Abstract
There is increasing research on the effects of industrial livestock production on the environment and human health, but less on the effects this has on animal welfare and ecological justice. The concept of ecological justice as a tool for achieving sustainability is gaining traction in the legal world. Klaus Bosselman defines ecological justice as consisting of three elements: intragenerational justice, intergenerational justice, and interspecies justice. While the first two have been extensively discussed, interspecies justice has received less attention. It is argued that the neglect of interspecies justice in the practice of industrial livestock production leads to both intragenerational and intergenerational injustices. The article focuses primarily on an animal welfare perspective, addressing the extreme harm and oppression of animals entailed by their commoditization for industrial food production. The destructive impact of this mode of food production on environmental resources and its massive contributions to climate change also lead to the impoverishment of the food, environmental, social, and economic health of present and future generations. The article describes the legal mechanisms that have permitted, and indeed encouraged, the move to industrial livestock production, and suggests changes that could reduce the three kinds of ecological injustices which industrial livestock production produces.
Keywords
Introduction
If slaughterhouses had glass walls, everyone would be a vegetarian.
As Ruth Harrison pointed out in 1964,
if one person is unkind to an animal, it is considered to be cruelty, but where a lot of people are unkind to animals, especially in the name of commerce, the cruelty is condoned and, once large sums of money are at stake, will be defended to the last by otherwise intelligent people. (Harrison, 1964, as cited in Wolfson, 1999, p. 6)
David Wolfson points out that 40 years after Harrison’s study, mainstream media such as The Economist agree that it is the market system itself that takes the moral aspect out of individual behavior: “It is all very well to say that individuals must wrestle with their conscience . . . Industrial society, alas, hides animals’ suffering” (Anonymous, 1995, p. 12, as cited in Wolfson & Sullivan, 2004), noting that most individuals who are happy to eat eggs would never personally lock a hen in a tiny cage for lengthy periods of time. Similarly in Canada, some media opinions, for example, paint the World Society for the Protection of Animals (WSPA) as an organization with an “agenda” due to its views that “animals should not be considered ‘raw materials’ for the benefit of mankind” (Anonymous, 2010). That this is perceived as a radical position clearly indicates how strongly the necessity and normalcy of animal suffering to produce human food is entrenched in public perceptions, and how essential it is to “the way agriculture functions in Canada” (Anonymous, 2010) 2 and in many other places.
I will argue that the neglect of interspecies justice in the practice of industrial livestock production leads not only to clear and extensive animal suffering but also to human intra- and intergenerational injustices. The article will focus primarily on an animal welfare perspective, addressing the extreme violations of animal welfare. It will apply the concept of commoditization (Manno, 2000, 2002 and 2010) to understand the economic dynamics behind the mistreatment of animals and to suggest approaches to counter the extreme degree of commoditization of animals in the food industry. It will then move on to show how the broken relationship between humans and animals also affects humans as both producers and consumers, degrading fundamental aspects of our humanness, the very humanity that people use to justify the different treatment and respect accorded to humans than to nonhuman animals. The destructive impact it has on the environment leads to the impoverishment of the food, environmental, social, and economic health of present and future generations. It reduces choice in relation to what food is eaten and how it is produced. The article will briefly expose the mechanisms that have permitted, and indeed encouraged, the move to industrial livestock production.
The Context
Commoditization
Jack Manno (2010) has described commoditization as a process of “colonization of the communal and ecological spheres by the logic and values of markets” (p. 165). Manno (2010) argues that “commoditization distorts development in ways that intensify negative social outcomes experienced by oppressed groups and undermines the possibility for sustainable development” (p. 164). He addresses how commoditization leads to systemic racial and sexual oppression (Manno, 2000), yet the oppression of animals resulting from our commoditization of food, 3 and particularly food animals, has been less fully explored. 4 Industrialized factory farming represents a site where the process of commoditization is extreme, and its effects harsh on both animals and people. The oppression of animals as industrial livestock would be painfully obvious except for the distance that has grown between most people and the food that sustains them. The commoditization of food animals has the affect of undermining human relations to land and to animals. Humans have become mere cogs in the economic wheel of the industrialized food system almost as much as the nonhuman animals have. In order to fully participate in this system, they need to divorce themselves from feelings such as empathy and community. They must also replace care about fellow humans and future generations, as well as concern for nonhuman creatures, with short-term and narrowly defined economic benefits. Manno (2010) points out that “[t]he three roles of consumer, citizen, and inhabitant correspond to the three circles–economy, society, and environment–used to illustrate the interdependent arenas of sustainable development” (p. 165). Yet industrial factory farming emphasizes almost solely the consumer in humans, and destroys this interdependence that leads to sustainability. It has also devastated farming communities in developed countries, reimposed food colonialism on the developing world, and created local and global environmental harms, as we will see in more detail below. Factory farming objectifies animals, limits people’s identities to market consumers, and negates their lives as conscientious citizens and inhabitants of the ecosystem, and this allows commoditized animal products to be produced in this highly unsustainable way. We turn now to the realities of this type of farming before moving on to the role of law in enabling its injustices.
The Realities of Industrial Livestock Production
Intensive Livestock Operations (ILOs) as they are generally known in Canada, or Concentrated Animal Feedlot Operations (CAFOs) in the United States, are not farms but industrial animal factories. They are based on obtaining the greatest output of “animal product” in the most efficient and cheapest way possible. The Humane Society of the United States (HSUS, 2008) has reported that “[e]ach year in the United States, 10 billion land animals are raised and killed for meat, eggs, and milk,” (p. 1)
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while over 700 million animals are killed for food annually in Canada (WSPA, 2010, as cited in Anonymous, 2010). ILOs and CAFOs are generally defined according to the density of animals per square feet or meter (Agricultural Operations Act, 1995) and more often the number of “animal units.”
