Farmland

Animal Abuse in Factory Farms is the Norm, Not the Exception. Sami Grover, Treehugger:

Last year I wrote about research that shows that cows have best friends and suffer when separated. What was surprising about that study was not the results themselves—but the fact that people found this news at all.

We have become so desensitized to animal cruelty and industrial processing of farm animals, that most of us—myself included—need reminding that farm animals are sentient beings little different from our beloved pets at home. As evidenced by the outcry when a TV chef equated eating pork with eating puppies, the majority of us meat and dairy eaters would desperately like to hold on to the notion that farm animals are somehow "different", and hence can be treated as a pure commodity.

Riffing off the book Every Twelve Seconds by Tim Pachirat, Mark Bittman penned an excellent piece last week in the New York Times, explaining the human cost of animal suffering, and demonstrating how it's the system's routine normalization of suffering, not the outlying cases of abuse, that should be the largest cause for concern:

What makes “Every Twelve Seconds” different from (for example) a Mercy for Animals exposé is, says Pachirat, “that the day-in and day-out experience produces invisibility. Industrialized agriculture perpetuates concealment at every level of the process, and rather than focusing on the shocking examples we should be focusing on the system itself.”

At that point we might finally acknowledge that raising, killing and eating animals must be done differently. When omnivores recognize that our way of producing and eating meat reduces not only slaughterhouse workers but all of us to a warped state, we’ll be able to bring about the kind of changes that will reduce both meat consumption and our collective guilt.

Is there a connection between the institutionalization of the population (schools, prisons, cubicles), and the institutionalization of food production? Is there a connection between mass industrialized slaughter of animals and the industrialized slaughter of human beings (the Holocaust, aerial drone executions, etc.)? Is this the end result of "progress?" What is the human cost of our approach to the natural world? The Human Cost of Animal Suffering, Mark Bittman, The New York Times:

The most publicized stories about industrial agriculture represent the exceptions that prove the rule: the uncommon torture of animals by perverse individuals in rogue operations. But torture is inherent in the routine treatment of animals as widgets, and the system itself is perverse. What makes “Every Twelve Seconds” different from (for example) a Mercy for Animals exposé is, says Pachirat, “that the day-in and day-out experience produces invisibility. Industrialized agriculture perpetuates concealment at every level of the process, and rather than focusing on the shocking examples we should be focusing on the system itself.”

At that point we might finally acknowledge that raising, killing and eating animals must be done differently. When omnivores recognize that our way of producing and eating meat reduces not only slaughterhouse workers but all of us to a warped state, we’ll be able to bring about the kind of changes that will reduce both meat consumption and our collective guilt.

Pachirat says he has changed as a result of his experience, becoming increasingly interested in what he calls “distancing and concealment.” He now intends to work on those issues as they relate to imprisonment, war, torture, deployment of drones and other sophisticated weaponry that allow impersonal killing. And it’s because these connections make so much sense that we should look more carefully at how we raise and kill animals.

On a related note: The rights of dolphins, chimps, and other nonhuman persons (Smart Planet):

The fact that working out good criteria for nonhuman persons may be difficult is no excuse for failing to do it, however. My suspicion — and it is no more than that — is that even if the Declaration of Rights for Cetaceans runs out of steam, the questions of whether and how to recognize persons who aren’t Homo sapiens are going to keep coming up. Maybe we’ll face the problem someday with digital intelligences; maybe creations from biotech labs will pose it instead; maybe someone from the stars will compel us to return to it. The sheer number of ways it can pop up makes me think it’s inevitable.

My further hunch is that, notwithstanding the problems, cetaceans and at least some of the great apes will eventually be recognized as persons. In fact, this categorization will someday probably be regarded as so self-evident that future generations will look back on our ignorance of it with the incredulity that we have for societies that kept slaves.

Closer to home: Meet Claudia, The High Tech Cow (NPR):

Feeding has also gone high tech. Each cow is fed individually, according to its lactation cycle. The cows wear a special collars that work with a computerized system to deliver the right diet to the right cow.

"If she's at the stage of lactation where she's producing a lot of milk, she'll get a little extra grain there to help support her milk production," says Robert.

The feed itself is perfectly engineered to release nutrients throughout the cow's digestive tract. Think of each mouthful of grain as a little fleet of cargo planes, releasing its payload at just the right moment.

When you ask Robert what's driving all these innovations in dairy farming, he sounds indistinguishable from a factory owner.

"The free market forced that to happen," he says. "Because either you were going to make a lot of milk ... quickly and efficiently ... or you wouldn't be in business."

The Fulpers did it, which is why they are among the last remaining dairy farmers in upstate New Jersey. Those farmers who couldn't keep up with the changes are long gone.

And George Washington (no, not that one), has been on a tear with some obesity exposés:

The REAL Cause of the Global Obesity Epidemic

Animals and 6-Month-Old Infants Are Getting Fatter … Which Mean that It’s Something In the Environment

Study: Genetically Modified Corn Increases Body Weight in Rats

And see this: Your brain, your food, and obesity (BoingBoing):

We recently hosted an article by scientist and guest blogger Stephan Guyenet that explained how certain foods—those with a high calorie density, fat, starch, sugar, salt, free glutamate (umami), certain textures (easily chewed, soft or crunchy, solid fat), certain flavors, an absence of bitterness, food variety, and drugs such as alcohol and caffeine—could trip reward systems in the human brain. Those reward systems, then, encourage people to eat more of the foods that trigger the reward. The result, says Guyenet, is a cycle that could be the link between the American obesity epidemic and the rise of highly processed convenience foods, designed specifically to trip those neural reward systems.

This theory, and several related theories, are increasingly popular in the scientific community. This week, there's an opinion piece in the journal Nature Reviews Neuroscience that looks at the strengths and weaknesses of these theories and talks about what research needs to be done going forward.Sadly, you can't read this article unless you have a subscription to Nature Reviews Neuroscience (or pay them $32 for single article access). Luckily, Scicurious, a neuroscientist and an excellent blogger, has read the article, and has a nice run-down of what it's saying and what you should know.