Diet for a New America 25th Anniversary Edition. John Robbins

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СКАЧАТЬ it takes only one person to run the whole show. Another advantage of the system is that, with no room to move about, the pigs can’t burn up calories doing “useless” things like walking, and that means faster and cheaper weight gain, and so more profit.

      A typical example of Bacon Bin farming was happily described in the Farm Journal beneath the title: “Pork Factory Swings into Production.”¹⁴ The article begins proudly:

       Hogs never see daylight in this half-million dollar farrowing-to-finish complex near Worthington, Minnesota.15

      This is something to brag about?

       Pig’s Feet Modern Style

      Pigs’ feet and legs were designed to scratch for food, to kick or claw if needed for defense, and to stand and move on different kinds of natural terrain. But in today’s pig factories, the floors are either metal slats or concrete. Peter Singer and Jim Mason, authors of Animal Factories, the classic book on contemporary food-animal raising, have described what happens to pigs’ feet under these conditions.

       Pigs are cloven-hoofed animals, and, in most, the outer half of the hoof (“claw”) is longer than the inner half. Outdoors, the extra length is absorbed by the natural softness of the soil. On the concrete or metal floors of the factory pen, however, only the tissue in the foot can “give.” As a result, many confined pigs develop painful lesions in their feet which can open and become infected. Pigs with these foot sores usually develop… abnormal posture in an attempt to relieve the pain. Eventually, the crippling may worsen when this abnormal movement and weight distribution overworks joints and muscles in the legs, back, and other parts of the pig.16

      One Nebraska study showed that nearly 100 percent of all pigs raised on concrete or metal slats had damaged feet and legs.¹⁷ Providing bedding can reduce the problem,¹⁸ but bedding is rarely provided in the modern homes of the pigs destined to become America’s pork chops, because straw costs money, and the pain and suffering the pigs endure from damaged feet and legs is not figured into the financial equations that determine policy. Of course, the pork producers are aware that the animals are crippled by the flooring, but they are not disturbed. As the editors of Farmer and Stockbreeder explain:

       The slatted floor seems to have more merit than disadvantage. The animal will usually be slaughtered before serious deformity sets in.19

      In other words, the pigs are usually slaughtered before their deformities become so extreme as to affect the price their flesh will fetch. One producer summarized industry thinking rather colorfully.

       We don’t get paid for producing animals with good posture around here. We get paid by the pound!20

      As I look at the situation, I doubt whether the pigs who spend their painful lives on these devastating floors, hobbling about on distorted skeletons, are able fully to appreciate this kind of logic.

       Improving on Mother Nature

      It may not be wise to tamper with nature. It may even be disastrous. But you can be sure that if it’s profitable, someone is certain to give it a try. The leading edge in pork production these days is in getting more pigs per sow per year. The idea is to turn sows into living reproductive machines.

       The breeding sow should be thought of, treated as, a valuable piece of machinery, whose function is to pump out baby pigs like a sausage machine.

      —NATIONAL HOG FARMER, MARCH 1978²¹

      In a barnyard setting, a sow will produce about six piglets a year. But modern interventions have cranked her up to over 20 a year now, and researchers predict the number to reach 45 within a short time.²² Producers rave about the prospect of being able to force sows to give birth to over seven times the number of children nature designed them for.

      They’ve got it down to a science. First of all, piglets are taken away from their mothers much earlier than would ever occur in any natural situation. Without her babies to suck the milk from her breast, the sow will soon stop lactating, and then, with the help of hormone injections, she can be made fertile much sooner. Thus, more piglets can be extracted from her per year.

      Unfortunately, the poor sow is not up-to-date enough in her thinking to appreciate the wonders of a system in which she will spend her whole life producing litter after litter, only to have her babies taken away from her as soon as possible after each birth. The sow calls and cries for them, though her distressed sounds always go unheeded. Not having gotten the hang of modern factory life, she only knows that her whole being is filled with an inexorable instinct to find her lost babies and care for them.

      Most pork producers have found that they have to let the piglets suckle from their mother for a couple of weeks before taking them away, or else they die, which, of course, defeats the whole purpose. But at least one large manufacturer of farm equipment sees the waste in such an operation and is now strongly promoting a device it calls Pig Mama.²³ This is a mechanical teat that replaces the normal one altogether and allows the factory manager to take the piglet away from his mother immediately and get her back to the business of being pregnant, just a couple of hours after birth. Noting this development, Farm Journal said it was looking forward to “an end to the nursing phase of pig production.”²⁴ The result, they predicted gleefully, would be a

       tremendous jump in the number of pigs a sow could produce in a year.25

      For years now, pork breeders have also been hard at work developing fatter and fatter pigs. Unfortunately, the resulting products of contemporary pork breeding are so top-heavy that their bones and joints are literally crumbling beneath them.²⁶ However, factory experts see nothing amiss in this because there is additional profit to be made from the extra weight.

      There are, however, a few problems with the new model pig rolling across the assembly line in today’s pork factories that do concern the factory experts. Singer and Mason point out a few of these problems in Animal Factories.

       The pig breeders’ emphasis on large litters and heavier bodies, coupled with a lack of attention to reproductive traits, has produced… high birth mortality in these pigs. These new, improved females produce such large litters that they can’t take care of each piglet. To cure this problem, producers began to select sows with a greater number of nipples—only to discover that the extra nipples don’t work because there’s not enough mammary tissue to go around.27

      Not to be dismayed, however, the genetic manipulators are continuing their efforts to “improve” the pig and convert this good-natured and robust creature into a more efficient piece of factory equipment.

       Breeding experts are trying to create pigs that have flat rumps, level backs, even toes, and other features that hold up better under factory conditions.28

       Hormone City

      What they can’t accomplish with genetics, today’s pork producers shoot for with hormones. Hormones, as you may know, are incredibly potent substances that are naturally secreted, in minute amounts, by the glands of all animals, pigs and humans included. It takes minuscule amounts of these substances to control our entire endocrine and reproductive systems. If our taste buds were as sensitive to flavor as our target cells are to hormones, we could detect a single grain of sugar in a swimming pool of water.²⁹

      Given the immensely powerful effects that hormones have on animals’ reproductive systems, СКАЧАТЬ