THL
A huge proportion of food is produced in factory farms around the world, but they are often hidden away.
Factory farming is the primary way that the UK and many other countries produce animal products like sausages, cheese, and eggs. But it’s far from a flawless process. Factory farming causes significant damage to the environment and disregards the welfare of the farmed animals themselves.
Today, animal advocates from a broad range of backgrounds are increasingly calling for a shift away from these harsh industrial practices to give rise to a more just, equitable food system.
This article will explore what factory farming is, what life on a factory farm is like for animals, and why major changes within this industry must be implemented.
What is factory farming?
Factory farming is a modern industrial method of raising farmed animals, who are collectively known in the industry as livestock.
At its core, factory farming is a form of intensive agriculture, meaning it’s designed to maximise profits using as few resources as possible. For example, on factory farms large numbers of animals are confined in small spaces, which often means keeping animals indoors in cramped conditions for the duration of their lives.
Factory farming is an increasingly common way to raise animals for food, focusing on species such as cows, pigs, chickens, and fishes. Factory farms can also be used to farm animals for non-food purposes, such as minks farmed intensively for their fur.
The origins of factory farming
Many people in the UK picture animals being raised on farms like childrens’ storybooks, or in the tv ads of supermarkets. But these images of outside green space and clean, happy animals are far from the truth when it comes to modern farming.
Over the last few decades, demand for cheap meat, eggs and dairy has changed farming dramatically. Smaller farms have been driven out of business and replaced with factory farms; scaled up, intensive, and able to produce more quickly and cheaply.
At the end of World War II, people were eager to regain control of our food supply and not rely so much on imports.
To help this, the government set up a subsidisation system that encouraged farmers to expand their herds and flocks. The government gave them money for every animal slaughtered. It was this model that led to the factory farming we see today.
By the 1960’s, mega farms had started to crop up over Britain, first for chickens, and then pigs and cows. Now, in the UK alone, over 1.2 billion animals are slaughtered every year and 95% of them will be raised on factory farms.
Which animals are raised on factory farms?
Factory farming is used to produce a wide range, from milk to meat. Therefore animals kept on these farms include chickens, cows, pigs, fishes, turkeys and other ‘game’ birds, and sheep.
What happens on factory farms?
On factory farms, animals are not given any choice about how to live their lives. They're raised to grow quickly so that they can be turned into products as swiftly as possible. Various bodily mutilations, extremely tight and crowded confinement, and lives spent entirely indoors are routine aspects of life for factory-farmed animals.
Inhumane treatment
Inhumane treatment occurs on factory farms wherever animal cruelty is ignored, though definitions of cruelty vary widely depending on who you ask. For example, a description of animal cruelty used by the CEOs of big meat companies will differ drastically from those used by animal advocates.
While producers often claim to root out inhumane treatment of farmed animals wherever possible, factory farms are inherently inhumane.
Routine factory farming practices include separating mother cows from their day-old calves, which often results in mothers crying for days; castrating male piglets without anesthetics; or never once allowing animals to experience the outdoors—save for a terrifying journey in the back of a truck on the way to the slaughterhouse.
There is little about the experience of farmed animals in the factory farming system that is humane.
Chickens are beak-trimmed
Mutilations are a common practice on factory farms.
Chickens’ beaks are a vital part of their physiology. In the same way that we use our hands to explore our environment, chickens use their beaks, pecking at food and other objects up to 15,000 times each day.
In factory farms, this behaviour can take an ugly turn. When chickens are faced with overcrowding (which prevents them from exploring their surroundings), boredom, and other restrictions of factory farms—they often turn this pecking behaviour onto fellow chickens, resulting in injury and even death.
Rather than provide chickens with more freedom and space to help eliminate this pecking behaviour, many companies instead cut off parts of the chickens’ beaks. Using a machine equipped with an infrared beam (or a hot blade in other parts of the world), the tip of the beak is removed.
There is evidence that beak-trimming with a hot blade causes pain to chickens not only during the cutting but chronically throughout their lives. Infra-red beak trimming may be a less painful procedure but it changes the shape of the beak and chicks lose weight after having their beak trimmed.
Wild chickens do not need their beaks trimmed to properly socialise with one another. Factory farming practices create these abnormal behaviours.
Pigs are tail-docked
Some animals on factory farms routinely have their tails removed—a process known as tail-docking. This type of mutilation is generally carried out without anesthetics and is banned in certain regions because of the long-term pain they cause farmed animals.
