The Only Way Out

I've been hearing a lot of folks talking about the idea that if we just go back to small-scale, humane methods of farming animals, we will solve the problems associated with factory farming. Michael Pollan, Barbara Kingsolver, and many other animal welfare advocates support this ideology. Sounds quaint, but does it work?

Well, first, let's look at it from an animal welfare viewpoint, my personal favorite, of course. Is it humane to bring something to a premature death for the sake of one's taste buds? Pigs are killed at around the human equivalent of twelve years of age, before they are even teenage pigs who rock out to hard metal and hate their parents for a few years.

F the PoPo!

It's simply unfair, and there can be no standards for welfare in this system. As one PETA employee interviewed in Eating Animals puts it, that would be the equivalent of legalizing child labor and simply trusting that each employer would treat its child employees humanely and fairly. It just doesn't make very much sense. It's still needless killing.

I know that not everyone shares my viewpoint. But even if you can dismiss the inhumanity of raising animals for food in principle, small farming of animals on a large scale is logistically impossible. For example, (and, unfortunately, I can't recall the source of this information, so I apologize) based on the amount of chicken Americans consume, all of the chicken raised on small farms in the entire country at this moment would only be enough to sustain Staten Island. That's an incredible figure, but it's a fact. So please, explain to me how our country's small farmers would ever be able to sustain the appetites of an entire country, let alone a largely obese country. They could not.

As professor James McWilliams argues in this article, the only way we will ever truly end factory farming is to make meat socially unacceptable. And really, with the amount of problems that factory farming causes for humankind and the environment, it should be socially stigmatized. Think about the reasons for the US working to make smoking socially unacceptable--it is hazardous to the smoker's life and to the lives surrounding him or her. And meat is different, how? It contains carcinogens, it creates disease for everyone, whether someone eats it or not. I was struck with swine flu in 2009 (which has been essentially proven by geneticists to have come from a hog factory farm in North Carolina), but I've never had pork in my life. I don't think that's very fair. And I'm not just complaining because I was stuck on the couch for a week; this is a real problem. We're going to keep creating epidemics and pandemics like swine flu, mad cow disease, and avian flu if we don't change our behaviors. And, to make matters even worse, the antibiotics fed to animals make human antibiotics less effective. So, when everyone becomes horribly ill from these diseases we create through our farming practices, the only ones who will be able to be cured are people like me; those who abstain from antibiotic-infested animal products.

Arguably, eating meat is even worse than smoking cigarettes for your health, it's just that meat kills you more slowly than cigarettes. It is far worse for the environment and other people than smoking could ever be. So, will we start combatting factory farming by stigmatizing meat now, or will we wait until it's too late? How much longer should we have to be 'tolerant' of lifestyles that include meat? You can say that the diet is personal, that each person should just do whatever works for them. This is no longer an option. Desperate times call for desperate measures. If we are going to solve this environmental, human health, and animal rights crisis, stigmatization is truly the only way out.