Lesser Beasts: A Snout-to-Tail History of the Humble Pig (29 page)

224
“Vertical integration gives you high-quality”
:
David Barboza, “Goliath of the Hog World,”
New York Times
, April 7, 2000.

224
The number of hogs raised there doubled
:
Key and McBride,
Changing Economics
, 9.

224
Wendell Murphy, founder of a large hog producer
:
Pat Stith and Joby Warrick, “Murphy’s Law,”
Raleigh News and Observer
, February 22, 1995; Michael Thompson, “This Little Piggy Went to Market: The Commercialization of Hog Production in Eastern North Carolina from William Shay to Wendell Murphy,”
Agricultural History
74 (2000): 569–584.

224
By 2006, 95 percent of hogs in the United States
:
Wise and Trist, “Buyer Power,” 4, 6.

224
1,300 hogs per hour in some cases
: Ted Genoways,
The Chain
(New York: Harper, 2014), xii.

225
These laborers had little bargaining power
:
Wise and Trist, “Buyer Power,” 4–8; Lance Compa,
Blood, Sweat, and Fear: Workers’ Rights in U.S. Meat and Poultry Plants
(New York: Human Rights Watch, 2004).

225
It was no accident that the hog industry
:
Deborah Fink,
Cutting into the Meatpacking Line
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998), 1–2, 50–69; Brian Page, “Restructuring Pork Production, Remaking Rural Iowa,” in
Globalising Food
, ed. David Goodman and Michael Watts (London: Routledge, 1997), 133–157.

225
For every dollar spent on pork
:
Wise and Trist, “Buyer Power,” 19.

225
In constant dollars, the price of pork
:
John McGlone, “Swine,” in
Animal Welfare in Animal Agriculture
, ed. Wilson G. Pond, Fuller W. Bazer, and Bernard E. Rollin (Boca Raton: CRC Press, 2012), 149.

226
“It came through the woods”
:
“Huge Spill of Hog Waste Fuels an Old Debate in North Carolina,”
New York Times
, June 25, 1995.

226
A 250-pound hog excretes 7.8 pounds of feces
:
Al Jensen,
Management and Housing for Confinement Swine Production
(Urbana: University of Illinois, 1972), 19; Pew Commission,
Putting Meat
, 29.

226
Strict rules governed the disposal of human waste
:
Quarterly Hogs and Pigs
(Washington, DC: US Department of Agriculture, September 29, 1995).

226
As one man who lived near a manure lagoon explained
:
Jeff Tietz, “Boss Hog,”
Rolling Stone
, December 14, 2006; also see Joby Warrick and Pat Stith, “New Studies Show That Lagoons Are Leaking,”
Raleigh News and Observer
, February 19, 1995; Key and McBride,
Changing Economics
, 12; Darrell Smith, “Can Pigs and People Live in Peace?,”
Farm Journal
119 (1995): 18.

226
In 2011, at a farm in northern Iowa
:
Sarah Zhang, “The Curious Case of the Exploding Pig Farms,”
Nautilus
, December 2, 2013.

227
As a result, the industry shifted to the high plains
:
Wise and Trist, “Buyer Power,” 7.

227
All told, experts suggested that American taxpayers
:
Elanor Starmer and Timothy Wise,
Living High on the Hog
(Medford, MA: Tufts University, 2007); Elanor Starmer and Timothy Wise, “Feeding at the Trough: Industrial Livestock Firms Saved $35 Billion from Low Feed Prices,”
GDAE Policy Brief
07–03 (2007).

227
Depending on whose estimate you believe
:
Robert Goodland and Jeff Anhang, “Livestock and Climate Change,”
World Watch
22 (2009): 10; Pierre Gerber,
Tackling Climate Change Through Livestock
(Rome: Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, 2013), xii.

227
More than three-quarters of the antibiotics
:
“Record-High Antibiotic Sales for Meat and Poultry Production,” Pew Charitable Trusts,
http://www.pewtrusts.org/en/multimedia/data-visualizations/2013/recordhigh-antibiotic-sales-for-meat-and-poultry-production
; Maryn McKenna, “Imagining the Post-antibiotics Future,”
Medium
, November 20, 2013,
https://medium.com/@fernnews/imagining-the-post-antibiotics-future-892b57499e77
(accessed June 1, 2014).