For example, in England it is illegal to tail-dock cows. While it is technically not legally permitted in the UK to tail-dock pigs, except under certain circumstances, this is often done routinely in the industry to piglets at just a few days of age.
The industry claims tail-docking is necessary for a number of reasons. In pigs, much like chickens, the stressful, unnatural conditions on factory farms drive the animals to bite one another’s tails, causing injuries and sometimes infections that can lead to death. Tail-docking is designed to remove the part of the tail that moves a lot and can lure other pigs to bite. The practice is also designed to cause pain on the pig’s tail so that they more actively avoid being bitten.
Sadly, it’s another example of the animal being made to fit the system, rather than the other way around.
Animals are confined
Extreme confinement is the defining feature of factory farms. It causes boredom, frustration, stress, and other serious welfare concerns for farmed animals. The most intensive confinement system for cows is called a tie stall and is used on dairy cows.
Tie stalls force each cow to spend all her time tied into a single stall. Thankfully this system is prohibited in the UK but used commonly in places like Switzerland. Loose stalls, in which cows are allowed to roam around a small shed, are the most common in the UK.
However, while some get to go out in the summer we know an increasing number of cows spend their entire lives indoors, never getting to lie on pasture.
One study found that confinement of any sort, when compared with raising cows in a pasture, negatively affects welfare in many respects.
In some countries, including the US, female pigs used for breeding are held in sow stalls so small that they cannot turn around for the duration of their pregnancies.
This is illegal in the UK but farrowing crates are still commonly used, where mother pigs are confined for the first four weeks after birth while they are with their piglets. Farrowing crates are designed to stop mother pigs from crushing their piglets but have severe welfare drawbacks, including preventing sows from being able to turn around freely and build their nests.
Genetic selection
Genetic selection is when animals can be bred to possess certain traits. It happens on a huge scale on factory farms.
For example, broiler chickens are designed to grow bigger breasts, since breast meat is preferred among consumers. This added body weight means that their legs can struggle to support their weight, leaving them lame, often lying in their own waste.
Similarly, cows and hens have been bred to produce more milk and eggs than is natural, causing a host of debilitating medical conditions.
Genetic selection carries risks to both human and animal health. Over time, acquiring such traits in farmed animals can lead to each individual becoming nearly genetically identical, which increases the already-high pandemic risk inside factory farms.
Under normal circumstances, individual genetic variations act as speed bumps on the road to viral transmission. Large numbers of genetically similar animals allow viruses to spread much faster and potentially become more virulent.
Why does factory farming still happen?
There are many reasons that factory farming remains the dominant method for raising animals for food in the UK. The animal agriculture industry wields serious financial and political clout, allowing the industry’s harmful effects on human health and the environment to often be ignored.
The conditions on factory farms also remain obscured, due to them being away from public sight. Many people in the UK assume that our welfare standards are high and that the issues are in other countries.
Public perception of farmed animals plays a role in the proliferation of factory farms as well, since animals are often not viewed as deserving a life beyond their exploitation by humans. These beliefs are often cultural and at times can be attributed to a lack of understanding regarding animals’ proven sentience or ability to experience pain and negative psychological effects from captivity.
In recent years, public understanding of animal sentience is thought to be changing in some countries, arriving at a point that is in greater alignment with science.
The two biggest factors behind the continuation—and dramatic increase—of factory farming around the world are the rise in global meat consumption and the growing demand for cheap meat.
Countries like the US, Brazil, and China help meet this demand by generating a surplus of animal products, which can be exported abroad. There is big money and political power behind industrial animal agriculture pushing to keep welfare standards low, governmental subsidies high, and consumer demand soaring.
Why is factory farming bad?
Factory farming is bad for the environment, the communities near these facilities, consumer health, and animal welfare. Below are a few key issues surrounding factory farming.
Animal welfare
Animal welfare philosophy and legislation are grounded by the Five Freedoms, a framework denoting the kind of living conditions animals should not be subjected to. The Five Freedoms are:
- Freedom from thirst, hunger, and malnutrition
- Freedom from discomfort and exposure
- Freedom from pain, injury, and disease
- Freedom from fear and distress
- Freedom to express normal behaviour
The conditions on a typical factory farm make it impossible for animals to fully achieve even one of these freedoms. Harsh confinement, such as cages and farrowing crates, makes it impossible for animals to express their full repertoire of natural behaviours.
