These are excerpts from a book called Righteous Porkchop - you can buy the book here and check out the website here.
*Today, hormones for beef animals are even more popular, being used on an estimated 90 percent of cattle in feedlots, usually in the form of a time release pellet, implanted subcutaneously in the animals ears.
*Interestingly, because of human health concerns, the United States has banned the use of growth hormones in poultry and pork production - however there are currently no signs of the us disallowing hormones for beef cattle.
*Cattle are strictly herbivorous by nature. Yet in 1951 animal by-products (the meats, organs,bones and chicken feathers leftover at slaughterhouses) became common additives for both dairy and beef cattle feedlots. In 1997 (almost 10 years after scientists connected feeding animal by-products back to cows to mad cow disease) the United States finally outlawed feeding ground up ruminants (sheep and cattle) back to cattle. U.S. regulations still allow feeding cattle other meats such as pig and poultry, and allow feeding all meat and bone by-products to farmed fish, poultry, pigs and sheep.
*In 1909 a milk cow produced an average of 2,902 pounds of milk each year. In 2005, cows gave an average of 19,951 pounds of milk a year. In other words, over the course of the twentieth century, the dairy cows average production was increased by a factor of seven. A 2004 Wisconsin university study says "Improved genetics accounts for about half of the annual increase in U,S, per cow milk production. But one does have to wonder: What is meant by improved when dairy cows have trouble walking due to oversized udders and epidemic levels of lameness, and are routinely sent to slaughter before the age of four, several years before even reaching their peak milking age of six to eight?
*Among the common feed additives listed in the Trades Official 1994 Feed Industry red book were the following animal by-products: Blood meal (coagulated packing house blood which has been dried and ground into meal), poultry feather meal, fish meal, meat and bone meal, poultry by-product meal (necks, feet, underdeveloped eggs, and intestines). Typical feed rates for the additives listed above are between a half-pound and two pounds per day per cow.
*Some "organic" dairies are big confinement facilities with large manure lagoons. To qualify as organic, dairies have not been required by the USDA to truly keep their cows on pasture. Rather, they only have to provide some outdoor access, use feed that has been grown without chemicals, and follow certain restrictions with respect to veterinary care.
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Not all organic milk is created equal! For example, some of the milk marketed as "organic" by Horizon foods comes from a supplier milking 10,000 cows, in a feedlot in Pixley, California. Click on this link to find out how organic your "organic" milk really is:
The Cornucopia Institute organic dairy report
And read more about the organic milking industry here
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*Cage free eggs are not kept in the small, wire mesh boxes (battery cages) that are standard in today's egg industry. But "cage free" operations are not required to provide hens access to the outdoors and most do not. The facilities tend to be huge, extremely crowded industrial contract growing operations. Eggs labeled "organic" must come from hens provided only organic feed (which does not contain slaughterhouse wastes, antibiotics or genetically modified grains - unlike all other egg producers). It specifies that animals have some access to the outdoors, to exercise, and bedding. Unfortunately, some companies do the bare minimum, and the outdoor space they provide laying hens may be small cement or gravel areas, not the roomy pastures you would expect. "Free range" requires only that poultry raised for meat have access to the outdoors (although not pasture) and the term is wholly undefined for laying hens. Thus, egg companies can legally claim to be "free range" even without providing hens any outdoor access.
*The USDA currently requires only that the meat labeled "natural" be minimally processed - how the animal was raised (feedlots for cows, metal crates for pork) is given no consideration.
*Starting in the 1930's, hatcheries began to check the sex of baby chicks as soon as they emerged from their shells. For many egg laying breeds, males were considered worthless; in many locations they are simply thrown away. Around that time, hatcheries began drowning two million day old chicks every year. How could a system be considered progress when it throws away millions of newborn animals every year - one of every two live births.
*Poultry began to be provided mash that included ingredients like excess fish and slaughterhouse waste. When operators noticed the confined, mash eating chickens were collectively losing their appetites, it became a common practice to add arsenic to feed. Arsenic of course is a poison yet in low doses it acts as a powerful appetite stimulant.
*Keeping hens in battery cages, and away from sunlight and vegetation changed the nutritional qualities and appearance of the eggs. Yolks lost their omega -3's and took on a dull, grayish look instead of the yellow hue one expects. To correct the problem, egg producers began adding red dye to hen feed to make the yolks look yellow. This is still a widespread practice today.
