Can a conscious death be humane? September 18, 2012
Posted by Angelique in Animal welfare.Tags: agriculture, animal ag, animal rights, Animal welfare, chickens, Food ethics, slaughterhouses
4 comments
I don’t know about you, but I’d like to be unconscious when I kick the bucket. No last-minute grasping at the final shreds of life for me. Let me go in peace, preferably without even knowing it.
That’s what humane slaughter requires for many food animals, too. Cows and pigs must be “rendered insensible” before slaughter, so that they don’t know what’s going on and can’t feel any pain. Now, that’s not to say that such idyllic circumstances actually obtain at slaughterhouses, as a recent article in The Atlantic makes clear. In A Call for USDA Vigilance in Humane Treatment of Food Animals, former Humane Society undercover investigator Cody Carlson discusses the recent closure (and reopening) of Central Valley Meat, a dairy cow slaughterhouse, for violations of the Humane Methods of Slaughter Act.
Commenting on the article, I noted that while I agreed with Carlson that the USDA’s multiple mandates make it impossible for the agency to truly protect animal welfare, it was still possible to eat meat and dairy ethically by choosing products vetted by strong animal welfare certifications. Responding to my comment, a person identified as Janet Weeks flounced “You do realize that birds and rabbits are NOT protected under the Humane Methods of Slaughter Act …there is not even an attempt to make them ‘insensible’ to pain. They are slaughtered while fully conscious.” End of discussion, I suppose, for Ms. Weeks.
Well, just to get one thing out of the way: strong animal welfare certification programs like Animal Welfare Approved do require that chickens, rabbits, and any animals covered by the program are stunned to the point of unconsciousness before slaughter. So if you eat meat certified by one of these programs, it doesn’t matter whether the USDA follows suit or not.
But Ms. Weeks’ comments gave me pause, because they made me realize that most of probably assume reflexively that unconsciousness is a prerequisite for a humane death. But is it? Let’s get personal again. I’d like to be unconscious when I die, but I know that lots of people aren’t and that it’s quite likely I won’t be. Does that make my probable death inhumane? I don’t think so. If it’s pretty quick and not terribly painful, that’s all I can reasonably hope for. Ideally I’d like unconsciousness, but I can live with the alternative (so to speak) if it’s not too bad.
I think the same is true for animals. It doesn’t really bother me that the USDA doesn’t require chickens to be insensible when they’re killed. As long as they are killed quickly and effectively, I’d say that’s good enough. And by the by, that’s the way a lot of small farmers do it. They don’t have the big mechanized stun baths used by conventional industrial players. So when you are being all virtuous buying your chicken at the farmers market, realize that it may have been conscious when it was killed. Having seen firsthand what that looks like (at chicken supplier Kadejan in Glenwood, Minnesota) I gotta tell ya, it’s pretty much a non-event. The chickens, when held securely upside-down, seem quite calm and not remotely aware of what’s coming, and a quick slit to the throat bleeds them right out.
What do you think? Can a conscious death be humane?
Hoofing it in the wrong direction September 10, 2012
Posted by Angelique in Animal welfare.Tags: agriculture, animal ag, animal rights, Animal welfare, cows, Food ethics
add a comment
If you’ve poked around this blog a bit, it comes as no surprise that I’m a fan of raising food animals in ways that allow them to express their natural behaviors – to be themselves, so to speak. That often means raising them in settings that mimic their natural environment as closely as possible. Thus I find pasture most appropriate for many species (although the best indoor options, like deep-bedded pens for pigs, can sometimes be perfectly fine).
The conventional livestock industry that has best approximated raising animals naturally has long been the beef industry. Most beef cattle are raised on the range for most of their lives. Calves still suckle their mothers for several months as they graze the land with the herd. It’s not until cattle reach twelve to eighteen months of age that they are moved to feedlots where they are confined in small, barren spaces and fed grain to fatten up for a few months before going to slaughter. It’s because humans leave beef cattle well enough alone for most of their lives that knowledgeable vegetarian spokespeople tell omnivores that if they insist on continuing to eat conventional meat, beef is the best option.
