Factory Farming Animals is Immoral

That 10 kilobyte limit (≈ 1400 words) is there for a reason. Looking at your document, the major premise is that “it’s immoral to inflict unnecessary suffering on nonhuman animals,” and because factory farms inflict unnecessary suffering, this kind of farming is therefore immoral in a just society. There is a side argument concerning the propriety and healthfulness of a vegan diet which I won’t contest, but which is peripheral to the issue at hand: one need not advocate a particular dietary lifestyle to answer our question about factory farms. Given the hunting sports codes and animal cruelty laws on the books in every state, I think we agree on your major premise. It is inhumane to inflict needless suffering on animals. Hence I will take exception to your minor premise, that factory farming techniques cannot avoid causing excessive suffering in the animals raised. Subjective experience is of course difficult to evaluate in creatures that don’t talk. We can never be certain that another living thing even has subjective experience to begin with, but generally accept that higher animals, especially birds and mammals, probably do have emotions and feel pain. For brevity, I will look only at pigs and pork production here. Much of the suffering alleged in connection with gestation crates for sows, or indeed with any confinement indoors, is from deprivation. The pigs can’t move around much and their environment offers little stimulation. They then become bored and exhibit stress symptoms as a result. But do they? Michael Domjan (Essentials of Learning & Conditioning, 3rd ed., pp. 29-34) discusses the phenomenon of habituation, seen in all mammals including humans. Key here is the effect of stimulus change, that is, an animal’s responses vary from baselines only when a new stimulatory environment is presented to them. In short, we don’t miss what we have never had. While it might be cruel to take an adult free-range pig and put it in a crate—because that represents a change of its habitual environment—a pig raised from birth in a crate won’t know the difference because it has never experienced the free-range condition. Peter Singer, author of Animal Liberation (1975), is a well-known activist. In a 2002 book, The Ethics of What We Eat (pp. 42-68), Singer investigates an actual pork factory operation in Iowa, the Wayne Bradley farm, which raises about 12,000 pigs each year indoors. The owner informs him of the ways conditions in the building are better than those outdoors—when it’s 30 below, the pigs relax at 70 degrees. They are much cleaner because earth, straw, and feces are not near the animals, which are bathed frequently. They appear to spend much of their time sleeping and make little noise, where you might expect squealing were they distressed. The frozen ears and blizzard deaths of earlier farming are a thing of the past. Diseases are detected sooner and treated by veterinarians. Free-range pigs instinctively engage in combats to establish social hierarchy. This involves at best the biting off of tails, and at worst broken hips that mean having to euthanize. The Bradley farm sows do live most of their lives in the crates, but they are let out for several weeks between each litter. Although their motive—profit—is less noble than yours, factory farmers have an interest in the comfort of their animals, because stressed pigs suffer high mortality and produce inferior meat (Jodi Sterle, “The Frequency of Porcine Stress Syndrome in Texas Show Pigs,” white paper, Texas A&M, 2002). In fact, this paper states that the leading cause of stress in pigs is actually a gene, PSS, that causes the syndrome in homozygous individuals. The pork industry educates youth entering the business on ethics and good management practices: “The use of an electric prod is a stressful event and it should be avoided…Complete withholding or severe restriction of feed or water as a weight management tool is not acceptable,” says Jodi Searle again (“Handling/Management to Prevent Stress in Show Pigs,” white paper, Texas A&M, n.d.). Factory farming, along with nearly everything wild or domestic going on in the animal world at large, looks brutal to people. Yet we must remember that people are used to much different standards of living than animals are, and have more intellect and foresight with which to anguish over things that seem wrong to us. In a way, animals are braver and sturdier than modern people. They accept life as it is without demanding the personal increases we feel entitled to. For these reasons, and because you haven’t demonstrated inherent cruelty in factory farming itself (at least for pigs), I must reject your syllogism as unsound. Sources used and available online. Catalog entry can be verified for the print sources. Frequency of PSS: http://animalscience.tamu.edu... Handling: http://www.pork.org...