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An “animal unit” is defined, for example, as
equivalent to the following kinds of animals according to their number: 1 cow, . . . 1 horse, 2 calves weighing from 225 to 500 kilograms each; . . . 5 hogs weighing from 20 to 100 kilograms each . . .; 250 chicken broilers. For all other animal species, 500 kilograms equals one animal unit. (Regulation Respecting the Prevention of Water Pollution in Livestock Operations, 1981)
While the exact formula for calculating an animal unit varies in different pieces of legislations, this term is said to be used beneficially, to allow regulators to assess livestock production in a uniform way, regardless of the type or number of actual animals in question. But this is primarily for the benefit of humans, because it is used to regulate the wastes and pollutants from ILOs that pose risks to humans in terms of their health in eating animals who are more subject to diseases in such close confinement, and to human uses of the environment. The actual effect of the term animal units is to make all these animals equivalent and interchangeable, mere widgets in the operation of industry. Using the term animal units rather than cows, chickens, and pigs, completely divorces the “product” being manufactured and marketed from human awareness that these “commodities” are living, breathing, sensing creatures, and this is itself an indispensable part of making the commoditization of animals possible.
Industrial livestock production is entirely a market-driven process. “Decreasing commodity prices and cost efficiencies achieved through economies of scale and the adoption of new technologies have contributed more than anything else to reshaping and redefining the structure of modern agriculture” (Beaulieu, Bédard, & Lanciault, 2001, p.1). This industrialization has led to significant concentration of animal product production, and to “transferring the locus of decision-making for important production from the farm-level to elsewhere in the food processing and agri-business systems” (Abdalla, 2002, p. 178). The real control of this “industry” is now highly centralized in the hands of a small number of very powerful corporations:
One aspect of this concentration is the dominance of a small number of companies, often meat processors, who increasingly own the animals, feed mils and brand-names of the finished product through a process called “vertical integration”. These companies contract with producers, or farmers, to produce a pre-specific quantity of livestock. . . . One report states that hogs produced under contract in the US went from 10 percent in 1993 to greater than 50 percent in 1999. (Speir et al., 2003, p. vi)
Indeed, “just 20 feedlots feed half of the cattle in the US and these are directly connected to 4 processing firms that control 81% of the beef processing” (Lang, 2003). The number of industrialized animal operations has also been increasing very rapidly.
The FAO reports that industrial animal production systems are increasing at six times the rate of traditional mixed farming systems and at twice the rate of grazing systems. At least 50% of the world’s pigmeat and over 70% of the world’s poultry meat and eggs are produced in industrial systems. (Compassion in World Farming [CIWF], 2009b, p. 4)
Part of this is based on the world economy of corn. Subsidies and increased centralization of corngrowing led to a need to find uses for this surplus grain, and feeding it to livestock was one solution. It makes it cheaper to produce meat in factories with grains than to raise them on family farms where they eat crops that humans cannot eat, and provide natural, nonchemical fertilizer for crops (Cassuto, 2010).
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So the commoditization of animal farming is a direct result of the commoditization of the food system in general, where food has become a profit-driven global industry rather than a basic element of maintaining human life. As I have noted elsewhere, international law and the trade system have been central to this transformation of the food system:
The WTO Agreement on Agriculture (AoA) has arguably helped to facilitate intensive livestock production. Penelope Simons explains that “[s]ecuring the interests of big business was one of the goals of the negotiations on agriculture. . . . Ritchie and Dawkins allege that the US and the EU used their political clout in the Uruguay Round negotiations to ensure that, among other things, the AoA rules would serve the interests of their major corporate actors by facilitating an increase in trade volume of agricultural products. . . . The provisions of the AoA supported industrial farming and allowing the U.S., the E.U. and other OECD countries to continue their subsidy programmes, which benefitted multinational corporations and large agribusinesses.” (McLeod-Kilmurray, 2011, citing Simons, 2008, p. 414)
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Finally, the exponential growth of industrial livestock production has been caused by, and has in turn increased, the consumption of animal products:
[M]eat consumption per capita in China has jumped to 59.5 kilograms per year, up more than fourfold from 13.7 kg in 1980. In Brazil, it has doubled to 80.8 kg. The world’s per capita meat consumption has soared to 41.2 kg per year, up 37 percent from 30 kg in 1980. Demand has similarly soared for milk and eggs. (Goodland, 2010)
This is occurring while there remain millions of people in the world without adequate food supplies, despite the fact that it is well documented that industrially produced animal products require more inputs of water, grain, and energy than they produce in protein and calories for human consumption (see, e.g., CIWF, 2009a, p. 19, Cassuto, 2010, p. 7, and Pew Commission on Industrial Farm Animal Production, 2008a, as will be discussed below in the section on the effects of industrial livestock on consumers). We will turn to the intra- and intergenerational injustices of this form of food production below. But since the injustices to animals are the most immediately obvious in the commoditized livestock system, we will begin there.