Unfortunately, that piece of advice may not hold true for much longer. This summer’s Midwestern drought is making what was once a relatively rare practice – raising beef cows in confinement from the day they’re born – look more attractive by the day. So called drylot cow/calf production allows famers to keep cows inside on concrete or on fenced-in plots of dirt (which turns into dust or mud, depending on the weather) their entire lives. That means they don’t have to pay for pasture, which is getting more expensive and, in any case, is of little value when there’s not enough rain to sustain its fertility. Now, farmers who confine cows for their whole lives have to pay the extra cost of their feed, which in normal circumstances is enough to put farmers off the idea. But as pasture becomes more spendy (or is simply unavailable) buying feed becomes a relative bargain.
If the bulk of ranchers move to raising beef cattle in confinement, they will have completed the transition to modern, CAFO-based livestock farming that started with the chicken nearly a century ago, trickled through to the pig and to the dairy cow, and now characterizes every species raised commercially for food except the beef cow. Will it happen? Here’s hoping not.
Book review: The Butcher’s Guide to Well-Raised Meat August 27, 2012
Posted by Angelique in Food ethics.Tags: agriculture, animal ag, book review, Food ethics
3 comments
I like this book. I like the story of the people who wrote it. What’s not to like about a former vegan and (almost-) vegetarian running a butcher shop? Joshua and Jessica Applestone, owner-proprietors of Fleisher’s Meats in New York’s Hudson Valley, want to tell you what’s up with meat and butchers. If you don’t already have a lurking fascination for the process of turning animals into meat, you should probably skip The Butcher’s Guide, because most of it’s pretty technical. But if you do, this butcher’s bible, with its bluntly friendly tone and gritty black-and-white photos of carcasses slung over tattooed shoulders, might just be for you.
TBG is full of practical information about the part of thoughtful eating that this blog doesn’t cover; that is, what happens after the animal is killed, both in the butcher shop and later, in the home kitchen. Chapters devoted to each type of meat cover everything from breeds to primal cuts to recipes. Learn how to hold a knife like a pro, with the pistol grip or the surgeon grip. How to boil the piss out of kidneys. The virtues of wood vs. plastic cutting boards. How to stuff a sausage.
TBG also has a short chapter on sourcing sustainable, humanely-raised meat, which does overlap with my project here. It’s not bad for a ten-page overview of a really complicated topic, but I have some quibbles. The Applestones stock grain-finished beef in their shop and acknowledge that the cattle providing it are typically fed corn. They mention the health concerns about this type of beef but not the ethical concerns, which arise from the fact that eating significant amounts of corn gives cattle sub-acute ruminal acidosis (SARA) – basically, a constant stomachache. The Applestones discuss third-party certifications and give a thumbs-up to Animal Welfare Approved, which I consider the gold standard of certifiers. But they qualify their approval by saying that AWA’s standards don’t make sense for all farmers without elaborating on why. The real question is, do they make sense for all animals, and if so, they’d better make sense for the farmers or the farmers shouldn’t be raising the animals.
Quibbles aside, TBG succeeds in being both entertaining and informative, so if you’re a butcher-to-be or just really interested in the best dry-heat methods for cooking a lamb saddle, give it a read.
Fatter, firmer, tastier? August 20, 2012
Posted by Angelique in Food ethics.Tags: agriculture, animal ag, Animal welfare, cows, Food ethics, pigs
6 comments
Grassfed beef stymies your average cook. Grill a steak or braise a shoulder the way you’re used to, and it comes out all tough and gamey. This presents a challenge to ranchers who’ve bet the farm (so to speak) on selling grassfed beef. They can’t make a living by just raising the damn animals and getting them to market. Now they have to teach people how to cook too.
Supposedly if you do it right you can get wonderful results with grassfed beef. Myself, I stick to the stuff you can’t mess up: hamburger. I leave preparing the more delicate cuts to the experts, like JD Fratzke at The Strip Club in St. Paul, who wowed me with a New York Strip years ago. (Let it be noted that I can mess up just about anything in the kitchen, including frozen pizza. Perhaps the beef is not the problem.)
