The word human has an interesting history.  From the Proto-Germanic guman, through Old English, to the Old French humain and the Latin humanus, meaning “of or belonging to man”¹, the history of humanity has been dominated by the history of man.  Man, being given dominion over all living things, ordered the natural world to suit his need and fancy.  Humans were placed at the top of the pyramid of life.  All other life forms were subject to the demands of the human race.  This is evident not only in how and what we eat, but in how we treat animals that we raise for consumption.  One would think that American society would have learnt its lesson back in 1906 when reading Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle.  Stories of filth and contamination, along with the cruel treatment of animals, were a dominant theme in the novel which brought awareness and reform to the meat packing industry.  However, today’s factory farms and meat processing facilities are dominated by the cruel and inhumane treatment of livestock. Overcrowding, massive pushes for production, and human detachment from the plight of sentient beings other than humans has led to a new food crisis.

Food, Inc., a documentary released in 2008, explains many issues associated with modern farming, including how a two year old boy died from eating a hamburger contaminated with e coli at a Jack in the Box restaurant in Puget Sound.  The bacteria festers in the first stomach of cows which are intended to eat grass and not grain.  Their systems are not able to digest the grain.  It rots and stagnates in their stomachs producing bacteria.  This bacterium is passed out of their bodies via waste which is sprayed on crops, and it proliferates in ground beef². Mason and Finelli, two noted scholars who address animal rights issues note in their article Brave New Farm that “Liver abscesses are common in these animals because their digestive tracts are geared more to roughage than to the steady diet of high-energy grain and growth promotants that they receive”³. Grass is roughage, and our cows are no longer getting enough of it. Ranchers and regulators can see and quantify this feeding issue as one that affects both the welfare of cows and people, as can ordinary citizens.  Googling spinach recalls from e coli contamination returns upwards of 48,800,000 results, yet most people remain detached from the reality of the damage caused by forced diets aimed solely at cheap production.

Mason and Finelli enumerate many of the violent ways in which humans treat animals being raised for food production in their article.  A very disturbing example is how ducks used for foie gras are force fed a corn/fat mixture through a 12 – 16 inch tube for two to three weeks. The purpose is to fatten up their liver, which often swells to ten times its normal size and often ruptures³. Another is the treatment of calves used in veal production.  These calves are separated from their mothers, confined to a space as small as their bodies to prevent movement and muscle mass production, and fed only a milk replacer that leaves them starving for iron.  The goal is to keep their muscle white because this fetches a higher price at market. The ugly reality behind these practices is the disregard of the suffering of sentient beings to sate human appetites.  “In doing so we treat them merely as a means to our ends.  We regard their life and well-being as subordinate to our taste for a particular kind of dish”⁴, Peter Singer tells us in All Animals Are Equal. Imagine fattening up a human child to the point its internal organs ruptured to make a tasty dinner.  This would be unacceptable.  Treating an animal in this manner is simply a function of the perceived order of nature and social conditioning.  It is something we have the power to change.

Many other inhumane treatments of livestock stem from the demands of factory farming.  The killing of male chicks, the debeaking of birds, the tail docking of dairy cows, the overcrowding of chickens, pigs, cows, and other livestock, and the castration of animals all without anesthesia simply to ease the processes of mass production of food stuffs is enough to make a person turn vegan.  Or is it?  These issues have a broad reach that extends to and beyond equality between humans and animals, cultural norms, and dietary habits.  If the world of factory farming wasn’t hidden behind a corporate veil of power and greed, if people were rooted in the processes that bring dinner to their table, many of these inhumane practices would stop.  The very natures of our modern lifestyles drive power into the hands of a concentrated few that dominate the production scene.  The answer to this new food crisis is permaculture and small scale animal husbandry, coupled with a willingness to change our personal footprint.  All of this takes time, daily time – actual hours in a day that can be devoted to producing what we need to survive on a sustainable scale. Perhaps as humans we belong to more than man. Perhaps we belong to the entirety of the planet, taking our place in a web rather than perching atop a pyramid. A few hens in the backyard could easily produce a healthy daily breakfast, keep kitchen scraps in check, and provide dinner in a couple years, all while reducing dependence on factory farmed foodstuffs.

Will we find there are psychological and biological impacts to humans from consuming animals that have been traumatized their whole lives and then slaughtered?  It is very possible. When Upton Sinclair penned The Jungle, his primary goal was to draw attention to the deplorable working conditions of Americans in the meat packing industry. How much has changed for the workers at Purdue or Tyson who head in every day to cull male baby chicks and debeak females? They work in a death machine. In our endless demands to have more, we should demand that the contents of more itself contribute to our long term and daily happiness and well-being.

¹Online Etymology Dictionary. (n.d.). Retrieved November 6, 2014.

²Food, Inc. [Motion picture]. (2008). United States.

³Mason, J., & Finelli, M. (2006). Brave New Farm? In In Defence of Animals: The Second Wave (pp. 104-122). Oxford: Blackwell Publishing

⁴Singer, P. (1974). All Animals are Equal. Philosophical Exchange, 1, 103-116