227
according to the Food and Drug Administration
:
US Food and Drug Administration, “Antimicrobials Sold or Distributed for Use in Food-Producing Animals” (Washington, DC, September 2014), 16–17.

228
In response to such dangers
:
“Pig Out,”
Nature
486 (2012): 440.

228
Pork producers in the United States
:
“Antimicrobials/Antibiotics,” National Pork Producers Council,
http://www.nppc.org/issues/animal-health-safety/antimicro bials-antibiotics
(accessed October 7, 2014).

228
“Antibiotic use in food animals”
:
Antibiotic Resistance Threats in the United States
(Atlanta: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 2013), 11, 14.

228
The FDA in 2013 issued
:
Sabrina Tavernise, “Antibiotics in Livestock,”
New York Times
, October 2, 2014.

228
“They love it”
:
Matthew Scully,
Dominion
(New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2002), 258.

229
Workers who enter the barns
:
Abigail Woods, “Rethinking the History of Modern Agriculture: British Pig Production, c. 1910–65,”
Twentieth Century British History
23 (2011): 177.

229
“Acute and chronic infections of the respiratory tract in pigs”
:
Mark Ackermann, “Respiratory Tract,” in
Biology of the Domestic Pig
, ed. Wilson G. Pond and Harry J. Mersmann
(Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001), 527.

229
But in a confinement facility with metal bars and concrete floors
:
Ruth Layton, “Animal Needs and Commercial Needs,” in
The Future of Animal Farming
, ed. Marian Dawkins and Roland Bonney (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2008), 88–92; “Early Weaned Behavior May Last Lifetime,”
National Hog Farmer
, December 1998.

229
“Without malleable substrates to chew”
:
Stanley Curtis, Sandra Edwards, and Harold Gonyou, “Ethology and Psychology,” in Pond,
Biology of the Domestic Pig
, 66–67; Harry Blokhuis et al.,
Scientific Report on the Risks Associated with Tail Biting in Pigs
(Parma, Italy: European Food Safety Authority, 2007).

229
“Once a building is built”
:
John McGlone, “Alternative Sow Housing Systems” (paper presented at the annual meeting for the Manitoba Pork Producers, Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada, January 2001), 4.

230
From standing so long on hard floors
:
Joe Vansickle, “Sow Lameness Underrated,”
National Hog Farmer
, June 15, 2008.

230
They cannot groom themselves or interact
:
Joe Vansickle, “Sow Housing Debated,”
National Hog Farmer
, August 15, 2007; “Crateless Farrowing,”
Pig Farming
, January 1997.

230
With no outlets for natural instincts
:
Curtis, Edwards, and Gonyou, “Ethology and Psychology,” 67. Also see Donald Broom and Andrew Fraser,
Domestic Animal Behaviour and Welfare
(Wallingford, UK: CABI, 2007), 275.

230
But they keep trying
:
Layton, “Animal Needs,” 90.

231
“Contemporary swine production systems may create frustration”
:
Curtis, Edwards, and Gonyou, “Ethology and Psychology,” 52.

Chapter 18

233
Cattle ranchers, he had found, “cared deeply”
:
Bernard Rollin,
Putting the Horse Before Descartes
(Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2011), 213.

234
In his talk to the farmers
:
Rollin,
Putting the Horse
, 213.

234
“I have been feeling lousy”
:
Rollin,
Putting the Horse
, 213.

234
On the soundtrack, Willie Nelson sings a Coldplay song
:
Johnny Kelly, dir.,
Back to the Start
(Chipotle, 2011).

235
China and Brazil accounted for nearly all of that growth
:
World Agriculture Towards 2015/2030
(Rome: Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, 2002), 58–59.

235
During that same period, meat production in the developing world increased
:
Henning Steinfeld,
Livestock’s Long Shadow
(Rome: Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, 2006), 16–17; James Galloway et al., “International Trade in Meat: The Tip of the Pork Chop,”
Ambio
36 (2007): 622–629.