Culinary confessions aside, though, a little irony occurred to me as I was thinking about the health and flavor benefits that reportedly accrue to grassfed beef. Because grassfed cattle follow their natural diet and typically have the freedom to graze, grassfed beef is leaner than grain-finished beef, which comes from cows that get less exercise and more cheap calories. That’s supposed to be good for us healthwise, because there’s less fat in grassfed beef than in the conventional grain-finished product. And it’s supposed to taste better if you manage to cook it right – more earthy, more robust, more, well, beefy.
Funnily enough, it’s the exact opposite for pork. Pastured pork (there is no such thing as grassfed pork, since pigs can’t survive on grass) usually has more fat and calories than conventional pork. That’s because the breeds chosen for conventional pork production are super-lean, allowing pork to market itself as a healthy option and “the other white meat.” In contrast, pastured pork producers use a variety of breeds that are hardy enough for outdoor living and have higher fat percentages.
So grassfed beef is relatively lean while pastured pork is relatively fatty. Yet both grassfed beef and pastured pork are marketed as tastier than their conventional counterparts. And on the pork side, I’d have to agree. Conventional pork chops rank right up there with conventional chicken breasts and conventional Styrofoam cups in terms of flavor profile, but pastured pork can be just heavenly!
Tie stalls: the next target? August 13, 2012
Posted by Angelique in Animal welfare.Tags: agriculture, animal ag, animal rights, Animal welfare, cows, Food ethics, pigs, veal
add a comment
First there were veal crates. People found out that veal calves were being kept in small crates that didn’t allow them to so much as turn around, and people stopped eating veal. If you waxed poetic about the joys of your grandma’s veal scaloppine, your more socially responsible friends turned to you, horrified, and proceeded to tell you everything you didn’t want to know about those poor calves. Eventually a cottage industry in “rose veal,” that is, veal from calves raised outdoors on pasture, grew to satisfy the desires of customers who wanted their ethics and their veal both.
Then there were gestation crates. People found out that in the conventional pork industry, sows were being kept for most of their lives in crates so small that, again, they couldn’t turn around. The way to get around that one was, similarly, to eschew conventional pork for pastured pork. But pork isn’t a little asterisk in meat industry sales reports like veal. It’s big business and it’s the lifeblood of huge companies like Smithfield. So to avoid losing market share to farmers raising pigs outdoors, some big players have promised to phase out gestation crates themselves, so no bacon-lover has to compromise his principles to enjoy his breakfast.
What I’m wondering is, how come no one has found out about tie stalls yet? Tie stalls are a type of housing used by some dairy farms. They’re just what they sound like: individual stalls in which cows are confined by tying them to a post. Here’s a pic from the USDA’s website. 
Cows can get up and lie down easily in (well-designed) tie stalls, but they can’t turn around. That makes them not much different from the crates that have tarnished the reputations of veal and pork producers. Yet no one’s yet made a fuss about them.
I think there are a couple of reasons for that. One is that many tie-stall dairies are not the corporate behemoths everyone loves to hate, but are actually small family farms using old barns that have been in the family for generations. That is, they’re the kind of farms that people love to love. Also, I’ve heard that many tie-stall dairies do untether their cows to graze for a few hours a day in good weather, so to the extent that that’s true, it sets these farms apart from conventional veal and pig producers, whose animals are confined 24/7. But I haven’t seen any hard data on what percent of tie-stall operations allow grazing, and in any case, it’s not like you can find out whether your Cheez Whiz came from a tied-up cow by reading the label.
So will tie stalls become the next target of farm animal welfare activists? Despite the factors that distinguish them from veal and sow crates, I think it’s only a matter of time.
Putting an old saw to rest August 6, 2012
Posted by Angelique in Animal welfare.Tags: agriculture, animal ag, Animal welfare, Food ethics, pigs
3 comments
“It just makes sense to treat my animals well. If I don’t treat them well, they won’t produce. So for me to make a living, I have to do right by my animals.” I’ve heard this reassurance put a number of ways by a number of livestock farmers. It’s meant to make nonsense of the view that the way farmers raise animals on conventional modern mega-farms is cruel. If that were true, the logic goes, those farms would be out of business, because unhappy animals won’t deliver the meat and milk the farmer sells.
