In addition to concerns around food security and the threat of rising food costs, South Africans took to social media to express their dismay over the plight of the culled birds. “This is heartbreaking,” tweeted one user. “#Animalcruelty,” proclaimed another. I was perplexed.
No doubt, these birds had met with a cruel end — but is animal agriculture ever humane or merciful, even under the best of circumstances, and were well-meaning citizens under the impression that it is? While at first glance the industry might appear harmless, the reality of life as a farmed animal (intensive or otherwise) is, sadly, far from pleasant.
Annually, our species raises and kills approximately 56 billion land animals, while emptying the seas of at least a trillion fish. Alarmingly, our consumption of animals and animal products is expected to double by 2050.
South Africa alone consumes approximately 2.9 million tonnes of beef, pork and poultry per annum, the majority of which is sourced from factory farms. Recent research suggests that approximately 75% of all beef produced in South Africa comes from concentrated animal feeding operations (intensive farms or feedlots), as do other widely-consumed animal products, including poultry, pork and eggs.
Such operations typically confine non-human animals to cramped living spaces which inhibit their ability to express natural behaviours. Intensively-farmed sows, for example, spend the entirety of their lives being shuffled between farrowing and gestation crates, forced to endure repeated cycles of impregnation and birthing before eventually being slaughtered. The crates in which they spend their lives are no larger than a standard refrigerator.
Many of us would like to believe that buying free-range animal products is enough to absolve ourselves of any wrongdoing as far as animal welfare is concerned, and that animal agriculture is mutually beneficial to both humans and other animals. After all, if we didn’t eat, wear or experiment on farmed animals, they would not exist; and isn’t a net-positive existence, albeit a ridiculously short one, better than no existence at all?
Before concluding that the above narrative is sound and well-reasoned, allow me to indulge you with a short story, “The Secret Lives of Livestock”:
I begin by juxtaposing the blackout-induced cullings of recent months against the routine “extermination” of day-old male chicks born into the egg industry. Males are unable to produce eggs and are thus considered “economically unviable” to the industry. As a result, billions of newly-hatched male chicks are killed each year through maceration or asphyxiation. Such practices occur without consumer awareness and unlike the aforementioned blackout-induced cullings, seldom make headlines, despite causing comparable suffering to birds.
The exploitation of non-humans at the hands of human beings does not end with the egg industry. All animals raised for meat or textiles endure routine mutilations without the aid of analgesia and are killed at just a fraction of their natural lifespans. They may be starved for up to 24 hours prior to slaughter and suffer horrendously when pre-slaughter stunning fails, which, according to various academic reports, occurs anywhere between 2% to 28% of the time across species.
In pigs and chickens, regaining consciousness after stunning can result in the animals being submerged into scalding tanks of water while still semi or fully-conscious. Then, of course, there are dairy farmers, who routinely separate calves from their mothers, killing males and isolating females in clusters of tiny hutches so that adult humans may consume the milk intended for the calves by nature, never once pausing to question the absurdity of their actions.
Loadshedding is disrupting South Africa agriculture and agribusiness activities
The crux of my short tale is this — “ethically sourced” animal products are expensive and unsustainable on the scale required to meet global demand. In other words, “ethically sourced” animal products, in the context of our daily lives, are a myth.
Most people would instinctively agree that nothing described thus far could be considered ethical, nor could it possibly lead to the elusive “net-positive” existence of our fantasies. Yet, these occurrences are standard practice in the field of animal husbandry.
How, then, do we justify our support for animal agriculture, especially as a self-purported nation of “animal lovers”? Some of us attempt an appeal to nature — “I am an omnivore and eating meat is natural, are you going to condemn lions as well?”
This rhetoric is a logical fallacy which assumes everything natural to be “good” and all unnatural things to be “bad”. To better illustrate the flaws of the “appeal to nature” argument, imagine it used to justify rape, murder or infanticide — all of which occur in nature. The argument that “lions kill other lions in nature; therefore, I can kill humans,” would not hold up well in court. Humans have moral agency, which demands that we act ethically even if other beings do not.
A similar argument, the “circle of life” or “food chain” defence, is also commonly employed. It assumes a “survival-type” situation in which human beings have no choice but to consume sentient life. The food-chain argument further implies that our consumption of animals serves an important function in maintaining the balance of ecosystems.
This simply isn’t true, as animal agriculture exists outside of any natural food chain. If anything, our consumption of domestic animals serves only to destroy natural ecosystems through its impact on deforestation, species extinction and the formation of ocean dead-zones. Simply put, for modern humans, eating animals is not a necessity, it is a choice — and not necessarily a good one.
In a now-famous debate on the ethics of eating animals, environmentalist and animal rights activist, Phillip Wollen, quoted the following excerpt from Shakespeare’s King Lear:
‘King Lear, late at night on the cliffs, asked the blind Earl of Gloucester, “How do you see the world?” And the blind man, Gloucester, replied, “I see it feelingly.”’
‘“Shouldn’t we all?” asked Wollen, before continuing: ‘Animals must be off the menu because tonight they are screaming in terror in the slaughterhouse, in crates and cages — vile ignoble gulags of despair. You see, when we suffer, we suffer as equals. And in their capacity to suffer, a dog, is a pig, is a bear … is a boy.’
In an increasingly anthropocentric world, humans would do well to remember that we ourselves are animals — a species of great ape — and that there is no sound basis for the opinion that our interests matter more than those of other animals. After all, according to the principle of evolutionary continuity, all our capacities and behaviours exist (with variations in degree) in continuity with other animals. In short, our differences matter less than our similarities as a foundation for the extension of basic rights.
I believe that if we are honest with ourselves, we will admit that we know this intuitively. After all, we would never harm a beloved pet — nor subject them to death by slaughter.
