Rolling Stone Lifts the Veil on Animal Abuse at Factory Farms <\/i><\/p>\n
Rolling Stone just posted an in-depth, Snowfall-esque feature<\/a><\/strong>\u00a0on the litany of abuses carried out by Big Meat. It covers, in horrific detail, the extent to which meat and dairy producers will go \u2014 and the extent to which the government will overlook or even approve of their behavior \u2014 in order to raise the estimated 9 billion broiler chickens, 113 million pigs, 33 million cows and 250 million turkeys consumed each year in the U.S.<\/p>\n It includes sound effects, pop-up factoids and some truly brutal descriptions of conditions on factory farms, like the following:<\/p>\n You\u2019re a typical milk cow in America, and this is your life. You are raised, like pigs, on a concrete slab in a stall barely bigger than your body. There, you never touch grass or see sun till the day you\u2019re herded to slaughter. A cocktail of drugs, combined with breeding decisions, has grossly distended the size of your udder such that you\u2019d trip over it if allowed to graze, which of course you\u2019re not. Your hooves have rotted black from standing in your own shit, your teats are scarred, swollen and leaking pus \u2013 infected by mastitis \u2013 and you\u2019re sick to the verge of total collapse from giving nearly 22,000 pounds of milk a year. (That\u2019s more than double what your forebears produced just 40 years ago.) By the time they\u2019ve used you up (typically at four years of age), your bones are so brittle that they often snap beneath you and leave you unable to get off the ground on your own power.<\/p>\n That account of the typical doesn\u2019t include the instances of extraordinary abuse (one activist: \u201cI had a job at a barn with this sick-fuck boss who was proud of the stuff he did to cows. One day, we\u2019re doing repairs on a gate in the barn and a couple of cows stroll over to watch us work. Well, one grazes him with her snout, just to be playful, and he smashes her in the face with his wrench. I also got him bragging about past assaults, like tying a cow to a fence and taking turns beating her, getting the other guys to work her over.\u201d)\u00a0For the very not-faint-of-heart, there are videos, too.<\/p>\n The article fingers companies like Tyson and Perdue\u00a0for transforming meat production into a tightly controlled, top-down system, under which they \u201cbegan treating animals as production units, not living, feeling creatures with basic rights.\u201d And it\u2019s not enough that laws and USDA regulators aren\u2019t protecting these abusive and unsafe practices from happening, it continues. A new spate of lobbyist-driven \u201cag-gag\u201d<\/a>\u00a0legislation\u00a0is keeping activists from stepping in and doing the government\u2019s job for them. Various state laws make it illegal, for example, to film a farm from a public road, or to hold on to evidence for longer than 48 hours before presenting it to the police.<\/p>\n After a whole lot of bleakness, the article ends with a vision of humane slaughter, imagining a future when we can subsist on a more natural and regional food system. Everything that comes before it presents a solid case for us making the necessary sacrifices to get to that point \u2014 as one activist told Rolling Stone<\/a>: \u201cWherever you stand on the issue of eating animals, I think we agree that making their lives hell is too high a price for cheap food.\u201d<\/p>\n _______________________________<\/p>\n Lindsay Abrams is an assistant editor at Salon, focusing on all things sustainable.<\/i><\/p>\n