When Colorado four years ago mandated that farmers provide more room for hogs and calves raised for veal, this state appeared to be a leader in the humane treatment of animals. It may still be a leader, but events of the past few weeks suggest the rest of the nation is rapidly catching up.
After all, Colorado’s requirement that a calf have enough room “to stand up, lie down, and turn around without touching the sides of its enclosure” only took effect this year. And the trigger date for a similar mandate for “gestating sows” won’t arrive until Jan. 1, 2018.
Meanwhile, according to The Associated Press, resistance nationally to more space for hogs has all but collapsed. Under pressure from consumers, activists and major buyers like McDonald’s, the wire service recently reported, “several major pork producers have agreed to phase out gestation crates and switch to more open pens.”
Even Smithfield Foods, the nation’s largest pork supplier, projects a total conversion to roomier stalls by 2017, a year before Colorado turns the corner.
Matthew Scully, a former speechwriter for George W. Bush who penned Sarah Palin’s acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention in 2008, once described Smithfield as “my candidate for the worst corporation in America in its ruthlessness to people and animals alike.”
“At the Smithfield mass-confinement hog farms I toured in North Carolina,” he wrote by way of explanation, “the visitor is greeted by a bedlam of squealing, chain rattling, and horrible roaring. To maximize the use of space and minimize the need for care, the creatures are encased row after row, 400- to 500-pound mammals trapped without relief inside iron crates 7 feet long and 22 inches wide. They chew maniacally on bars and chains, as foraging animals will do when denied straw, or engage in stereotypical nest-building with the straw that isn’t there, or else just lie there like broken beings. … All of these creatures, and billions more across the earth, go to their deaths knowing nothing of life, and nothing of man, except the foul, tortured existence of the factory farm, having never even been outdoors.”
Many of the charges against corporate farms served up routinely by political activists are distorted or simply off base. They also usually ignore or deny the benefits to consumers — especially those with modest incomes — brought about by efficiency, scale and science. But it is hard not to experience a shudder of unease when reading accounts of industrial-scale hog and chicken farms, which came into their own in the past few decades.
It’s hard not to wonder whether economic calculations have trumped our obligation to treat domesticated animals — even animals we’re going to slaughter for food — with some minimal degree of decency.
Answering “yes” to that query, as I would, doesn’t mean you have to join Scully in his vegetarianism. Nor does it mean you must shop only at Whole Foods, or confine your fast-food consumption to Chipotle.
And it most certainly doesn’t put you in the same camp as the animal liberationists who oppose not only superfluous animal testing involving, for example, cosmetics or obesity, but even research to aid children with severe neuromuscular disorders.
For that matter, deploring certain features of industrial farming hardly requires you to sympathize with the PETA activists who insist SeaWorld’s killer whales qualify as “slaves” under the 13th Amendment — and recently lost a lawsuit making that case — or the law-school clinics that hope to persuade courts to recognize animals as persons in order to invest them with legal rights.
What taking such a step probably does mean, though, is that you recognize our obligation to other creatures is not merely a function of convenience and proximity, and that “I’d rather not know” is a sorry slogan for an engaged consumer.
True, we might not be able to feed ourselves, let alone the world, if we put all of the animals back on Old MacDonald’s Farm — the old fellow is long gone anyway — but that doesn’t mean we have to torment them all, either.
E-mail Vincent Carroll at vcarroll@denverpost.com. Follow him on Twitter @vcarrollDP.