As I’ve said before, that logic may have worked before farmers started routinely administering antibiotics and hormones to their animals, but it doesn’t fly anymore. And a recent assessment of loading processes for pigs leaving their farms (in most cases, headed for the slaughterhouse) proves it – though that wasn’t really the point of the study. Scientists up in Saskatchewan, CA observed ten different farms loading pigs onto trucks to document the facilities, tools, and tactics that worked the best. Some solid practical tips for ramp design, lighting, etc. came out of it. Notable for farmers and people working in livestock transport, a big yawn for the rest of us.
But what is interesting for the rest of us is an implication of one of the research team’s findings. The researchers noted that prod use – that is, swatting the pigs with electric or non-electric rods to move them onto the trucks – was counterproductive. In fact, stated the scientists, the farm where prods were used the most had the longest load time. Why? It turns out that “…when the prod is used frequently, pigs become less capable of responding and attempt to turn back.”
Now, all of the farms visited by the researchers were renowned for their good practices, and prod use in general was very low. But what I’m wondering is, if hitting and poking pigs with sticks is counterproductive, why would anyone be doing it in the first place? According to Farmer Joe, economic self-interest is supposed to guarantee that farmers treat animals well, but every prodded pig is a piece of evidence that it doesn’t. Economically rational farmers should want to load their pigs as quickly as possible, so they should eschew the prod – but they don’t, not even in farms pre-selected for their good practices.
Part of the problem is ignorance, ignorance that studies like this one will hopefully dispel. We can hope that people who simply don’t know that prodding pigs is counterproductive will stop doing it once they see the light. But people have been herding animals for centuries, indeed millennia, so I can’t believe that ignorance is the whole story here. The other problem is that we’re not rational economic agents, we’re human beings. Sometimes we haven’t had our coffee or are sweating in hundred-degree heat or just don’t give a crap, and we slip up. If we’re working in a textile mill that might mean we rip up a sweater, but if we’re working on a livestock farm, that might mean we abuse a pig. How do we handle that?
Cows in the news July 30, 2012
Posted by Angelique in Animal welfare.Tags: agriculture, animal ag, Animal welfare, cows, Food ethics
add a comment
Some cows are getting more comfortable these days, some less. The “less” is easy to explain: the same heat wave that’s making all of us sweat is making cows, who don’t sweat anywhere but their noses and can’t dissipate heat very well, miserable. Cows start feeling the burn at about 80 degrees, so you can imagine what day after day in triple digits does to them.
Which gives us yet another argument for allowing cows to graze pasture rather than keeping them confined in feedlots, as most conventional dairies and beef finishers do. Pastures with shaded or breezy spots or watering holes allow cattle to cool themselves off. (Have to be careful about the water, though: thousands of pounds of cow mucking around in a riverbed can turn a pristine creek into a foul mess.) Bare dirt lots sectioned off as feedlots give cows no respite from the beating sun. Compounding the problem, sunlight reflecting off the dirt or concrete floors of feedlots warms things up even more. Barns with partial roof cover and misters to spray the cows with water can help.
While Midwestern cows are struggling through the dog days of summer, though, their cousins in the Pacific Northwest are living it up. Several Oregon farms have recently installed waterbeds to allow their cows to recline in comfort. Laugh all you want, but lameness is one of the biggest problems affecting modern dairy cows, who have to support their increasingly heavy bodies on unforgiving concrete. Straw bedding gets wet and dirty; sand bedding is expensive and leaves farmers with the problem of disposing of used sand. Enter the waterbed. If you drive by a dairy farm and glimpse a bunch of cows bouncing up and down inside the barn, you’ll know why.
