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

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СКАЧАТЬ many scientists are extremely concerned about their use in animal farming, acknowledging that we know very little about many of the potentially dangerous effects of these substances. The factory experts, however, look through very different eyes. When they first realized the new drugs gave them the power to control a sow’s estrus, and thus to induce or delay her fertility, they were overjoyed.

       Estrus control will open the doors to factory hog production. Control of female cycles is the missing link to the assembly line approach.

       —FARM JOURNAL30

      One pork producer was so taken with this new development that he called it the greatest advance in hog production since the development of antibiotics.31

      Another new innovation that has the industry astir is called embryo transfer.³² Here a specially chosen sow is dosed with hormones to cause her to produce huge numbers of eggs, rather than the usual one or two. These eggs are fertilized by artificial insemination, then surgically removed from the sow and implanted in other females. It is not uncommon for a breeder sow to go repeatedly through this unnatural violation until the stress kills her.

      At the University of Missouri, work is being done in test tubes to combine sperm and eggs that have been taken from specially selected breeding animals.³³ The newly fertilized eggs are then implanted surgically in ordinary females.

      Once a sow in today’s pork factories is pregnant, she is injected with progestins or steroids to increase the number of piglets in her litter. She will also be given products like the new feed additive from Shell Oil Company. Called XLP-30, it is designed to “boost pigs per litter,”³⁴ though it has a name that makes it sound like it should be added to motor oil instead of animal food. Incredibly, a Shell official acknowledges—“we don’t know why it works.”³⁵ Undeterred by such ignorance, however, the industry is not at all reluctant to tamper with the reproductive systems of the animals whose flesh is designed for human consumption. Anything that can speed up the assembly line and improve profits is considered fair practice.

       A Life of Suffering

      It is difficult for us to fathom the suffering of today’s pigs. They are crammed for a lifetime into cages in which they can hardly move, and forced against their natures to stand in their own waste. Their sensitive noses are continuously assaulted by the stench from the excrement of thousands of other pigs. Their skeletons are deformed and their legs buckle under the unnatural weight for which they have been bred. Their feet are full of painful lesions from the concrete and slatted metal floors on which they must stand.

      I have looked into their eyes and I can tell you it’s a terrifying sight. These sensitive, tortured creatures have been literally driven mad.

      In this respect, they are similar to the chickens who live in today’s “chicken heavens.” Chickens, you may remember, when forced into unbearably crowded conditions, go crazy and develop “vices” such as feather-pecking and cannibalism. Forced into equally bizarre conditions, pigs are likewise driven completely out of their minds. One reporter noted:

       Some animals may become so fearful that they dare not move, even to eat or drink. They become runts and die. Others remain in constant, panicked motion, neurotic perversions of their instinct to escape. Cannibalism is common in swine… operations.36

      One of the most common problems in modern pork factories is known in the trade as “tail-biting.” The trade journals are full of discussions about tail-biting and what to do about it. When I first heard the phrase “tail-biting,” I rather naively pictured some kind of playful nipping at little, curly, pink tails. But I have since learned how very far from the mark I was. “Tail-biting” is the industry’s term for the deranged and desperate actions of powerful animals driven berserk by the frustration of every single one of their natural urges.

       Acute tail-biting… frequently results in crippling, mutilation, and death…Many times the tail is bitten first, and then the attacking pig or pigs continue to eat further into the back. If the situation is not attended to, the pig will die and be eaten.37

      Tail-biting, naturally, disturbs the managers of the pork factories, who can’t sell a pig that’s been eaten by another pig. Not being the types to sit back and let a disaster like that occur, they’ve come up with a number of bizarre solutions.

      One strategy is to keep the pigs in total darkness. A March 1976 edition of Farm Journal carried an article titled “Cut Light and Clamp Down on Tail Biting.” This report reassured pork producers:

       They can still eat—total darkness has no effect on their appetites.38

      The preferred method of preventing tail-biting in today’s pork factories, however, is a trick the pork producers picked up from the poultry men. They can’t, of course, de-beak pigs, because pigs don’t have beaks. But they have found another way of preventing tail-biting that, like chicken de-beaking, does absolutely nothing to correct the grotesque conditions that give rise to the behavior in the first place.

      They cut off the pigs’ tails.

      This practice, known in the trade as “tail-docking,” is now standard operating procedure in United States pork production.³⁹ Its application is nearly universal today, despite the fact that it causes severe pain to the animals and drives them even crazier. I asked one pork farmer about tail-docking, and he replied, somewhat angrily:

       They hate it! The pigs just hate it! And I suppose we could probably do without tail-docking if we gave them more room, because they don’t get so crazy and mean when they have more space. With enough room, they’re actually quite nice animals. But we can’t afford it. These buildings cost a lot.40

      This farmer’s remarks don’t reflect his thoughts alone. They are typical of the rationale behind virtually all of the steps being taken today toward even more mechanized pork production. Having invested great sums of money in confinement buildings and automated feeding systems, today’s producers feel they must use every trick in the book to get the maximum number of piglets per sow and cram as many pigs as possible into the buildings.⁴¹

      In fact, the trade journal Hog Farm Management has an even better idea than the parking lot–like stalls. How about stacking the pigs in cages, one on top of another, like shipping crates? Just think how many more animals you could get in a building this way. Explaining the brilliance of having not only wall-to-wall pigs but floor-to-ceiling pigs as well, the journal reasoned:

       There’s too much wasted space in a typical controlled-environment single-deck nursery. The cost of the building is just too big a cost factor. Stacking the decks spreads the building cost out over more pigs.42

      A number of today’s largest pig factories have been so impressed with this idea that they’ve wasted no time in employing it. You might not think that it would make that much difference to a pig who is already crammed into a cage so small he can hardly move, whether there are other pigs above him in the same plight. But it does. The excrement from the pigs in the upper tiers falls steadily on the pigs in the lower tiers.

       Anger and Tears from a Pork Producer

      It’s actually gotten to the point that many of today’s pig farmers are being forced to do things even they find abhorrent. I’m not talking now about people who are particularly empathetic toward animals. I’m referring to people who long ago came to accept bashing an animal’s brains out or slitting its throat as all in a day’s work. These are hardened veterans of the everyday СКАЧАТЬ