Animal Suffering 9
Animals in ILOs are confined in very small spaces, in very large numbers. Often their growth rate is accelerated, partly through use of hormones, and this can often cause physical ailments including chronic pain, sometimes to the point where the animals “are on the verge of structural collapse” (HSUS, 2008, citing Wise & Jennings,1972). The very close confinement, combined with the inability to access fresh air and sunshine, and to exercise and engage in normal behaviors, means that the creatures are at increased risk of illness, so antibiotics are often used (CIWF, 2009a). Male chicks in egg factories are considered nonuseful and therefore disposed of with almost no consideration of their status as living beings: “Millions each year are gassed, crushed, or thrown into garbage bins to die from dehydration or asphyxiation” (HSUS, 2008, p. 1). Since the females are kept in extremely close quarters, they have the tips of their beaks seared off, without painkillers, in order to prevent them from pecking each other, but this also makes eating and normal pecking activities difficult (HSUS, 2008). Most are kept in tiny cages—often so small the birds cannot spread their wings—during long portions of their lives, stacked upon each other to maximize use of factory space. These creatures can be starved for days to speed up the egg-laying process, known as “force molting.” The slaughter of chickens is done at such a fast pace to maximize hourly worker output that they are often still conscious when their throats are cut or they are boiled to remove their feathers (HSUS, 2008).
Pigs are also often kept in gestation crates too small for them to turn around in. Sows, and often dairy cows, are subject to impregnation with little time to recover between pregnancies. Pregnant sows are kept in farrowing crates that prevent them from engaging in nesting and rooting behaviors. Most of these nonhuman animals’ lives are measured in months—the minimum time it takes them to get to market weight, or the time in which they can successfully produce eggs, and then they are sent to slaughter, greatly reducing the natural life expectancy they would enjoy in less intensive farming settings. Beef cattle are often subjected to pain as a result of branding, removing horns, castration, and other procedures without anesthesia. They may be allowed to graze briefly but are “finished” in intensive factories where they are fed corn and soy, not foods that they would naturally eat and which cause their digestive systems to expel gases such as methane that contribute significantly to global warming, as does the intensive industrial approach to animal agriculture more generally. Male calves produced by dairy cows may be raised as veal in crates that do not permit the animals to move for the entire 18 weeks of their lives before slaughter. Not only do they suffer within the ILOs but during transportation as well, where regulation, as we will see below, is very lax and many animals die en route. For example, 650,000 animals died in transit in Canada in a 3-month period, mainly from freezing or from disease due to overcrowding, because “Canada’s allowable transport times are among the longest in the developed world” (WSPA, 2010, as cited in Anonymous, 2010). The WSPA (2010) report states the animals who die in transport (dead on arrivals) are “usually calculated as a percentage of the load” (p. 3). This is a further indication of the full extent of the commoditization of food animals as mere “product” in the production chain, with no independent dignity or importance of their own.
The industrial approach to livestock production harms not only the animals that pass through the system but also wildlife as a result of the environmental degradation of land use and pollution and the harmful effects on air and water. It also affects other domesticated animals that are not favored by the commoditized market system. The Food and Agriculture Organization’s report, The State of the World’s Animal Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture, has been criticized for “not paying attention to the industrial livestock system as one of the main forces behind the destruction of the biodiversity of domestic animals and for undermining the livelihoods of local communities that nurture this diversity” (“Interlaken Declaration,” 2007).
When we speak of animals used for food, their bodies and every aspect of their lives are fully commoditized, and their value limited to the dollar per pound they can obtain on the market. Their physical pain is downplayed, their emotional and psychological suffering denied entirely. Manno (2000) argues that “the dynamics of oppression are simply the flip-side of the dynamics of commoditization, which are embedded in the system and not necessarily the result of individual decisions to oppress other human beings” (p. 124). Similarly, many meat-eaters do not think about the pain and death of living creatures but simply about the protein requirements of their diets and even more, their taste preferences, as stimulated by cultural values and extensive advertising enticing people to eat meat. They also do not think about the vastly increased pain and suffering animals experience in the new production mode of industrial factory farming nor the significant environmental harms and economic distortions of this approach to food production, which further negatively affect both human and nonhuman animals.
Yet the legal and market system has allowed the industrialized process to colonize our food production. Despite criticism of these practices by animal welfare and animal rights groups, such as the HSUS, Mercy for Animals, the Sierra Club, PETA, CIWF, and the World Society for the Protection of Animals, among others, the bulk of the legislation and litigation in this area in Canada and the United States is limited to concerns over the threats that intensive animal farming poses to human health and the environment. Very little discussion on the welfare of animals themselves is heard at legal and policy levels. However, in Europe many of these animal production practices have been banned, and progress is being made on animal welfare standards and labeling to reveal the animal welfare issues involved in the production of these products. This is mainly because the European Union has constitutionally recognized that animals are sentient beings and their welfare must be taken into account in law and policy making, as we shall see below.
The Role of Law: Purposes Versus Realities
Ecological Justice
The law is intended to be a tool for protecting dignity, and ensuring justice and freedom from suffering. There is an extensive legal and philosophical literature on arguments for animal rights, which is beyond the scope of this article, and there has been a recent growth of the subfield of law called Animal Law, 10 as well as the nonlaw field of Critical Animal Studies. 11 However, there has been very little concrete improvement in North American law to entrench rights for animals. Until enforceable, stand-alone animal rights are legislated, we must look for alternative approaches.
Klaus Bosselman (2006) has argued that in the environmental context, the law should be a tool for achieving “ecological justice” which he defines to include (a) intragenerational justice or “concern for the poor”;
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(b) intergenerational justice, or “concern for future generations”;
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and (iii) interspecies justice.
