In America, almost every meal contains meat or dairy. The people who consume these products usually don’t know where they come from. Most American’s don’t realize what has to happen in order for their milk to be in their refrigerator and steak on their plate. Factory farming is not suitable for American living and is a topic all American’s should know more about. What better way to stay healthy than to know more about the food you eat? The conditions in factory farms are very poor and can cause unhealthy meat to be sold everywhere. In factory farms animals are not only killed but go through severe pain before death just because it is the quickest and cheapest way to produce meat for us. The farms are big warehouses however they are always over populated causing unnatural diseases in our animals. How can someone think their food is healthy knowing how overcrowded these places are? Of course the animals are medicated, but with antibiotics that soon build immunity in their bodies that turn out to be worthless leaving the industry with no way to cure such abnormal diseases like mad cow (the meatrix). Just by taking a look at what happens in these places, a person can change perspectives completely about where they purchase their food. Of course there are laws that focus on protecting animals from cruelty but animals that are used for food (livestock) are not covered under these laws. The government makes animal rights laws because it is right to protect animals, but how can someone say a chicken or a cow is not an animal? Being an animal lover means loving all animals, not just the ones that don’t taste good. It is crucial that the new generation be knowledgeable of this subject so that in the future there could be a change in the way America eats.

Factory farms have become popular in this generation. Before the industrialization of agriculture, the meat and dairy products produced in America were all from small local farms, but soon the owners decided they wanted more money which meant faster food production. In factory farms the animals are packed so closely together that most can’t even turn around in their cage. This is necessary for two reasons; there is not enough room for the animals to run free so instead they must be packed close together and secondly, the animals are not supposed to move because when an animal is muscular the meat is tough and not as tender (adaptt). During these animals’ shortened life span they don’t taking any steps or even see the light of day until the last few hours before death and even then sometimes the animals are too weak to walk themselves to the slaughterhouse. Some of these animals end up dead before they reach the slaughter house, in this case those animals are then fed to the living animals in the factory farms. These animals are naturally supposed to eat grass or other natural foods not their own flesh and blood. The meat America eats today is very much different from the natural healthy meat from long ago.

Chickens aren’t even caged; instead thousands of them are thrown into a large room that is still not big enough to have their own space. Since the chickens are so closely packed they often fight with each other. Factory farming is such a harmful place that the workers needed to perform brutal tasks in order to prevent fights and disease within the animals in the warehouse. When a chicken is born they each need to go through a very excruciating process called de-beaking (removing the beak) which basically is as painful as a person losing a finger tip and because loosing their beak means making it harder to eat, many of the baby chicks die of starvation. The removal of the beak also prevents the chickens from harming each other when experiencing unusual panic attacks caused by their overpopulated habitat. The pain of this process doesn’t disappear right after it is done, in fact the pain actually lasts for about three weeks (Kentucky Fried Cruelty). Many chickens are injected with fast growing hormones which shorten their life span to two months from the regular ten to fifteen years. These injections also cause them to grow to the point where they can’t even lift their legs to walk, which also causes them starve to death because they can’t get to their food. Just living through the horrible conditions of the warehouse isn’t enough, the chickens are taken to a machine where their legs are clamped and they are held upside down. The chickens are then dipped into steaming water to remove their feathers, only after that will the ones still conscious finally have their throats slit to be free from the pain and suffering. This is just the pain that chickens experience, there are many other animals that are being mistreated as well.

Pigs, on the other hand, have to go through many unnatural processes for their “safety.” After birth piglets are held upside down and their tails are removed because tail biting is common in the overcrowded unnatural conditions of today’s farms. The second procedure for these baby pigs is for two to eight teeth to be cut off right in the gum line with a pair of wire cutter-like devices so when fighting they don’t break each others flesh. Another main reason for this procedure is because one mother that is producing more than enough milk must provide for over ten piglets and when the piglets do not have teeth it decreases the harm to the nipples. The reason the mother has to provide for ten piglets is because the overpopulated conditions that the pigs live in, the health problems they develop, the antibiotics they inject them with and the artificial hormones add on to the harms of always being artificially inseminated which causes a lack of milk production in their bodies and the real mother can sometimes not produce enough milk for her young. After this procedure is completed the piglets have a portion of their ears ripped out for marking. The last procedure is for each male piglet to have his testicles ripped out with no anesthetic. All pigs are held in small cages where they can’t even turn around with thousands of other pigs in cages around them transferring diseases to one another. The largest killer of pigs in the world gets paid eight billion dollars per year by killing eleven hundred pigs an hour (Peta).

The processes and conditions of male cows are much like pigs. Male cows have their horns sawed off and their testicles removed (And Nobody Gets Killed). However, female cows have to live under these inhumane conditions for longer than any other animal. Many American’s wonder, “How can milking a cow be cruelty to animals?” The truth is that unfortunately many Americans do not know that just like women, female cows only produce milk after giving birth. The cows in dairy farms must be forcefully artificially inseminated by long steel devices that shoot semen into their uteruses in order to produce enough milk to feed the whole world. Since the milk is going to human beings, the baby cows never get a taste of this and are fed a mixture of other dead cows’ blood and bones. Female cows grow to be the same milk producing machines as their mothers and the baby male cows are shipped off to veal companies which are only in business because of the dairy companies. When the cows produce milk they are hooked up to metal machines that suck out the milk from their utters. These machines are not the most comfortable; in fact they are painful for the cow and very unsanitary. The devices they use to squeeze the milk out of the utters are very hard to keep clean because they are used constantly in these overpopulated farms. The unsanitary devices cause infection in the utters and bacteria and puss to grow inside and around the utter. Even though our milk is sanitized it has been scientifically proven that puss still remains in the milk America drinks (Milk sucks). All this time the population has been told milk is good for the body but they failed to mention that the factory farms of today’s new America have taken away the natural healthy milk that people think they are consuming.

