Factory farming

How does factory farming affect wildlife?

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Billions of animals suffer every day in factory farms. But did you know that intensive farming harms wildlife too?

Ariel view of a factory farm

As the number of farmed animals rapidly grows, our planet’s wildlife is dwindling. Centuries of human intervention has caused untold destruction to wild animals and their habitats. Our methods of farming animals contribute to this destruction and now the biodiversity of our planet hangs in the balance. Read on to find out how factory farming impacts our vulnerable wildlife.

The evidence is clear: modern human society is driving our planet to breaking point. And the creatures we inhabit the Earth with are paying the price.

According to the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF), wild animal populations have fallen by more than two-thirds in the last fifty years. We’re in the midst of a huge loss of biodiversity, with species dying out between 1000 and 10,000 times faster than the natural rate.

One of the many modern phenomena driving this, and unleashing havoc onto our wildlife, is factory farming. Here are a few reasons why.

Pollution

Animal agriculture is one of the leading causes of water pollution in the UK. The UK is home to approximately 800 ‘mega-farms’, facilities that house tens of thousands, even hundreds of thousands, of animals - usually chickens.

The sheer number of animals in these farms creates huge amounts of waste containing harmful chemicals. Chicken excrement contains phosphorous, which causes ‘algal bloom’ in water, where bacterial algae start to grow rapidly, often resulting in a coloured scum on the surface. As well as being harmful to human health, these toxic algae interrupt the food chain for fishes, killing off their food sources and leaving them to starve. If algae become dominant, it can also use up the oxygen in the water, preventing fishes from being able to breathe. For years, campaigners have been calling on major chicken producers to tackle the pollution they are causing to the UK’s rivers.

But how is the chicken waste getting into the waterways in the first place?

Factory farms often store animal waste in huge cesspools, which have been known to leak and cause contamination in nearby rivers and lakes. Furthermore, animal excrement is often used as manure in fields to grow crops. When it rains, manure can run off the soil and end up in the waterways too, creating disease and dead zones.

The issue of chemicals from farming entering the waterways is not exclusive to animal agriculture, although it is one of the chief culprits. Farming of crops also causes pesticides to run off into nearby streams. A solution is clearly needed to tackle the way in which our farming practices negatively impact wildlife.

Our ocean is also being polluted by intensive farming. Aquaculture, the mass farming of aquatic animals, can contaminate the sea. For example, marine fishes are often farmed in sea cages, which are giant nets floating off the coast (you can see these if you fly over certain parts of Scotland or Greece). Seawater can freely flow in and out of these nets - as can anything floating in that water, too. Effluents from salmon farms, such as excrement, as well as chemicals and antibiotics from feed leave the cages and spill over into the surrounding area, polluting the seas and harming aquatic wildlife.

Disease

Intensive farming can also put wild animals at an increased risk of disease.

A huge welfare issue associated with salmon farming is the prevalence of sea lice. Sea lice feed off the bodies of salmon, and are a natural occurrence in the wild that can cause irritation, lesions and loss of scales and flesh. In fish farms, due to the unnatural environment in which the salmon are kept, sea lice are far more common and problematic than in the wild. Since sea cages are exposed to the surrounding ocean, these sea lice transfer easily onto wild fish that pass by, infecting local wild populations and causing disease and even death.

Genetic mixing

Continuing on the topic of farmed fishes, escapes from sea cages into the wider ocean can cause inter-breeding of farmed and wild populations. Farmed salmon are selectively bred for certain characteristics profitable to producers, such as larger size and later reproductive age. If they escape and breed with wild salmon, this can cause problems for their offspring, since farmed salmon have been bred to develop traits which are unhelpful for survival in the wild.

Escapes are relatively common, with recent major events seeing tens of thousands of salmon released into the wild as a result of net damage caused by storms.

Deforestation

Around one third of the world’s croplands are used to grow animal feed. Between 1980 and 2000, an area over 25 times the size of the UK was taken up in the developing world to make room for this. Over 10 percent of this was at the cost of tropical forests.

A huge driver of Amazon deforestation, along with pasture for beef cows, is the production of soybeans. This soy isn’t being grown to provide tofu for the vegans of the world - in fact, approximately 80 percent of all soy grown globally is for livestock feed.

The effect of this deforestation on our Earth’s climate is alarming. And deforestation is devastating the planet’s wildlife too.

It causes wild animals to lose their shelter and homes, and can force them to stray into areas where they would not naturally be found. This can push them closer to humans, where they can transmit diseases unfamiliar to our bodies and pose a pandemic risk.

Deforestation also makes it more difficult for wild animals to find food because there is less vegetation. Deforestation-driven climate change causes adverse weather conditions that these animals are not designed to survive. The loss of forests causes many challenges that, sadly, wildlife is not equipped to handle.

How you can help

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