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This multilevel ecological approach to justice would help the law to act as a tool for ensuring sustainability. Bosselman (2006) argues that “[t]he inclusion of an elaborate concept of interspecies justice is certainly crucial for a theory on ecological justice as distinct from mere social justice” (p. 152). He also makes the point that including interspecies justice within the notion of ecological justice makes this approach to justice seeking an ecocentric, rather than an anthropocentric, one. Bosselman (2006) likens this to the difference between the
philosophy of more-is-better [and] the philosophy of different-not-more. It asks the question “sustainability of what?” The concern here is that sustainable development simply means to sustain the Western way of life at the expense of the poor and of future generations. To be sustained are not the economic, but the ecological conditions requiring substantial changes in economy and society. (p. 153)
This ties in directly to Manno’s understanding that the root causes of environmental degradation are the systemic rewards and punishments that our current legal, economic, social, and other systems use to drive us toward decisions that may seem advantageous from the market perspective, but in fact are harmful to all other aspects of our well-being. It also suggests that legal principles and frameworks such as ecological justice can help the legal system to correct, rather than enable, this unsustainable commoditization. In relation to industrial animal farming specifically, the realities and consequences of ILOs violate all three elements of ecological justice in terms of their economic, environmental, and social consequences, but this starts with the law permitting and enabling the commoditization of animals and industrial food production.
Animal Suffering and Exploitation: The Role of Law
While there are larger problems with the overall legal governance of the food system domestically and globally, which I have in part canvassed elsewhere (McLeod-Kilmurray, 2011), in this article I will address the specific legal regime governing the treatment of intensively farmed animals. In Canada, there are four specific problems with the existing legal framework, and these are closely mirrored in the U.S. legal system. 15 The first is the operation of the common law which defines animals as private property. The second is the paucity and weakness of specific laws outlawing animal cruelty. The third is the operation of farming legislation to undo the protection of these anticruelty provisions. The fourth is the absence of provisions governing the treatment of animals specifically in intensive farming operations.
Legally in North America, animals (other than wild animals) are private property. Essentially
[a]nimals are considered property under Canadian law which means that their owners, whether human or corporate, can largely buy, sell and dispose of them as they would an outdated computer or broken lawnmower. . . . It is difficult to value animals in and of themselves while they continue to be classified as property. As property, the animals are legal non-persons—objects which are not seen as having interests independent of their owners. (Deckha, 2011; see also Torres, 2007, p. 64)
Just as slaves, women, and children were historically perceived, and treated by the law, as nonpersons, nonhuman animals are currently within that legal territory. This both reflects, and perpetuates, the speciesism deeply entrenched in North American culture, and this is key to why it is legally possible to commoditize animals for food production.
Animal Cruelty Laws
Second, the animal cruelty provisions in Canada are clearly inadequate to prevent the harms of ILOs. Federally the anticruelty provision is contained in the section of the Criminal Code outlawing “Forbidden and Willful Acts in respect of certain property,” in a subsection on Cattle and Other Animals, once again emphasizing the status of animals as property. Section 445 provides that it is an offence to willfully “kill, maim, wound, poison or injure” cattle, birds, or other animals “kept for a lawful purpose.” In the next subsection on cruelty to animals generally, section 445.1 provides that it is an offence to “willfully cause or permit to be caused unnecessary pain, suffering or injury to an animal or bird.” 16 Section 446 also makes “willful neglect” of animals an offence, but it applies only to domestic or wild birds and animals. It has been pointed out that the Criminal Code’s focus on willfulness and “unnecessary” pain leaves large loopholes for intensive farming practices.
There is also the federal Health of Animals Act (1990) which focuses on animal suffering during transport, and the Meat Inspection Act (1985) which adds some protection of animals “during handling and slaughter in federally registered slaughter facilities” (Wepruk, 2004, p. 1). Overall, however, these provisions have not restricted the inhumane treatment of animals in industrial production facilities. This is largely due to legislation protecting farmers.
Farming Laws: “Normal Farming Practices”
Canada and the United States
Provincial anticruelty legislation is similar to the federal law, except that many of these include express exemptions for “normal farming practices” (Wolfson & Sullivan, 2004, p. 205).
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An example is the Ontario Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals Act (1990) which provides
11.1 (1) Every person who owns or has custody or care of an animal shall comply with the prescribed standards of care with respect to every animal that the person owns or has custody or care of. (2) Subsection (1) does not apply in respect of, (a) an activity carried on in accordance with reasonable and generally accepted practices of agricultural animal care, management or husbandry; or (b) a prescribed class of animals or animals living in prescribed circumstances or conditions, or prescribed activities.
Similar exemptions have been included in a vast array of American legislation as documented in detail by David D. Wolfson and Mariann Sullivan. They conclude that
[s]tate legislatures have endowed the farmed animal industry with complete authority to define what is, and what is not, cruelty to the animals in their care. There is no legal limit to institutionalized cruel practices to farmed animals who live in states with customary farming exemptions . . . if a certain percentage of the farming community wants to institute a new practice of raising a farmed animal, that is the end of the matter, and the hands of the judge, prosecutor or local SPCA are tied. The customary farming exemptions are not only an example of a powerful industry evading a criminal law that applies to everyone else, they are a unique development in that they delegate criminal enforcement power to the industry itself. It is difficult to imagine another non-governmental group possessing such influence over a criminal legal definition; for example, a law that provided that chemical corporations have not polluted (and, consequently, violated criminal law) so long as they released pollutants in amounts ‘accepted’ or viewed as ‘customary’ by the chemical industry. In effect, state legislators have granted agribusiness a license to treat animals as it wishes. (Wolfson & Sullivan, 2004, p. 215)
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Indeed, as Wolfson points out, the very fact that the agribusiness lobby felt it necessary to push for these exemptions to be enacted into law indicates a widespread understanding that these “generally accepted farming practices” would otherwise constitute animal cruelty. Indeed, these legal changes are part of how the law is failing to prevent, and on the contrary helping to legalize and perpetuate, these practices. Some statutory provisions are honest and transparent in stating that such treatment in factory farms still is “acute suffering, serious injury or harm, or extreme anxiety or distress that significantly impairs its health or well-being” but it is just exempt from legal liability. 19 However in other provisions, the law actually erases, by defining away, the suffering of these animals. For example, section 6(2) of the Animal Care Act (1996) provides that “[f]or the purposes of this Act, an animal shall not be considered to be in distress as a result of any treatment, process, or condition that occurs in the course of an accepted activity.” Regardless of whether it actually is in such distress, the law will consider it not to be. 20 It is clear that if the word “animal” were replaced in this section with the word “person,” this provision would violate a range of domestic and international laws, but it is acceptable in the context of food animals.