Does standard practice count as abuse? July 23, 2012
Posted by Angelique in Animal welfare.Tags: agriculture, animal ag, animal rights, Animal welfare, Food ethics, pigs
add a comment
Mercy for Animals (MFA), a nonprofit dedicated to preventing cruelty to farm animals, has a proud history of recording and publicizing undercover videos at farms and slaughterhouses to expose their inhumane practices. Last November’s coverage of Sparboe Farms led Target to drop Sparboe as an egg supplier. Now MFA is putting the pressure on Walmart to stop buying pork from what it considers abusive sources. To that end, it just released a video called, intriguingly, “The Hidden Cost of Walmart’s Pork.” The video profiles Minnesota’s Christensen Farms, the third largest pig producer in the US and a Walmart supplier.
We can all agree that hurting animals just to get your rocks off is abuse. But no one on the Christensen Farms video is doing that. Almost everything shown is standard industry practice and is recognized as such by vets, animal welfare specialists, and everyone who works with livestock. Castrating piglets and docking their tails without anesthesia is a complete non-starter. In fact, castration is done without anesthesia even at the most humane small local farms. (Every single humane animal welfare certification program allows it.) Keeping breeding sows in gestation crates for most of their lives is also the norm, although many retailers have committed to pushing their suppliers to abolish the practice.
Killing unpromising piglets by slamming their heads against the floor is not only standard practice, it’s recommended by the American Veterinary Medical Association (AVMA). Why? Because when it’s done properly, death is quick and therefore relatively humane:
A blow to the head can be a humane method of euthanasia for neonatal animals with thin craniums, such as young pigs, if a single sharp blow delivered to the central skull bones with sufficient force can produce immediate depression of the central nervous system and destruction of brain tissue. When properly performed, loss of consciousness is rapid.*
(In the MFA video, the piglets who’ve been slammed on the floor are still kicking afterward, but that is no indication that they are still conscious. The proper procedure for determining consciousness is to look for eye movement.) The only thing I saw on the video which livestock vets would not condone was the presence of live piglets and mother pigs with serious injuries that appeared to have been left untreated.
So it’s important for consumers to know that for the most part, what’s on the video is not what anyone working in the industry would classify as abuse. This is in contrast to other videos MFA has released that show workers kicking, hitting, or throwing animals around. If you’re uncomfortable with what’s going on at Christensen Farms, you should stop eating conventional pork, period – because it doesn’t get any better than that. Go for pork that’s been certified by a strong animal welfare certification or from a farmer you know instead, or join the MFAers and go vegan.
* AVMA Guidelines on Euthanasia, June 2007, p. 13
The Humane Society: The money vs. the message July 16, 2012
Posted by Angelique in Food ethics.Tags: animal ag, animal rights, Animal welfare, Food ethics
1 comment so far
When you think of the Humane Society of the US (HSUS), what images come to mind? For a lot of Americans, stray cat and dog shelters probably top the list. In fact, the HSUS is primarily a huge lobbying organization which works to improve conditions for many kinds of animals by strengthening anti-cruelty laws and their enforcement. Lab animals, animals used for sport (e.g., cock-fighting), and farm animals all matter to the HSUS. The HSUS itself doesn’t operate any animal shelters, and the local organizations which do typically don’t get much money from the HSUS.
Recently the conventional livestock industry, which feels threatened by the HSUS’s push for stricter standards for the humane treatment of farm animals, has come up with a way to attack it by exploiting this discrepancy between what the HSUS does and what people think it does. The industry (which specific companies remains confidential) hired Rick Berman, a lawyer whose biggest-profile former client is the tobacco industry, to create a nonprofit called HumaneWatch to discredit the HSUS. Berman’s most recent tactic has been to invite the Attorneys General of a dozen states to sue the HSUS for misleading its donors. According to HumaneWatch, the HSUS “actively perpetuate(s) the misperception that HSUS’s primary focus is to care for abandoned and abused cats and dogs,” while only one percent of its budget goes to “hands-on shelters and rescues.”
The HSUS doesn’t make it easy to check up on the percent of funding that it allocates to each of its program groups. But HSUS president Wayne Pacelle has stated that it spends about twenty percent on pets. That figure includes not just what it spends on shelters and rescues, but also money used to address issues like puppy mills and pet overpopulation. The question is, does the HSUS mislead its donors into thinking that pets are a much higher priority? Being a donor to the HSUS, I receive its annual report and bi-monthly magazine as well as its (annoyingly frequent) solicitations for money. In its magazine, there is always at least one major story about farm animals. But there are many more stories on dogs and cats. There are also articles on lots of other topics, like the loneliness of dolphins in aquariums and the loss of prairie dogs’ habitat.