Ready for more? The following excerpts and information came from a book called Food Inc: A participants guide. The book can be found here and more information about Food Inc can be found here.
Animal feed - you are what you eat....and what they ate:
*70 percent of all antibiotics used in the US are fed to livestock. This accounts for 25 million pounds of antibiotics annually, more than 8 times the amount used to treat disease in humans.
*Animal feed has long been used as a vehicle for disposing of everything from road kill to "offal" such as brains, spinal cords and intestines. Scientists believe that Mad cow disease is spread when cattle eat nervous system tissues, such as the brain and spinal cord, of other infected animals. People who eat such tissue can contract variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, which causes dementia and ultimately death. Unlike other food borne illnesses, consumers can not protect themselves by cooking the meat or by any other type of disinfection. In 1997 the FDA instituted a feed ban to prevent the spread of disease. Although this ban provides some protection for consumers, it still allows risky practices. For example, factory farm operators still feed poultry litter to cattle. Unfortunately, poultry litter, the waste found on the floors of poultry barns, may contain cattle protein because regulations allow for feeding cattle tissue to poultry. And cattle blood can be fed to calves in milk replacer - the formula that most calves receive instead of their mothers milk. In 2004 the FDA had the opportunity to ban these potential sources of the disease from cattle feed, but instead proposed a weaker set of rules that only restricted some tissues from older cattle. In the fall of 2006, the USDA decided to scale back testing for mad cow disease. Now, only 40,000 cattle, one-tenth the number tested the year before, will be tested annually.
Promoting growth at any cost:
*With the approval of the USDA and the FDA, factory farms in the USA use hormones and antibiotics to promote the growth and milk production in beef and dairy cattle. Regulations do prohibit the use of hormones in pigs and poultry. Unfortunately, this restriction doesn't apply to antibiotic use in those animals. An estimated two-thirds of all US cattle raised for slaughter are injected with growth hormones. 6 different hormones are used on beef cattle. In 1999 a report found that residues in meat from injected animals could affect the hormonal balance of humans, causing reproductive issues and breast, prostate and colon cancer. Milk from cows injected with rBGH has higher levels of another hormone called IGF-1. Elevated levels of IGF-1 in humans has been linked to colon and breast cancer.
Animal welfare:
*Pigs on factory farms are confined in small concrete pens, without bedding or soil or hay for rooting. The stress of being deprived of social interaction causes some pigs to bite the tails off of other pigs. The factory farm operators respond by cutting off their tails.
*Chickens stand in cages or indoors in large pens, packed so tightly together that each chicken gets a space about the size of a sheet of paper to itself. Chickens are not given space to graze and peck at food in the barnyard, so they resort to pecking each other. Many factory farmers cut off their beaks, a painful procedure that makes it difficult for chickens to eat.
The following is a list compiled by The Humane Society, follow the link below to learn more:
The Dirty Six: The Worst Practices in Agribusiness (via The Humane Society)
In just one hour in the United States, more than one million land animals are killed for food. Before their slaughter, most of these farm animals—nearly 10 billion each year—endure lives of abuse with virtually no legal protection at all. Considering this staggering figure, the mistreatment of farm animals is among the gravest animal welfare problems in the nation. Instead of being recognized as the social, intelligent individuals they are, chickens, pigs, cows, turkeys, and other animals are treated as mere meat-, egg-, and milk-production units and denied expression of many natural behaviors. And six standard agribusiness practices are the most egregious of all.
1. Battery Cages
In the United States, approximately 95% of egg-laying hens are intensively confined in tiny, barren "battery cages"(click on link to view video)—wire enclosures stacked several tiers high, extending down long rows inside windowless warehouses. The cages offer less space per hen than the area of a single sheet of paper. Severely restricted inside the barren cages, the birds are unable to engage in nearly any of their natural habits, including nesting, perching, walking, dust bathing, foraging, or even spreading their wings.
While many countries are banning the abusive battery cage system, U.S. egg producers still overcrowd about 300 million hens in these cruel enclosures.
2. Fast Growth of Birds
More than nine out of ten land animals killed for human consumption in the United States are chickens raised for meat—called “broilers” by the industry. About nine billion of these birds are slaughtered every year. According to poultry welfare expert Ian Duncan, Ph.D., "Without a doubt, the biggest welfare problems for meat birds are those associated with fast growth." The chicken industry's selective breeding for fast-growing animals and use of growth-promoting antibiotics have produced birds whose bodies struggle to function and are on the verge of structural collapse. To put this growth rate into perspective, the University of Arkansas reports that if humans grew as fast as today’s chickens, we'd weigh 349 pounds by our second birthday.