It is also notable that the word “person” would not include nonhuman animals, but could include corporations. Many jurisdictions include corporations within the definition of persons, as they are considered to be “legal persons.” This is because in our market economy we feel that corporations need to be endowed with personhood so that we can grant them the rights and freedoms to engage in the activities that are essential to our economies. The corporate persons, the ones who are doing the commoditizing, are therefore legally deemed to be more akin to humans than their fellow nonhuman living creatures are. Corporations have more rights than animals, and this goes a long way to explaining the possibility of commoditization of the food system. Yet even within such a system, it is not inevitable that animals be treated entirely as objects. The European Union has taken a different approach.
European Union
The European Union has been leading the way in recognizing the animal welfare consequences of industrial animal farming, and taking legal measures to counteract the harms of this mode of food production. Veal crates have been legally banned in England since 1987. Switzerland banned battery cages in 1991, and the European Union in 1999, although this does not come into force until 2012. The European Union has also banned veal cages from 2007 and gestation crates from 2013. Laws provide for farmers to meet the behavioral needs of farmed animals to some degree, such as providing pigs with materials they can root in, and laying hens with nesting areas, litter, and other material needs.
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As the European Commission itself describes it,
the first Community legislation on farm animal welfare was adopted in 1974 to reflect the basic five freedoms (freedom from discomfort, from hunger and thirst, from fear and distress, from pain, injury and disease and freedom to express natural behaviour).
This seems to reflect a greater understanding of animals as living, feeling creatures. These laws are also the beginning of a counter-commoditization strategy, aiming to distinguish these living creatures from commodities which do not share these unique characteristics. Indeed, in 1997, the Amsterdam amendments to the Treaty (which is essentially the constitution document of the European Union) were adopted, and included the Protocol on Protection and Welfare of Animals (1997):
THE HIGH CONTRACTING PARTIES, DESIRING to ensure improved protection and respect for the welfare of animals as sentient beings, HAVE AGREED UPON the following provision which shall be annexed to the Treaty establishing the European Community, In formulating and implementing the Community’s agriculture, transport, internal market and research policies, the Community and the Member States shall pay full regard to the welfare requirements of animals, while respecting the legislative or administrative provisions and customs of the Member States relating in particular to religious rites, cultural traditions and regional heritage.
To implement this obligation, the European Union adopted a Community Action Plan on the Protection and Welfare of Animals (http://ec.europa.eu/food/animal/welfare/actionplan/actionplan_en.htm) in 2006. 22 The Plan aims to “promote high standards” of animal welfare, and enhance coordination and research, and with the future goals of introducing “welfare indicators,” better informing the public and internationalizing these standards. 23 As part of these efforts, the European Union is also working on directives mandating animal welfare labeling, so that consumers can know how the animals were treated in the making of the animal products they are purchasing (European Commission, 2009). 24 The European Union also funded the Welfare Quality Project, 25 which “aimed to accommodate societal concerns and market demands, to develop reliable on-farm monitoring systems, product information systems, and practical species-specific strategies to improve animal welfare.” The basic goal of the Project was “to link informed animal product consumption to animal husbandry practices on the farm,” making consumers the drivers, and not just the recipients, of animal food production, which is an extremely important tactic in resisting commoditization. The quality indicators contain several animal welfare indicators, such as hunger, thirst, or malnutrition; physical comfort and security; health (injuries and disease); pain; normal/natural social behaviors; human-animal relationship; and reducing negative emotions and enhancing positive emotions. The Project was also intended “to develop European standards for on-farm welfare assessments and product information systems . . . based upon consumer demands, the marketing requirements of retailers and stringent scientific validation”; to make animal welfare claims systematic and verifiable; and thereby also reduce concerns that animal welfare, if unevenly legislated or enforced, could lead to market distortions. This suggests that even in this context, where animal welfare is the primary aim, it is still not feasible to “sell” this to producers and others if it causes economic harm. However, the European Union has made a giant leap forward in making animal welfare the primary focus of this project, and therefore making any humans benefits of better food quality and safety, and economic wealth, secondary to this. 26
It is important to note that in all these strategies, even those most alert to animal suffering, reducing the need and desire for animal products is very low on the agenda. On the contrary, although increases in wealth and globalization of goods and cultures are an important reason for the increase in demand for animal products, there is also a vast marketing effort to ensure this growth. Animals are often co-opted into these efforts, with smiling cartoon cows or chickens encouraging people to frequent steak or poultry restaurants. 27 This again reduces the moral weight of decisions to eat there by implying that the animals “don’t mind” and are willing participants in this food system.
This recalls Manno’s (2000) observations of the oppression that commoditization visits on certain groups of humans:
. . . [F]or example, . . . images of Native American culture are commoditized and marketed by Disney and Hollywood. This is an example of how commoditization pressures operate to simplify and stereotype by highlighting and marketing the most commoditizable aspects of any culture or group and ignoring or suppressing those aspects that resist commoditization. (p. 123)
Deckha and others have also observed that meat-eating is promoted as a gendered activity—“real men eat meat.” 28 It is a sign, and cause, of weakness to reject meat. It is also portrayed as an essential part of the affluent lifestyle, such that those with growing incomes in less developed countries increase their animal product consumption in keeping with their increased purchasing power, whether or not this is good for their individual health or their local economies or environments. So how can we achieve the want reduction that is an essential part of combating commoditization? One tool would be to increase awareness, and legal enforceability, of the concept of interspecies justice.
