Animal Factories


Written by Chetana Mirle, Ph.D. • Special Features • October 2010

6-1 The welfare of farm animals and the growing trend towards the industrialization of meat, egg, and milk production has profound implications for animals and people throughout South Asia and the rest of the developing world.

Farm animals contribute to the well being of approximately 70% of the world's rural poor, including hundreds of millions of pastoralists, mixed farmers, and landless peoples. From the animals' perspective, many homestead, pastoral, and mixed farming systems employed by these rural households have allowed them sufficient space for movement, environmental stimulation, and freedom to express some natural behaviors.

However, these extensive systems are being replaced by intensive, industrialized farm animal production (IFAP) facilities at a rate of more than 4% per year, particularly in developing countries. IFAP facilities, which concentrate thousands- if not hundreds of thousands- of farm animals along with their waste on a small land area, frequently confine animals in cages, crates, and stalls in factory-like facilities without environmental stimulation or adequate space. For example, in India, the majority of egg-laying hens are reared in barren battery cages so restrictive that the birds cannot even spread their wings.

Such intensive production practices have been implicated in a wide range of environmental harms, from air and water pollution, to shrinking water supplies. This environmental degradation also increases risks of infectious disease, respiratory ailments, and other health problems for people working or living near IFAP facilities. Throughout South Asia, the industrialization of farm animal production has also been accompanied by increased consolidation in the animal agriculture sector; raising concerns about the displacement of small farmers and rural laborers.

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Humane Society International works with governments, corporations, and civil society to improve the treatment of farm animals, and to raise awareness about the environmental and health impacts of industrial farm animal production. For more information, visit: hsi.org.

Chetana Mirle, Ph.D. is director of Humane Society International's Farm Animals department, which seeks to improve the welfare of farm animals worldwide through education and advocacy. She has worked in the fields of sustainable agriculture, food security, and animal welfare in Bangladesh, India, and other parts of the developing world. Web: www.hsi.org

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Commentary by Syed Rizvi:

This article is quite timely since the environmental degradation and world hunger today is the result of meat production across the globe. www.GoVeg.com

Eating meat wastes and pollutes natural resources-- consumes water and energy many time higher than required in producing plant based food. A recent United Nations report points out that meat industry is one of the top two or three most significant contributors to the most serious environmental problems. According to Environmental Defense, if every American skipped one meal of chicken per week and substituted vegetarian foods instead, the carbon dioxide savings would be the same as taking more than half-million cars off U.S. roads.

Eating meat require about 1 billion metric ton of grain, corn, and soy --fed to the animals, who burn most of the energy off, which drives up the price of food for people who are starving. There is more than enough food in the world to feed the entire human population, yet close to a billion people still go hungry. Studies made by Compassion in World Farming find that the crops that could be used to feed the hungry are instead being used to fatten the animals raised for food. It takes up to 16 pounds of grains to produce one pound of edible animal flesh.

Besides the impact of meat on the environment and world hunger there is an impact on our own psyche that suffers from an ethical blindness of not being able see what we are doing to our co-habitant of the planet - the animals. If we do eat them, we should have at least some moral responsibility to know what happens to them before they turn up on our plate as can be seen in the clip Meet your Meat narrated by the actor Alec Baldwin.

http://www.peta.org/issues/animals-used-for-food/default.aspx

www. Goveg.com,www.huffingtonpost.com, Bruce Friedrich (PETA).