Because the conditions are so poor, there is a health hazard for meat from these places. The animals are fed antibiotics just to keep them breathing until they get to the slaughter house but as soon as the body builds immunity to the drugs the diseases are welcomed back into the body. It is impossible for meat from an animal that has lived in factory farming to be completely healthy. That animal has stood in the same spot its whole life and stepped in its own feces not once breathing a breath of fresh air. The animal is in no means natural being born from artificial insemination and fed hormones that make the body grow faster so their life ends up being less than half of their natural life span. It’s amazing to find out this kind of information at this point in our lives. It’s time to take down the blinders that have been put up for American’s and teach their youth to eat the real healthy food products.

The reason factory farming became so big in America is because America is the largest meat eating country in the world (Peta). These blinders have been put up on the population of America to tell them meat needs to be in a diet. Most people justify consuming meat by saying it is good for the body. Many people around the world have never eaten a bite of meat in their life and yet are still completely healthy. It is not necessarily unhealthy to have meat in a diet but most American’s have a larger amount than they should because it tastes so good. Another blinder that is put up by the people of America is the idea that cows make milk all the time when in fact they are just like humans and only produce milk after giving birth. Instead of this milk going to the life it was intended (the baby cows), Americans take it for themselves, not to be selfish but because of the unintentional blinders that have been put up to justify drinking this milk. One thing people wonder when finding out this information is, what causes this to happen?

Animals are killed so brutally because it is convenient. The mind set of the workers is basically to keep things as quick and cheap as possible because America needs to eat. Especially at places like Kentucky Fried Chicken and other fast food chicken and burger shops the workers are underpaid, and who wants to take their time and do quality work when they aren’t getting what they deserve? The animals are the ones that suffer for these workers not getting paid enough. Workers continually club animals who cannot produce what they need or who seem to be doing poor physically. If an animal is suffering, of course it would be best to put it out of its misery, but not by clubbing it which causes even more pain. At slaughter houses the cow or pig is hung upside down while the worker slits its throat and holds a bucket under it to catch the blood while waiting for the screaming and moaning animal to bleed to death. More innocent animals are killed in one year than all the humans in the past five thousand years.

The factory farms for fast food restaurants are the worst; they need a large amount of meat in a small amount of time and even smallest amount of money. The quickest way is to kill the animals in these cruel ways, to set ten cows up in a row and slit their throats so ten can be killed at a time, or in the case of chickens to pick up ten chickens and throw them in to a crate of fifty other chickens all sitting on top of each other. Another way to make production go faster is to give the animals artificial hormones that make their bodies grow faster. Having the largest amount available is the reason there are factory farms, to fit more animals inside a small area even if it means risking their health. The cheapest way is to not only underpay their workers but also to not pay for an anesthetic or any kind of method to kill animals in more ethical way than to club them or slit their throats. They also refuse to pay for a drug that can help the animal’s condition improve that won’t build immunity and can last the whole lifespan of the animal. This information is a lot to take in, but everyone and anyone can help the situation improve.

The biggest extreme that helps tremendously is veganism which is when people only eat food from the earth and not food from an animal. This means not eating meat or dairy products. Being vegan helps the demand in America for these products to go down and the need for factory farming to decrease. This is hard for any person to accomplish and sometimes takes years to become a complete vegan.

Another option is to cut down on the intake of meat and dairy products, by doing this a person can improve in health and also help reduce the need for factory farms. One last suggestion is to research the topic and spread the word. It is important not only to know how healthy the food is that goes into our body but also to know where it came from. Many people have decided to only consume products from local farms, free-range farms and/or organic farms so that these farms can maybe become more popular in the future and the reign of factory farming will die. There are many ways to help in this type of situation but not one thing that one person can do to change the process in a short period of time. This process takes a long time to start working and takes a lot of people to get involved. It is important to realize that every little bit counts and even making one little change is a step forward.

Factory farming has been an issue for a while but is just now coming to the attention of people in America. Hopefully in the near future most of American’s will know about this topic and do their best to try and improve these conditions. Watching a video of workers at factory farms is enough to make a person not want to eat any meat for weeks. Sometimes people don’t understand where they get their health problems when they think they have been eating right, but just by reducing meat intake a little and eating the food from other types of farms can help improve a person’s health status by reducing the risk of heart conditions and cancers. It reduces the amount of meat needed in America and opens the road back up for small locally owned farms where there is healthy meat and happier animals. It is important to remember that every little bit counts and working together can only help improve a problem. Taking that attitude “it happens and there’s nothing I can do about it,” is very naive because this means that when there is a problem in the world there is nothing anyone can do to fix it. If this is true then the world would soon be coming to an end. When there is a problem in the world anyone and everyone can do something to help. The most important thing is just to believe and to do the best in pulling the weight each person needs.

SOURCES

"And Nobyd Gets Killed." Dir. Gary Yourofsky and Kate Timko. DVD. PETA, 2004

"Animals Deserve Absolute Protection Today and Tomorrow." 2001.

<http://www.adaptt.org/index.html> (10 April 2006).

"Kentucky Fried Cruelty."

<http://kentuckyfriedcruelty.com/index.asp> (10 April 2006).

"Milk Sucks." 2005.

<http://milksucks.com> (25 April 2006).

"People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals."

<http://peta.org> (10 April 2006).

"The Meatrix." 2004.

<http://themeatrix.com> (20 April 2006).