Interspecies Justice
We have seen that Bosselman (2006) includes as one of the three core pillars of ecological justice the notion of interspecies justice. The differential, and unfavorable, treatment of nonhuman animals has been called a kind of discrimination no different from discrimination based on other kinds of difference such as race and gender, and is often called speciesism. Why is this permitted and facilitated by law and policy? Apart from environmental law scholars such as Bosselman, ecofeminist analysis can also contribute to the debate about the legal treatment and commoditization of animals in two main ways. First, it explains how the law can treat nonhuman animals this way, but it also points out to human animals why, if we are not already inclined to do so, we should care about the legal maltreatment of our fellow animals. Maneesha Deckha (2006) has argued that the legal treatment of nonhuman animals should be an important issue for feminist and intersectionality scholars because “[t]here are intimate connections between human and animal oppressions such that abjuring animal suffering effectively disavows human suffering. This occurs through the tolerance of dynamics within animal oppression that have been held morally objectionable within critical cultural theory” (p. 3). Ecofeminists (e.g., Warren, 1990) explain that many of the arguments supporting speciesism include dynamics such as justifying different treatment on the basis of biological differences and dualistic hierarchies such as mind/body, culture/nature, which many branches of feminism have resisted strongly. Ecofeminist principles can be placed into five main categories: Acting on our Kinship, Recognizing the Interconnection, Adapting to the Cyclical Process, Validating the Emotional and Spiritual and Taking Responsibility. They include themes such as abandon[ing] dualisms, rejecting hierarchy, emphasizing inherent value and long-term thinking, validating emotion, and emphasizing diversity, respect, adaptability, and accountability (see, e.g., Hughes, 1995). All of these are put forward by ecofeminists as means leading us to sustainability.
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But they also lead us to respect for animal welfare as well, and a reduction in the species discrimination that enables and justifies consumption of animal products and the suffering of industrial farming. These five ecofeminist principles are also very contrary to the driving forces of commoditization which erase kinship, interconnection, emotions, and spirituality. As Michael Pollan (2006) has said,
To visit a modern CAFO is to enter a world that for all its technological sophistication is still designed on seventeenth-century Cartesian principles: Animals are treated as machines–“production units”–incapable of feeling pain. Since no thinking person can possibly believe this anymore, industrial animal agriculture depends on a suspension of disbelief on the part of the people who operate it and a willingness to avert one’s eyes on the part of everyone else. . . . A tension has always existed between the capitalist imperative to maximize efficiency at all cost and the moral imperatives of culture, which historically have served as a counterweight to the moral blindness of the market. This is another example of the cultural contradictions of capitalism–the tendency over time for the economic impulse to erode the moral underpinnings of society. Mercy toward the animals in our care is one such casualty. (pp. 317-318)
Yet the effects of these market forces are not confined to the food animals themselves. This structure of food production also requires the commoditization of the human animals who produce and consume these products.
The Commoditization of Producers and Consumers by Industrial Livestock Production
Producers
Apart from the corporations driving the industrialized food system, the individuals who actually work in the intensive animal factories are required to inflict suffering and death on fellow creatures on a daily basis. There have been reports of the rapid turnover of staff in slaughterhouses.
30
There is also evidence that the pay, health and safety and other working conditions of these employees is below minimum standards (Singer & Mason, 2006),
31
indicating, as Maneesha Deckha (2006) has suggested, that systems that permit and accept mistreatment of animals also accept and perpetuate mistreatment of humans. The personal feelings, health, and living standards of these employees are also lost to the commoditization process, as reducing the costs of employment is another imperative of the market system, and these “human resources” must also be crunched into the numbers of profit margins, rather than be seen as whole people with various needs. Wolfson and Sullivan (2004), in their study of the legal regulation of cruelty in intensive farming, also conclude that commoditization is central to this system, without using the term itself:
Nor can individual producers, by themselves, be expected to improve the conditions under which such animals are kept. Although measures which may be extremely deleterious to animals may shave only pennies from the cost of production, because of the economies of scale and the intensely competitive environment of the meat industry in the United States, producers who would prefer to treat their animals in a more ethical manner are severely constrained if they wish to compete. (p. 225)
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Peter Singer and Jim Mason (2006) agree:
[t]he way that factory farming treats animals is not so much a problem of gratuitous cruelty or sadism, and the main problem is not a matter of preventing isolated incidents of animal abuse. The core issue is the commercial pressures that exist in a competitive market system in which animals are items of property, and the conditions in which they are kept are not regulated by federal or animal-welfare law (p. 55)
Similarly, Manno (2000) explains how commoditization leads directly to oppression of various groups of humans. “Oppressed groups are affected . . . [f]irst by receiving a disproportionately small share of the benefits of commoditized economic development and, second, by suffering the greatest losses resulting from the deliberate underdevelopment and destruction of common goods, traditions and values” (p. 127). This is clearly one aspect of industrialized livestock production. The majority of the profits of this highly centralized and industrial system accrue to major food corporations and reduce the possibility for livelihoods of small farmers. This is excusable in the commoditized system because corporations are assumed and accepted as being impersonal, amoral actors. While clearly all corporations are made up of individual human actors, corporate behavior is deemed to be anonymous, and inevitably and rightly driven by the sole objective of maximizing shareholder profit. This is seen as a laudable goal and essential to economic growth and prosperity.
