expose cruel industry practices and create pressure for change by documenting processes inside factory farms and industrial slaughterhouses. Following years of released videos of “culling” or grinding up male chicks deemed valueless to the egg industry, United Egg Producers finally announced plans to eliminate the practice in 2016 after the development of new chick sex-determining technology.
From swearing off factory farm products to going fully vegan, the value of changing one’s diet is not, Singer explained, in committing an act of “personal purity,” but rather in opening an avenue for greater political action and bringing animal suffering into public consciousness.
Image Credit: Unsplash/Thought Catalog