The Meaty Truth (3 page)

In egg-laying operations, about six to eight chickens are crammed into cages that are stacked one on top of the other. To maximize space, the open wire cages, which are too small for the birds to move around in or spread their wings, are stacked on top of each other. For about two years, the chickens lay egg after egg until they are spent. They are so covered in
feces and waste from the birds above them that it is hard to see a trace of their feathers. Chicken sh!t can pile as high as six feet in a warehouse, and inhaling the stench can feel as if your lungs are burning.

We have engineered chickens to become obese so quickly that they are not able to move; often their legs break because they cannot carry their own weight. It takes just forty-five days to grow a five-pound chicken, which is half the normal growth time.
²⁶
Fatty grains and arsenic are the main ingredients to make the chickens gain weight at an unprecedented rate.
²⁷
That’s right: arsenic, a known poison, is in our food products. Just as added weight causes health problems for us, these birds also suffer from major health issues such as heart attacks and immobility. When these birds are taken to slaughter, most of them are deathly ill.
Ninety-nine percent of the chicken we eat comes from factory farms!
We are eating obese, toxic, antibiotic-ridden chickens, and it is no wonder we are getting sick. Still want those scrambled eggs for breakfast?

Pigs, the prized “other white meat,” are subjected to a similar fate to become our Christmas hams and pork loins. The pigs are pumped with the drug ractopamine, which is banned in most countries, including China.
²⁸
China is notorious for lax regulations, especially when it comes to animals, and even it doesn’t accept this practice.

Pigs are crammed by the tens of thousands into close-quarter sheds, where they are forced to lie down in their own sh!t on cold cement floors, unable to even turn their bodies in another direction. Sows are confined in 7 feet x 2 feet crates, and their snouts are often covered in blood from being cut on the cage bars. These pigs’ tails are cruelly amputated without any anesthetic. Pigs use their tails to communicate. This is the equivalent of humans having their tongues cut out. It is widely proven that pigs have the same level of intelligence as a toddler, and yet we can all agree that it would be considered severely abusive if we subjected our toddlers to any of this treatment. We wouldn’t treat our family dogs and cats like this, even though science shows that pigs are smarter than dogs. We love our pets, so why are pigs any different? Our values are at odds with how we are treating these animals.

Thousands of cows are crammed together in feedlots where, instead of green pastures to graze on, they stand knee deep in their own sh!t, covered in flies.
²⁹
Since there are usually about three people to oversee thousands of animals, open and festering sores on the cows’ hides are left untreated. The truth is they are ground up and turned into our food. Appetizing, isn’t it? There are hundreds of documented videos and articles that show downed animals, or animals too sick to walk, that are taken to slaughter and served up on your plate. We are making meat and dairy products from sick animals’ carcasses, loading the meat products with dangerous toxins, and wondering why we are experiencing an unprecedented volume of epidemic health problems. It isn’t hard to see that factory farming’s horrific conditions are contributing to our rapidly declining health. It’s really common sense.

Oh Baby, Baby, Baby!

Factory farm animals are baby-making machines. Ladies, imagine pushing one baby out, then getting pregnant again and again until your bodies collapse. It is a ridiculous practice. The sheer unnecessary volume of milk products produced each year come from cows that are subjected to a life of pregnancy to fulfill our milk and dairy desires.

Milk, the touted pure superfood, does not arrive on our shelves by magic. Instead of being milked by a farmer like in the good ol’ days, dairy cows stand row upon row in their own waste, as machines hooked up to their teats consistently suck them dry.
³⁰
But a cow’s milk is
not
made for humans. It is a specific formula for a baby cow to grow about four hundred pounds in a short few months.
³¹
Sadly, the baby calves do not even get their mothers’ milk. Instead, the female calves are given a formula, and the males are given a specific mixture stripped of iron to keep them severely anemic for that prized, white veal. Every mammal produces its own milk specifically to help its own babies grow. Despite advertising claims by the dairy industry, our bodies do not need and are not made to drink cow’s milk.

On top of it all, dairy cows are given growth hormones to produce more milk, which often gives them an infection called mastitis. Mastitis
produces pus that lands in our dairy products.
^32
,
33
Let’s be clear here: we drink the pus. The shocking truth is the USDA regulations allow pus into our food products. This is not only extremely gross but unhealthy. Once the mothers’ bodies give out from overuse, they are shipped off to slaughter, where they are made into our low-grade hamburger meat. The next time you sit down to dinner, think about what you are eating and where your food came from before it reached your plate.

Shutting the Factory Down

Corporations argue that factory farms are efficient, humane, and necessary for keeping the cost of meat down. They even call them progressive. But it is hard to call a place where blatant abuses, such as stomping on piglets, ripping off pigs’ ears, cutting chickens’ beaks, and kicking and hammering downed cows is progressive or humane by any means.
Barbaric
is a better word. What corporations like to call efficient and cheap has come at a huge cost to our own health, the lives of the animals, and our environment as we turn our health, land, and water into piles of crap. While companies argue that reforming factory farms would be undoing progress, these factories have already taken us backwards economically, socially, and environmentally.

Know your Sh!t Solutions:

1) Avoid the crappy factory-farmed food, especially fast food. Anything advertised as cheap, fast, and convenient food is equivalent to unhealthy. Seriously, it’s filled with sh!t.

2) Find out where your food comes from, and don’t be fooled by “homegrown” labels. “Cage-free” and “all-natural” meat are meaningless labels.

3) Start implementing Meatless Mondays.