Apart from harm to human employees in industrial animal factories, the commoditization of livestock production has inflicted intragenerational injustice on traditional farmers. The growth of major livestock corporations has devastated farming communities in developed countries and reimposed a kind of food colonialism on the developing world, whose farmers have to adjust their farming to produce the commodities the world market demands, often through monocropping and growing crops that these farmers do not consume themselves.
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These must also be crops which bring them monetary wealth so that they can buy the other products they need, which they may formerly have been able to produce themselves through more diverse farming. Manno (2000) says this also is a direct result of the domination of market paradigms:
In this process, what we have come to call the economy has become exclusively what can be exchanged in some way for currencies or other instruments representing abstract value. The meaning of efficiency in human activity shifted. No longer did it mean getting the most use and service out of the least expense of material, energy and time but instead efficiency came to mean the greatest output or yield per unit of value or money expended. (p. 131)
Manno (2000) points out that in a society which prioritizes and is organized around the commodity-based market, “as more and more spheres of human needs and wants become dominated by commodity satisfactions, participation or membership in social life itself depends on ability to participate in the market” (p. 123). This is what Vandana Shiva (1993) and others call replacing subsistence wealth with “culturally perceived poverty”:
It is useful to separate a cultural conception of subsistence living as poverty from the material experience of poverty resulting from dispossession and deprivation. Culturally perceived poverty is not necessarily real material poverty: subsistence economies that satisfy basic needs through self-provisioning are not poor in the sense of deprivation. Yet the ideology of development declares them to be so because they neither participate overwhelmingly in the market economy nor consume commodities produced for and distributed through the market, even though they might be satisfying those basic needs through self-provisioning mechanisms. (p. 72)
Industrialized animal farming thus commoditizes, and thereby oppresses, animal producers morally, physically and economically. It has similar effects on consumers.
Consumers
Consumers of animal products are treated in this intensive livestock system as simply one part of the industrial equation. They are no longer citizens, fellow-creatures, or inhabitants. The social, economic and environmental costs of their consumption are not included in the price tag on their package of chicken breasts. The risks even to their own health are downplayed, so that their economic interest trumps their health interest. Compassion in World Farming (2009a) argues that “increased fat content, bacteria causing food poisoning, obesity, risk of cancers and heart disease are all results of the move to a more meat-heavy diet” (p. 10). They also include the “risk of transmission of disease from animals to human consumers, as well as effects of air emissions from ILOs and CAFOs on neighbouring residents” (McLeod-Kilmurray, 2011, citing Pew Commission on Industrial Farm Animal Production, 2008b).
The very things which are often claimed by philosophers to justify differentiating humans from nonhuman animals—namely human instincts to empathy, and an ability to understand pain and feel emotions such as sorrow and guilt—are also thwarted when people are reduced to making their food decisions based solely on price tags. Manno (2010) cites Manner and Gowdy (2010) to say that
the scientific evidence that homo sapiens have evolved behavioural characteristics that tend toward mutual regard and cooperation and that the belief that humans are genetically determined to pursue material self-interest at the expense of more altruistic ends, is a serious misrepresentation of human nature. “Empathy, morality and love for others . . . is the glue that holds human societies together.” (p. 168)
The industrial livestock system depends on consumers not feeling that animals qualify as fellow beings who deserve or arouse empathy or love. It is clear from public opinion in Europe that this is not universally the case. Yet these feelings and beliefs are regularly checked at the door of supermarkets when busy and economically constrained consumers spend their weekly hour grocery shopping. This is the result of a lack of knowledge, awareness, and choice. The animal welfare labeling scheme can help with these first two problems, but will not be sufficient unless there is also the third element that allows consumer-citizens to exercise a real choice. This impoverishment of choice in itself can be argued to be a form of oppression:
In general, even as per capita productivity and consumption rise, many lives are contracted and more impoverished. Their contributions to the gross national product notwithstanding, the felt value of individual lives can diminish in proportion to the extent to which forces of commoditization govern their life chances and choices. (Manno, 2000, p. 127)
This creates significant intragenerational injustice, which is a necessary part of this unsustainable system.
In addition, a system which promotes continuous growth in the consumption of animal products oppresses those whose own right to food is violated by the demands on the environment that meat production imposes. This is the problem of the “the feed-conversion ratio.” For example,
[o]ne kilogramme of edible boneless beef requires around 20 kg of animal feed and 15,500 litres of water to produce . . . One calorie of food energy obtained from beef requires inputs of 9 calories of food energy from plants and 40 calories of fossil fuel energy. (CIWF, 2009a, p. 19)
In other words, “the ratio of energy input to output for industrially produced meat can reach as high as 35:1” (Cassuto, 2010, p. 7, citing Pew Commission on Industrial Farm Animal Production, 2008a). 34 It has been calculated that the American diet would only feed 2.5 billion people globally (CIWF, 2009a). Therefore, the promotion of animal product consumption is part of the global food shortage and arguably one of the causes of the intragenerational injustice of hunger in the midst of abundance.