The HSUS website also covers a wide range of topics, and its work on farm animal abuse, complete with video coverage of its undercover investigations, is featured quite prominently. Taking into consideration both its print and electronic presence, I’d say the HSUS comes off as an organization with wide-ranging animal concerns, but where cats and dogs figure at least as prominently as any other group. What if we were to discover (and at this point, the information is not public, so it’s impossible to know) that the HSUS devotes twice as much money to farm animals as it does to pets? Would it then be guilty of misrepresentation? What do you think?
At loggerheads over antibiotics (and just about everything else) July 9, 2012
Posted by Angelique in Food ethics.Tags: agriculture, animal ag, Animal welfare, Food ethics
add a comment
How’s this for the title of a nice even-handed discussion of antibiotics in meat: Meat On Drugs (MOD). This analysis, published by the guys behind Consumer Reports, lambasts the meat industry for irresponsibly relying on the routine use of antibiotics to raise livestock. Last week, the meat industry struck back with a letter to Congress defending the practice. And I got depressed reading them both, because they show just how polarized the debate over antibiotic use – and many of the debates about using animals for food – are. Both sides deliberately mislead. You almost feel sorry for the lawmakers who have to wade through this stuff to make decisions.
For starters, MOD trots out the oft-heard but little-sourced statistic that 80% of antibiotics sold in the US are used on livestock. The industry points out that 40% of antibiotics used on livestock are not suitable for (and therefore not used on) humans. These claims don’t contradict each other, so why are we having a “debate” over them? We use lots of antibiotics in the US; some are appropriate only for animals and some for both animals and humans; of the total, 80% are used on animals.
MOD uses the inflammatory term “factory farm”; the industry points out that 97% of farms in the US are family-owned, not “corporate.” Another meaningless debate. Family farmers usually find it useful for tax purposes to incorporate their farms, so family farms ARE corporate farms. The distinction we really want to draw is between CAFOs (Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations) and non-CAFOs, or between conventional farms and alternative ones.
Here’s where I start taking sides, because after all, I am against routine antibiotic use, although we have to be careful what sort of system we’d replace it with. MOD asserts that farmers use antibiotics to make their animals grow faster (for the uninitiated, it has been scientifically demonstrated that even healthy animals grow faster given antibiotics) while the industry says that only 13% of all antibiotics administered are for this purpose. The other purposes are for treatment, control, and prevention of disease, purposes which we are presumably supposed to feel are perfectly reasonable.
Disease treatment, OK, I see that. We use antibiotics to treat human diseases too. But can you imagine doctors prescribing antibiotics to all of us, every day, to prevent us from getting sick? Wouldn’t we balk at the likelihood of antibiotic-resistant disease strains developing? And how bad would the conditions we were living under have to be to make antibiotics necessary just to keep us going?
This relates to the final point that the industry makes against MOD: that MOD’s claim that livestock live in crowded and unsanitary conditions is just silly. On the contrary, the industry assures us, it’s just common sense to provide animals with the best possible living conditions, so they’ll be as productive as possible. Modern confinement systems allow farmers to prevent many types of disease and injury that animals in the great outdoors suffer from.
There’s enough truth in that to make it plausible, but not enough to make it right. Yes, CAFOs have reduced some health problems, and yes, they have produced extraordinarily productive animals. However, they are always crowded and often unsanitary. The animals are able to survive and be productive in such conditions precisely because they are routinely fed antibiotics. The effectiveness of antibiotics has allowed operators of CAFOs to maximize productivity without having to bother with good animal husbandry, which is labor-intensive and therefore quite expensive. Want some common sense? How’s this: farmers wouldn’t pay for routine antibiotics if they didn’t need them. And the fact that they do need them – that’s how you know there’s a problem.
From Animal To Meat 