It is also notoriously difficult to discern whether a farm animal is experiencing fear, since this would require the close monitoring of every animal in an attempt to monitor their affective emotional state. There are just too many animals on factory farms for this to be possible.
The routine mutilations of beak trimming, tail-docking, and other procedures are all injuries that can cause chronic pain, and they often go unmonitored.
While some factory farms have made attempts to improve welfare or align with the Five Freedoms, they largely—and arguably always—come up short.
Environmental impact
Raising animals for food is a resource-intensive activity. Animals require water, medications, climate controls that often rely on fossil fuel energy sources, and shelter.
Food is among the biggest resource required. Vast swaths of land must be planted with mono-crops such as corn and soy to feed animals. In the Amazon rainforest, crops for animal feed are among the primary drivers of deforestation. The UK’s consumption of chicken is named as a key driver of deforestation in South America.
Pollution from factory farms is another huge issue, contaminating the air, land, and water around facilities. According to a US report from Food and Water Watch, a single pig produces around one and a half tons of manure every year, and all the pig farms in the US produce a total of about 167 million pounds of waste—equivalent to the waste produced by half the country’s human population.
Pig waste is particularly dangerous since it is generally not treated before being released into the environment, leading to surface and groundwater contamination.
Antibiotic resistance
Antibiotic resistance is another looming health threat. Animals are often given antibiotics throughout their lives as a preventative measure against illness.
However, these drugs are often applied liberally, killing most of the bacteria but allowing small, drug-resistant “superbugs” to survive and multiply. The United Nations estimates antibiotic resistance could kill 10 million people and force 24 million people into extreme poverty by 2050.
Human health is further affected by factory farms through the bacterial contamination of meat, such as Campylobacter and E. coli, both of which are caused by fecal contamination and are extremely common in chicken meat.
How are factory farmed animals killed?
The Welfare at Time of Killing (WATOK) Regulations are supposed to ensure that animals are rendered unconscious by being stunned before they are bled out.
However, some animals such as chickens are still ineffectively stunned and can be fully conscious and sensible to pain while being slaughtered.
Chickens are slaughtered by being hung upside down by their legs. This in itself causes problems, as the overbreeding of chickens raised for meat has meant these animals often suffer from painful leg conditions. An electric water bath is meant to shock them into unconsciousness before their throats are cut, but many are not effectively stunned, leaving some conscious to experience the whole process, slowly bleeding out until they are plunged into the boiling water used to remove their feathers.
As part of the Better Chicken Commitment, companies must adopt controlled atmospheric stunning using inert gas or multi-phase systems, or commit to effective electrical stunning without hanging the animals upside down by their legs.
Additionally, fishes are not included in the WATOK Regulations on stunning parameters, so while it should be illegal to kill farmed fishes without stunning, the lack of clarity on what is effective stunning leads them very vulnerable to ineffective stunning or no stunning at all.
Cows are commonly killed using a stun-gun (or stunner), which is essentially a gun with a retractable bolt instead of a bullet. This bolt is fired into the brain between the eyes of the cow, rendering them braindead.
Pigs can be electrocuted with an apparatus applied to their temples, or gas stunned. Death from CO2 gas can mean around 15-30 seconds of suffering before the pig loses consciousness. They will feel burning, and a feeling similar to drowning, as they struggle to breathe.
Where is factory farming most common?
Factory farming happens all over the UK. According to this factory farming map, factory farming in the UK is most common in:
North Yorkshire East Riding of Yorkshire Lincolnshire Norfolk Suffolk Somerset Gloucestershire Herefordshire Shropshire Antrim Tyrone
How can we stop factory farming?
Factory farming has so many downsides for humans, animals, and the environment. The practice is perpetuated by multinational corporations and backed in large part by world governments and the political establishment.
A food system without factory farms—which would be far more equitable and just, and far less damaging to people, animals, and the environment—is long overdue.
The good news is that there are actions you can take to help put a stop to factory farming. No matter where you live or what skills you bring to the table, everyone is welcome to join the fight for a more just food system.
Sign this petition to tell the UK Governments that they must ban cages for all laying hens by 2026.
Sign this petition by Chris Packham, which calls on the Government not to abandon its plans to ban fur and foie gras.
You could also sign this petition which calls on the UK government to give fish the same protection as other farmed animals.
Finally, by receiving our emails, you can be part of all our campaigns and take quick online actions each week. These actions might be quick, but they can make a real impact for animals suffering on factory farms.