While the demands of the market make this approach to food production seem necessary and inevitable, it is important to remember that this approach to animal farming is very recent. Charles Abdalla (2002) notes that the industrialization of chicken production did not occur prior to 1950, and that of the pig industry not before about the 1990s, and that this change occurred because of “the increasing dependence on capital and the diminishing role of the inherent capacity of land as factors of production,” and “the advent of new technologies and marketing practices” (pp. 178-180). For centuries prior to this, in traditional farming, domesticated farm animals grazed on the land, provided natural fertilizer for the soil and crops, provided other foods such as eggs or milk during their natural lifetimes in addition to strength, heat, and companionship in some cases, until at the end of their natural lives their meat, skins, horns, and so on, could be used to avoid waste. Many remaining societies continue this model of animal farming, and the “new” (re)-turn to organic farming may also emphasize this kind of mutual benefit. The perceived advantages of industrial over more traditional farming is measured almost solely in the financial profits of these multinational livestock corporations and in the dollar figure on the animal products when purchased at the store. However, these higher profits and lower consumer monetary costs are merely a fraction of the true costs of this mode of production. “[T]he price of meat might double or triple if the full ecological costs–including fossil-fuel combustion, groundwater depletion, agricultural-chemical pollution, and methane and ammonia emission–were included in the bill” (Durning & Brough, 1991, p. 42), not to mention the immeasurable costs to the welfare of the animals themselves. As Compassion in World Farming (2009a) has noted, “[a]s we approach 2050, the huge resources of land, water and energy that our current intensive livestock production is based on may simply not be available. Factory farming would become both economically and ethically unsustainable” (p. 5).
Indeed, as I have documented elsewhere (McLeod-Kilmurray, 2011), one of the greatest harms of industrial livestock production, apart from its impact on the animals themselves, is its impact on the environment. Apart from reducing the environmental services of land, water, and air through the inefficient use of land and the pollution of water from concentrated animal wastes at these factories, industrial livestock production also vastly increases greenhouse gas emissions. 35 The resulting global warming will not only adversely and inequitably affect certain members of the current generation, but it is also victimizing future generations, reducing their capacity to live full and healthy lives and imposing an ever-increasing economic burden on them for mitigation and adaptation (Stern, 2007). This adds further human beings to the costs of industrial livestock production, making them once again simply part of the costs of doing business.
Our choice of food production systems is driven by international market, trade, and price structures that have come to be largely beyond the control of national governments and certainly of individual farmers:
Since the commoditized economy has expanded to the point where its allocation structures totally dominate the distribution of materials, energy, and human attention, there is almost no chance to opt out in favor of traditional ways. The forms of knowledge valued by indigenous people–knowledge of relationships between and among the varied components of the home ecosystem–is largely unvalued by the commoditized economy . . . The end result is a form of cultural genocide in which groups of people are systematically impoverished. (Manno, 2002)
Although she was writing about the genetic modification of plants, Vandana Shiva’s (2000) complaint could equally be made about industrial animal farming:
as small farms and small farmers are pushed to extinction, as monocultures replace biodiverse crops, as farming is transformed from the production of nourishing and diverse foods into the creation of markets for genetically engineered seeds, herbicides and pesticides [read grain-fed factory farmed animals and antibiotics], as farmers are transformed from producers into consumers of corporate-patented agricultural products, as markets are destroyed locally and nationally but expanded globally, the myth of ‘free trade’ and the global economy becomes a means for the rich to rob the poor of their right to food and even their right to life.” (p. 7)
Yet the new European approach, which does factor in market and economic imperatives but only after having entrenched protection of animal welfare, suggests that this is not an all or nothing endeavor. Human animals have built the international food system the way it is, and they can choose to change it to incorporate all three kinds of ecological justice.
Conclusion
In order to achieve environmental and food sustainability, industrial livestock production must not be the dominant mode of food production. While the pull of the globalized food system is powerful, there are several steps that could be taken to resist the total commoditization of animals.
Perhaps the most powerful and effective step would be to recognize that nonhuman animals have rights, and to recognize the accompanying human responsibilities to uphold these rights. If the right to life of animals were recognized and enforced in the same way that the rights of human animals are, it would become illegal to commoditize them. While, of course, there continue to be human suffering and abuses despite international legal protection for human rights, this does not mean that such entrenchment of animal rights would not go a long way toward improving their protection. Until this happens, the next best thing is to strengthen not only animal welfare but also environmental protection laws. North America could emulate the European Union in legally prioritizing animal welfare protection. It could also enact legislation specifically to govern the animal welfare aspects of industrial factory farming. If animal welfare were protected, this would at least reduce the suffering experienced by animals in industrial animal factories, and perhaps demand production processes and full cost accounting that would make this form of farming too expensive to be economically viable. Stronger laws relating to greenhouse gas emissions, putting a price on carbon, and stronger laws on water, air, and land protection would have similar effects. Even more immediately, “normal farming practices” should be legislatively defined and not left, as it is in some jurisdictions, to the customary practices of industrial actors. The provisions providing that animal cruelty laws do not apply to farming practices should be removed, and any definition of normal farming practice should specify that anything amounting to cruelty can never be deemed “normal” or “generally accepted.”
Efforts to raise consumer awareness are also essential to removing the monopoly on choice and control from agribusiness. Animal welfare labeling schemes would be one such tool, as would more focused media attention on the harms of industrial livestock production. Making affordable and appealing alternatives to meat products readily available to consumers in stores and restaurants is another tactic proposed by some such as Robert Goodland (2010). This could be done in part by transferring the massive subsidies to animal feed and livestock producers to those who produce alternative products. Another effort in changing awareness would be to reduce the active promotion and marketing of meat-eating, and the perception that it is essential to health, to culture, and to an affluent and privileged lifestyle.
Returning nonhuman animals to their status as living creatures, and human producers and consumers to their status as citizens and inhabitants, would reduce the commoditization of the key players in this industrial food system. Perhaps if ecological justice, with its three clear branches including interspecies justice, could be the driving force behind all food laws and policies, we would have the kind of transparency in our system that McCartney and Pollan suggest is needed for slaughterhouses. The transparency of ecological justice would lead us away from commoditization and toward sustainability in the food production system.
Footnotes
Author’s Note
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.