How Can We Help Chickens and Other Farmed Animals?
From All-Creatures.org Animal Rights/Vegan Activist Strategies Articles Archive
In the capitalist farming economy, the animals are
objects who exist only to make money and be consumed. The only true solution
is to wean people from animal products and grow the vegan economy.
Baby
rooster in transport crate on the way to being slaughtered seeks comfort -
Image by Jo-Anne McArthur/We Animals
The following points were made in an Interview I did this month with a
student at the University of Minnesota for her research project on factory
farms. Her questions are implicit in my answers. – Karen Davis
- There are many ways to make the public aware of the suffering and abuse
taking place inside factory farms. The internet has a lot of undercover
investigative footage including on Facebook sites and organizational
websites. See, for example,
Videos & Presentations. At the University of
California in Berkeley, we periodically set up Pay-Per-View video stations
where we pay each student one dollar to view scenes of animal suffering and
abuse on the farms and in the slaughterhouses: chickens, turkeys, pigs,
cows, ducks and others, as well as fish. We also leaflet our brochures to
people on the street and take advantage of opportunities to start or expand
a conversation about how animals live and die in these terrible places.
- The impression that chickens, turkeys and other “poultry” are not
intelligent enough to deserve respect is mistaken. Not only is there plenty
of anecdotal evidence to the contrary, including from sanctuaries such as
ours in Virginia, and Chicken Run Rescue in Minnesota; modern cognitive
animal science shows that these birds are as intelligent and sensitive as
other animals, including mammals.
Animal scientist Lesley J. Rogers, in
The Development of Brain and Behaviour
in the Chicken, provides detailed documentation of the cognitive complexity
of chickens. My own books, including Prisoned Chickens, Poisoned Eggs;
More
Than a Meal: the Turkey in History, Myth, Ritual, and Reality; and For the
Birds: From Exploitation to Liberation, contain well-documented information
about the intelligence and emotional repertoire of chickens, turkeys, ducks
and other “poultry.” See our webpage
Thinking Like a Chicken for the many
articles we’ve posted on intelligence and emotional complexity in these
birds.
I will also point out that, ethically, the degree of intelligence, to the
extent it can be determined, should not be a factor in how we treat any
creature of any species. All creatures have sensitivity to what they need
and to what is happening to them, for better or worse. There are plenty of
human beings who are not very intelligent, but that is no reason to mistreat
them.
- Ag-Gag legislation has not significantly affected United Poultry Concerns
except insofar as the legislation has prevented undercover information from
being obtained that might otherwise have been available. We do not normally
conduct these types of investigations, although we have openly visited
several farms and a Tyson chicken slaughterhouse and gotten a great deal of
information from these visits. One thing we’ve learned from our own and
other investigations of “cage-free” operations and the like is how
fraudulent the claims of “humane” treatment typically are. See, for example,
Free Range.
- Factory farming provides enormous quantities of animal products and plant
produce cheaply. The only way billions of people can have endless quantities
of animal flesh, mammary products (dairy), and eggs is to raise the animals
in vast numbers, in squalid confinement facilities. Prices can be kept low
only if the scale of production is huge, so from that standpoint, factory
farming is an integral part of the U.S. and global economy, the same as mass
production of clothes, cosmetics and other retail items.
However, the economy does not need animal factory farms because people do
not need to eat animal products in order to be healthy. Human health and
environmental health benefit from a nutritious plant-based diet and vegan
economy. If people stopped consuming animal products, the economy would
simply shift to providing all the plant-based products people would be
consuming instead. Indeed, we are seeing a rapid growth of animal-free,
vegan foods in the marketplace. Just because people stop eating animal
products doesn’t mean we stop eating!
- In my view, all forms of animal farming are factory farming, since animals
raised and killed for human food are viewed and treated as commodities
rather than as individuals in their own right. If, for example, they aren’t
growing fast or big enough, or producing enough milk or eggs, the farmer
kills them or sends them off to the slaughterhouse. The animals are
completely under the control of their owner – the farmer or corporation,
which is the essence of all forms of slavery and commodification.
While we should do what we can to alleviate the worst cruelties inherent in
animal farming, we need to understand that little can actually be done to
reform this type of enterprise. The billions of chickens and other animals,
including aquatic animals. are simply too vast, and animal farming is a
global operation with no real oversight or government interest in oversight.
In the capitalist farming economy, the animals are objects who exist only to
make money and be consumed. The only true solution is to wean people from
animal products and grow the vegan economy. See:
Life Can Be Beautiful.
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