Factory farming causes significant damage to rural communities, surrounding environments, and the farmed animals themselves. Today, advocates from a broad range of backgrounds are increasingly calling for a shift away from these harsh industrial practices to give rise to a more just, equitable food system. This article will explore what factory farming is, what life on a factory farm is like for animals, and why major changes within this industry must be implemented.
Factory farms, also known as concentrated animal feeding operations CAFOs , are a modern industrial method of raising farmed animals, who are collectively known in industry parlance as livestock. At its core, factory farming is a form of intensive agriculture designed to maximize profits using as few resources as possible. On factory farms, large numbers of animals are confined in small spaces, which often means keeping animals indoors for the duration of their lives.
Factory farming is an increasingly common way to raise animals for food, focusing on species such as cows, pigs, chickens, and fish. CAFOs can also be used to farm animals for non-food purposes, such as minks farmed intensively for their fur.
On factory farms, animals are not given any choice about how to live their lives. They're raised to grow quickly so that they can be turned into products as swiftly as possible. Various bodily mutilations, extremely tight and crowded confinement, and lives spent entirely indoors are routine aspects of life for factory-farmed animals. Inhumane treatment occurs on factory farms wherever animal cruelty is ignored, though definitions of cruelty vary widely between stakeholders.
For example, definitions of animal cruelty used by the CEOs of big meat companies will differ drastically from those used by grassroots animal advocates. While producers often claim to root out inhumane treatment of farmed animals wherever possible, many advocates believe that factory farms are inherently inhumane. When routine factory farming practices are taken into consideration, such as separating mother cows from infants, which often results in mothers crying for days; castrating male animals without anesthetics; or never once allowing animals to experience the outdoors—save for a terrifying journey in the back of a truck on the way to the slaughterhouse—there is little about the experience of farmed animals in the factory farming system that appears to be humane.
The way humans use our hands to explore our environment, chickens use their beaks, pecking at food and other objects 14, to 15, times each day. In factory farms, this behavior can take an ugly turn. When chickens are faced with certain conditions—like overcrowding which prevents them from exploring their surroundings , boredom, and other hallmarks of CAFOs—they often turn this pecking behavior onto fellow chickens, resulting in injury, cannibalism, and even death.
Using a machine equipped with a hot blade, which in some operations can debeak as many as 15 chickens per minute, top beaks are cut either by half or two-thirds, while the bottom beak is trimmed by a quarter of its length. There is evidence that debeaking causes pain to chickens not only during the cutting but chronically throughout their lives.
Wild chickens, or those kept in non-intensive farming conditions, do not become cannibalistic or need their beaks trimmed to properly socialize with one another. Factory farming practices give rise to these abnormal behaviors. Animals on factory farms, such as cows, pigs, and sheep, routinely have their tails removed—a process known as tail-docking.
These procedures are generally carried out without anesthetics and are banned in certain regions because of the long-term pain they are believed to cause farmed animals. Photo: Andrew Skowron. Tail-docking is done for a number of reasons. Tail-docking is designed to remove the tuft of hair at the end of the tail that can lure other pigs to bite.
In cows, tail-docking is performed to make milking easier and more comfortable for workers. The dairy industry reports purported benefits for cows in terms of improved hygiene, but some studies refute these claims. Tail-docking is prohibited in several European countries, but many North American countries have yet to ban the practice.
Extreme confinement is the defining feature of factory farms. It causes boredom, frustration, stress, and other serious welfare concerns for farmed animals.
The most intensive confinement system for cows is called a tie stall and is used on dairy cows. Each cow spends all her time tied into a single stall, followed by a loose stall in which cows are allowed to roam around a small shed. Still, these cows spend their whole lives indoors. Some locations still use artificial stimulants to encourage additional weight for the animal too.
It even takes less food per day to reach the higher weight results, decreasing from three pounds to about 1. There is more aggression with dairy production in factory farming. The federal government in the United States has set the price of milk since the s, tying it to the value of a pound block of Cheddar cheese that sells on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange.
Because the dairy industry is now dominated by factory farming, it is much easier to manipulate the retail price for consumers. By being aggressive in production, there are more revenues to find at the expense of the cattle. Intensive farming changes the activities of the animals under its care.
Hens typically lay a single egg each day after they go through the molting process. If you force the chicken into darkness for up to eight hours without food or water, then a second egg is possible. Even though 1 in 10 will pass away because of this change to their routine, the outcome still boosts production levels for the organization running the factory farm.
Cattle might be artificially inseminated to produce milk earlier than they would if nature were allowed to take its course. Then the cows are kept in a constant state of pregnancy to ensure production levels stay the same.
If the dairy production dries up, then the factory farm sends her to slaughter and starts over with a different heifer. Genetic manipulation is a possibility at factory farms.
Factory farms embrace genetic engineering because it allows them to produce more products for the food chain without impacting their cost profile. That means the goal of this disadvantage is to make the animals become more useful for us. Selective breeding has already led to problems with milk production, weight in the breasts of chicken, and other welfare issues.
Large-litter breeding for sows produces a high piglet death rate. Family separations occur frequently with intensive farming methods. Piglets are weaned at the two-week mark because this encourages sows to be ready for another pregnancy faster than they would be otherwise. We slaughter lambs and calves for food.
Facilities that focus on dairy production take calves away from their mothers just days after birth to encourage more fluid milk production. Mothers frantically call for their offspring when this occurs, sometimes searching for days to locate their little ones that were taken away. There are incidents where herds purposely hid their calves from farmers because they feared that their little ones would disappear. Some have chased after transport trucks or broken through fences to reunite with them.
It is a highly stressful situation where the average lifespan of a dairy cow is just five years when it should be 20 because their bodies break down from the forced labor. Goats encounter this issue as well. Elodie Briefer, a post-doctoral research at the University of London found that mothers react to the calls of their kid from the previous year more than they do to familiar ones born to other females, indicating long-term memory of their offspring. Animals are prevented from expressing their natural behaviors.
Most animals that live in a factory farm receive restrictions from their natural behaviors because of the intensive methods used. Hogs and swine prefer to sit in the sun during the day, but they are kept indoors without access to mud that prevents them from rooting. Instead of grazing all day in a pasture, cows might receive hay while they stay indoors on ground that could be laden with waste that could impact hoof health.
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