235
Thanks to genetically modified seeds, fertilizers, pesticides, and herbicides
:
Steinfeld,
Livestock’s Long Shadow
, 12.

236
It functions much like the federal oil reserve
:
Mindi Schneider,
Feeding China’s Pigs
(Minneapolis, MN: Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy, 2011), 3.

236
Though China is still largely self-sufficient in pork
:
David Bracken, “Chinese Company to Acquire Smithfield Foods for $4.7 Billion,”
Raleigh News and Observer
, May 29, 2013.

236
Those foreign soybeans do not get turned into tofu
:
Leslie Hook and Emiko Terazono, “China’s Appetite for Food Imports to Fuel Agribusiness,”
Financial Times
, June 6, 2013.

236
Two decades later, that figure had dropped
:
Schneider,
Feeding China’s Pigs
, 3–6.

239
After their pig-park study, Stolba and Wood-Gush concluded
:
A. Stolba and D. G. M. Wood-Gush, “The Behaviour of Pigs in a Semi-natural Environment,”
Animal Production
48 (1989): 423. Also see Alex Stolba and D. G. Wood-Gush, “The Identification of Behavioural Key Features and Their Incorporation into a Housing Design for Pigs,”
Annals of Veterinary Research
15 (1983): 297.

239
If breeders selected for maternal abilities as well as rapid weight gain
:
A. Kittawornrat and J. J. Zimmerman, “Toward a Better Understanding of Pig Behavior and Pig Welfare,”
Animal Health Research Reviews
12 (2011): 25–32.

240
In response to
Animal Machines
, the British government formed the Brambell Commission:
H. van de Weerd and V. Sandilands, “Bringing the Issue of Animal Welfare to the Public: A Biography of Ruth Harrison (1920–2000),”
Applied Animal Behaviour Science
113 (2008): 404–410.

240
The inquiry uncovered appalling conditions
:
Ruth Harrison et al.,
Animal Machines
(Boston: CABI, 2013), 11.

240
A group called the Farm Animal Welfare Council later revised the five freedoms
:
Harrison et al.,
Animal Machines
, 12.

240
These recommendations carried no legal weight
:
I. Veissier et al., “European Approaches to Ensure Good Animal Welfare,”
Applied Animal Behaviour Science
113 (2008): 279–297.

240
In 1997 an EU veterinary committee issued a 190-page report
:
European Union,
The Welfare of Intensively Kept Pigs
(Brussels: European Commission, 1997), 8.73.

240
The farthest-reaching provision banned the use of gestation crates
:
“Animal Welfare on the Farm: Pigs,” Council Directive 2001/88/EC, October 23, 2001.

240
Canada, too, has since ordered that gestation crates
:
Code of Practice for the Care and Handling of Pigs
(Ottawa, ON: National Farm Animal Care Council, 2014), 10–12.

241
Promoting farm animal welfare has proved more difficult
:
J. A. Mench, “Farm Animal Welfare in the U.S.A.,”
Applied Animal Behaviour Science
113 (2008): 298–312.

241
In 2008 the Pew Charitable Trusts, a prominent nonprofit
:
Pew Commission on Industrial Farm Animal Production,
Industrial Food Production in America: Examining the Impact of the Pew Commission’s Priority Recommendations
(Philadelphia: Pew Charitable Trusts, 2013), 26.

241
“Gestation crates are a real problem”
:
Humane Society of the United States (HSUS),
Undercover at Smithfield Foods
(Washington, DC: HSUS, 2010), 2.

241
A number of US states have banned gestation crates
:
Humane Society of the United States (HSUS),
Welfare Issues with Gestation Crates for Pregnant Sows
(Washington, DC: HSUS, 2013), 1–2.

241
Early in 2014, Smithfield promised
:
Christopher Doering, “Smithfield Urges Farmers to End Use of Gestation Crates,”
USA Today
, January 7, 2014; Mike Hughlett, “Consumer Pressure Leads Cargill to Give Pigs More Room,”
Minneapolis Star Tribune
, June 8, 2014.

242
“Their feelings aren’t rational”
:
Lydia Depillis, “Big Agriculture Wants to Reach Millennials,”
Washington Post
, May 14, 2014.