CHAPTER 2

America the Beautiful: From Cesspool to Shining Cesspool

F
actory farming is turning America into a land of crap. It produces 1.3 billion tons of animal crap each year.
¹
That is eighty-seven thousand pounds of manure produced
per second
.
²
This is the equivalent of 130 times the amount of crap per person in the United States, or five tons per person.
³
We have a colossal manure-management problem that is very inefficient and downright destructive. We know manure is by no means a sexy topic, but we have to address factory farms’ overflowing cesspools that are creating mountains of manure that devastate our health and environment across the nation every day.

Imagine if all of our bathroom activities were flushed into our backyard pools for storage and just left there to evaporate. This is obviously disgusting to even think about and, at minimum, extremely unsanitary. But this is what is happening all across America on animal-factory farms. We are turning our beautiful homeland into a fetid swamp as thousands of cesspools the size of football fields, filled to the brim with animal manure, now cover the American landscape.

While hard to believe, this animal crap is the primary culprit in decimating our waterways: by wiping out our streams and our oceans, producing dangerous, toxic organisms that are killing off our fish, and causing major manure spills that make oil spills pale in comparison. Rivers once blue are turning brown and even unnatural colors, such as orange, yellow, and red. Our waterways are running red with blood from the billions of dead fish lining the banks of the rivers with open, oozing, bloody lesions caused by the virus
Pfiesteria,
which comes from animal crap dumped into our water.

Why is manure degrading our waterways such a problem? Well, the United States is already in a water crisis, and spilling crap into freshwater streams is only making matters worse. Major water wars are being fought from north to south and east to west for access to water. At a minimum, we should regulate to keep remaining water bodies as clean as possible. Yet there is little to no regulation from the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), and agribusiness is getting away with dumping crap into our most precious resource. Ask yourself: what happens when all of our clean water turns to sh!t?

A Sh!tty Situation

Altogether, if the amount of animal crap from factory farms were packed into boxcars, there would be enough cars filled with manure to go around the whole world fourteen times!
⁴
In terms of weight, that’s over one billion tons of animal crap.
⁵
This is some heavy sh!t! This is more than
five
times the amount of waste produced by all of the people in the United States. Just one Smithfield pig farm in Utah that houses five hundred thousand pigs produces more sh!t than the 1.5 million people crowding the streets in Manhattan. The questions are where is all of this crap going and how damaging is it to our environment and our health?

Welcome to Cesspool Paradise

As the number of independent family farms has decreased in size, the number of animals per factory farm has substantially increased and so has the amount of manure in concentrated areas. For example, in 1975, there were more than 660,000 pig farms that produced about sixty-nine million pigs every year. By 2004, 90 percent of those farms had disappeared, but the number of pigs produced had risen to 103 million per year.
⁶
Today, the EPA estimates that there are about twenty thousand large-scale factory farms in the United States.
⁷
This means massive volumes of manure on a few farms.

The meat and dairy industries overlooked one very important detail when making the decision to house thousands of animals in one place—where do they put all of the mounds of untreated animal crap? Outside,
pools of animal crap now line our beautiful countryside. The animal manure is stored in thirty feet deep, football field-sized holes in the ground. One factory farm can have hundreds of these so-called “waste disposals.” The corporations call these holes in the ground
lagoons
, giving off the image of a tropical paradise. This is quite a misnomer. The animal manure is so toxic and densely concentrated in these holes that the crap turns from brown to a salami-pink color.

Let’s be honest. Sticking liquid manure into holes in the ground seems like a primitive form of getting rid of waste. This is the type of sanitation, or lack thereof, that organizations work to remedy in countries without first-class infrastructures. The underlying rationale for this disposal method is to allow the manure to sit there and evaporate. No, we aren’t making this up.

One of the many problems with this “logic” is that manure contains ammonia, which is a toxic type of nitrogen that is released as a gas when the manure is left to decompose in the open-air lagoons. About 70 to 80 percent of the nitrogen in the liquid lagoons changes into ammonia. As a gas, ammonia can travel more than three hundred miles through the air before it is dumped back onto the ground and into water sources. Let’s put this into perspective: it takes about five to six hours to drive three hundred miles. That means ammonia emissions in New York can be in Massachusetts in half that time. Since ammonia is the most potent form of nitrogen, it triggers eutrophication, which causes harmful algae blooms that wipe out marine habitats.
⁸

This gas is just the beginning of our problems. Manure contains 160 noxious gases, including deadly hydrogen sulfide.
⁹
As air pollution, and especially ammonia, can travel for hundreds of miles, this is no longer a local problem; anyone can be affected. Health concerns associated with ammonia include chemical burns to the respiratory tract and chronic lung disease. Just two minutes of exposure to ammonia “may result in chronic lung disease, and massive exposure to ammonia can be fatal.”
¹⁰
Air pollution was apparently not a high concern when deciding upon this disposal method.

Imagine a major city of more than twenty thousand people without sewage-treatment plants. It seems ironic that we would spend so much
money on sanitation methods for human waste and yet nothing on animal waste when there is three times as much coming from these factories. In contrast to human sewage, which is carefully treated and highly regulated, manure from factory farms is not. Think about this: there are 160 volatile organic compounds emitted in liquid pig crap. Unlike industrial waste and pollutants, for some peculiar reason the vast quantities of animal manure is not regulated. This means the animal waste remains in its highly toxic form.
¹¹
The biological oxygen demand, or BOD, of liquid manure is 160 times that of raw, municipal sewage. So not only is the manure not treated, but it is also more toxic. Logically, this does not make sense.