Consequently, 90 percent of chickens raised for meat have detectable leg problems and structural deformities, and more than 25 percent suffer from chronic pain as a result of bone disease.
3. Forced Feeding for Foie Gras
French for "fatty liver," the delicacy known as paté de foie gras is produced from the grossly enlarged liver of a duck or goose. Two to three times daily for several weeks, birds raised for foie gras are force-fed enormous quantities of food through a long pipe thrust down their throats into their stomachs. This deliberate overfeeding causes the birds' livers to swell as much as 10 times their normal size, seriously impairing liver function, expanding their abdomens, and making movements as simple as standing or walking difficult and painful. Several European countries have banned the force-feeding of birds for foie gras, and the state of California is phasing it out. The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) states that the "production of fatty liver for foie gras . . . raises serious animal welfare issues and it is not a practice that is condoned by FAO."
4. Gestation Crates and Veal Crates
During their four-month pregnancies, 60 to 70 percent of female pigs, or sows, in the United States are kept in desolate "gestation crates"—individual metal stalls so small and narrow the animals can't even turn around or move more than a step forward or backward. The state of Florida and the European Union (EU) have already begun phasing out the use of gestation crates because of their inherent cruelty, yet these inhumane enclosures are still the normal agribusiness practice of most U.S. pork producers.
Similarly, most calves raised for veal are confined in restrictive crates—generally chained by the neck—that also prohibit them from turning around. The frustration of natural behaviors takes an enormous mental and physical toll on the animals. As with gestation crates for pregnant pigs and battery cages for egg-laying hens, veal crates are widely known for their abusive nature and are being phased out in the EU but are still in use in the United States.
5. Long-Distance Transport
Billions of farm animals endure the rigors of transport each year in the United States, with millions of pigs, cows, and "spent" egg-laying hens traveling across the country. Overcrowded onto trucks that do not provide any protection from temperature extremes, animals travel long distances without food, water, or rest. The conditions are so stressful that in-transit death is considered common.
6. Electric Stunning of Birds
At the slaughter plant, birds are moved off trucks, dumped from transport crates onto conveyors, and hung upside down by their legs in shackles. Their heads pass through electrified baths of water, intended to immobilize them before their throats are slit. From beginning to end, the entire process is filled with pain and suffering.
Federal regulations do not require that chickens, turkeys, and other birds be rendered insensible to pain before they are slaughtered. The shackling of the birds causes incredible pain in the animals, many of whom already suffer leg disorders or broken bones, and electric stunning has been found to be ineffective in consistently inducing unconsciousness.
One last bit of reading that was easily the most difficult for me to get through. There is a book called Slaughterhouse: The shocking story of greed, neglect, and inhumane treatment inside the U.S. meat industry. This book literally brought me to tears, and I will never in my life understand how people can be so cruel to a helpless animal. To buy the book go here, and to read an excerpt please go here. It shocked me to find out that animals are routinely de-skinned, de-hooved, and cut wide open while they are ALIVE and conscious. Male chicks at hatcheries are deemed unworthy of life, and either tossed in garbage bags to suffocate, or tossed into a meat grinder....ALIVE. Spent battery hens (egg layers) are often sucked up with a large vacuum type hose into a meat grinder....ALIVE. All because its "cheaper" and "easier" to dispose of them that way, rather than searching for a humane end for these miserable animals. After reading Slaughterhouse I can promise you that you will never look at nicely packaged meat at the grocery store the same way again.
If you have made it this far, it should be pretty easy to understand why we want to get away from factory farmed meat. Its not easy - the lure of cheap meat is in our blood at this point, and it can seem crazy to spend 2-3 times more money on grass fed, humanly raised meat. But just like organic fruits and vegetables, the price is worth it to us. Maybe we don't have as much money to spend on things like new sneakers and nice decorations for our house. But we do have food free of chemicals and pesticides, food that isn't filled with antibiotics or hormones (especially scary if you have a little girl). Our food costs more...but we are worth it, our health is worth it, and the animals are worth it.
At the end of the Food Inc documentary, the filmmakers pointed out that we can vote with our dollars. Our family is casting our vote for local, sustainable, humanly raised, family farmed food. I hope that one day, everyone will join us, and together we can make the change that is so desperately needed.