In the poorly ventilated poultry sheds contagious diseases were rampant, and losses multiplied throughout the budding commercial poultry industry. Birds pecked others to death and ate their remains. Nightmarish scenes began to occur in the crowded sheds. Large-scale indoor production caught on fast around the urban market centres, but the new methods created a host of problems. When these were added to the feed, chickens could be raised indoors because they no longer needed sunlight and exercise for proper growth and bone development. These first mass-producers were able to turn out large flocks all the year round once poultry experts discovered the role of vitamins A and D. It began in the years before World War II, when farmers near large cities began to specialize in the production of chickens to meet the constant demand for eggs and meat. Right under our noses agribusiness has wrought a sweeping revolution in the ways in which animals are kept to produce meat, milk and eggs.
Moreover, the animal factory pulls our society one long, dark step backward from the desirable goal of a sane, ethical relationship with other beings and the natural world.
The factory farm is one of the more inappropriate technologies of this century: it requires high inputs of capital and energy to carry out a simple, natural process it causes a costly chain of problems and risks and it does not in fact produce the results claimed by its proponents. The new factory systems allow operators (not all farmers operate them and not all who operate them are farmers) to maintain a larger number of animals in a given space, but they have created serious problems for consumers, farmers and the environment, and they raise disturbing questions about the degree of animal exploitation that our society should accept. Health and productivity come not from frolics in sunny meadows but from syringes and additive-laced feed. On these factory farms there are no pastures, no streams, no seasons, not even day and night. In some of the more intensively managed ‘confinement’ operations, animals are crowded in pens and cages stacked up like so many shipping crates. Now, virtually all of our poultry products and about half of our milk and red meat come from animals mass-produced in huge factory-like systems. The reality of modern animal production, however, is starkly different from these scenes. We comfort ourselves with these bucolic images - images that are implanted by calendars, coloring books, and the countrified labelling and advertising of animal products. In our mind’s eye the farm is a peaceful, pleasant place where calves nuzzle their mothers in a shady field, pigs loaf in the mudhole, and chickens scratch and scramble about the barnyard.
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