(An article written for my college newspaper, the Randolph-Macon Yellow Jacket, in 2009)
Most people believe that animals can feel pleasure and pain. We shower our dogs and cats with love, affection, and even birthday gifts, eager for a tail wag or sloppy kisses in return. Conversely, we’re overcome with guilt when our busy feet happen to step upon their tails or paws, evoking a loud yelp or scream.
The scientific community agrees, recognizing many of the same activities and chemicals present in both human and non-human brains. Playful activity in apes is accompanied by the release of dopamine, a neurotransmitter associated with pleasure. Amygdalae, which stimulate a fear response, are functional even in snakes.
According to Dr. Roger Fouts, a psychology professor at Central Washington University, “To be sentient is to be aware. One of the ways we are aware is pain.” He explains that this sentience is extremely important for survival in the wild, and its complexity points to a long chain of evolutionary history in animal species.
It is difficult for us to fully realize the extent we depend upon animal suffering. The film Earthlings highlights five major forms of animal exploitation, including pets, food, clothing, entertainment, and experimentation, while offering a cruelty-free alternative – abstaining from the use of animal products, or veganism.
Animal exploitation might seem like a foreign concept, but it simply describes the use of animals for human benefit without consideration of the animals’ interests, especially an interest in avoiding suffering. The most obvious form of this exploitation occurs in food production.
Contrary to the idyllic notion of happy farm animals running freely, the majority of our meats, eggs, and dairy products come from the factory farming system. The objectives are efficiency and profit, and the result is billions of cramped farm animals that never have access to the outdoors.
Pigs are removed from their mothers after only a few weeks because they reach greater sizes when placed on a diet full of hormones and antibiotics. The early weaning prevents them from ever losing the sucking behavior of piglets, and they constantly attempt to bite the tail of nearby pigs in the confined cages.
The fix, devised by the USDA, is known as tail docking, the removal of most of the tail using pliers and no anesthesia. Then, as depicted by Michael Pollan of The New York Times, when a pig tries to suckle another pig’s tail, it is so painful that pigs will go to great lengths to avoid it.
Pigs that make it to slaughter are stunned and then put into scalding water to soften their skins. When the stunning process fails, pigs have been observed to scream and flail about as they burn and drown.
Factory farmed birds live out their entire short existence indoors in battery cages, with up to 5 or 6 birds in a single cage. Pollan also describes the debeaking process, in which half of a chick’s beak is removed without anesthesia to prevent birds from pecking one another. Still, about 10 percent die just from the conditions. Male chicks serve no purpose, so they are ground up or gassed at birth.
Where do the growth hormones, chemicals and antibiotics infused into the factory farm diet end up? Onto the plates and into the stomachs of Americans. The overuse of antibiotics is a major contributor to modern superbugs. Moreover, the United Nations in 2006 announced that animal agriculture produces more greenhouse gas emissions than the entire transportation sector.
Most Americans would not readily accept these conditions, but the success of the industry depends on public ignorance. Factory farming cannot be dismissed as a few scattered and unfortunate mistakes around the country. On the contrary, the National Agricultural Statistics Service reports that 98 percent of American eggs are derived from battery-caged hens.
As awareness of factory farming grows, new terms such as “cage-free” and “free-range” are created to con consumers into paying more money while believing they are making ethical purchases. Cage-free hens, according to the Humane Society of the United States, are not confined to battery cages, but rather, crowded hen houses with no exit to the outdoors. They still undergo debeaking, males chicks are still slaughtered at birth, and hens are killed after just two years.
The free-range standard, while intended to describe animal products originating from freely roaming animals, is only lightly regulated by the USDA. Chickens raised for meat must simply have some level of outdoors access, but there is no requirement for free-range eggs. Therefore, many eggs labeled as free-range originate from farms with slightly larger cages or a few windows.
HymaneMyth.org reveals that even dairy products marketed from “happy cows” are misleading. To perpetuate the milk production cycle, cows must be painfully impregnated every year in a contraption known as a “rape rack,” and the resulting calves are either immediately slaughtered or sold to veal farms to endure castration and 4 months in a crate or tiny pen before slaughter.
Yet animal abuse permeates society far beyond the food we consume. Perhaps animal experimentation is accepted as a legitimate scientific tool. But Peter Singer, author of Animal Liberation and professor at Princeton, can describe hundreds of instances of animal cruelty in testing familiar products like cosmetics and shampoos.
In the 1940’s, the FDA began eye irritancy tests, involving bleach, ink, and shampoo, on rabbits placed in devices to restrict their movement. Animals can undergo 3 weeks of these tests, and many lose their vision. All react by rapidly closing their eyes, squealing, or trying to flee.
Huntingdon Life Sciences is one of the largest animal experimentation labs in the world. One of their most shocking studies involved the deaths of about 12,800 rabbits, dogs, mice, rats, and monkeys. The animals were given excessive amounts of sucralose, the sweetener in Splenda, to test its effects on the nervous system.
Today, these tests are widespread in the corporate world. In fact, if a cleaning or hygiene product is not labeled as cruelty-free, it was probably tested on animals. The tests are not required by law, however, and there are hundreds of lines, such as Revlon and Clinique, that abstain from them.
Why do we allow these abuses to continue? We have evidence that many animals have intellectual capabilities surpassing those of some humans including infants and the severely mentally handicapped. Stanley Curtis, a professor at Penn State University, found that pigs could use a joystick to play video games while recognizing and remembering symbols.
The pigs outperformed dogs in the video game tests, but we even distinguish between these species, smothering dogs with affection but locking pigs in tiny cages out of sight. Other cultures have different standards. In some Asian countries, dogs are considered food.
People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) reveals that over half the fur sold in the United States is imported from China, where dogs and cats are slaughtered and sometimes skinned alive for the fur. The Chinese producers are aware of this moral discrepancy between cultures and therefore mislabel the species of the fur.
How are we really determining which standard is morally correct and which animals are to be respected while others are degraded? Peter Singer describes speciesism, the tendency to discriminate solely on the basis of species. It is a cultural phenomenon, in which some animals have accumulated greater value, not because they are more intelligent, but out of our own history of interaction with them, hence the cultural division.
Speciesism furthermore prevents us from recognizing the value of any individual animal apart from human use or enjoyment. Circus animals have been used to excite millions. Audiences appear to love the animals and cheer wildly for them. Yet few stop to ponder the confining cages or extensive beatings endured by circus elephants in preparation for these performances.
In 1789, Jeremy Bentham stated, “The question is not, ‘Can they reason?’ nor, ‘Can they talk?’ but, ‘Can they suffer?’.” It seems that modern society has forgotten that it is a part of the animal kingdom, and while we may differ from other animals in many regards, the capacity to suffer binds us all.
Every choice we make has implications for the environment and the species with which we share the planet. Continuing to hide our abuses behind walls only perpetuates ignorance. If the old maxim, “You are what you eat,” is really true, I hope that more people begin to chose awareness over ignorance.
Every person that embarks on a vegan lifestyle spares between 90 and 100 animals each year. For me, veganism has been a rewarding year-long adventure after 7 years of vegetarianism, and this is coming from someone who thought she could never stop eating cheese.
Now, my favorite foods consist of soy cookies ‘n cream ice cream and vegan pizza with imitation cheese and pepperonis. I no longer buy leather, wool, or products that involved animal testing. I feel healthier than ever, and I can truly mean it when I say I have compassion for animals. There’s no turning back.
Here are some resources with more information on the vegan lifestyle:
CaringConsumer.com (a list of cruelty-free companies)
Meat.org (exposes the realities of factory farming)
VeganOutreach.org (guides to vegan eating and nutrition)