Forks Over Knives (9 page)

GENE BAUR, A native Angeleno, graduated from California State University, Northridge, in 1985 and later received a master’s degree in agricultural economics from Cornell. The cofounder and president of Farm Sanctuary, America’s leading farm-animal protection organization, he is the author of the best-selling book
Farm Sanctuary: Changing Hearts and Minds About Animals and Food
. Gene has photographed and video recorded hundreds of farms, stockyards, and slaughterhouses to expose countless examples of factory-farming cruelty; his work has been featured throughout the major news media.

Gene has also helped initiate legislation to prevent farm-animal abuse by testifying in court and before local, state, and federal legislative bodies; he played an important role in passing the first U.S. laws to prohibit cruel farming methods, including the Florida ban on gestation crates, the Arizona ban on veal calf and gestation crates, and the California ban on foie gras.

From a young age, Gene knew he wanted to help others. “My parents are very conservative Catholics and I grew up with a strong dose of Catholic morality,” he recalls. “Not all of it stuck, but some of the basics, like ‘Thou shalt not kill’ remained important—and these values, enhanced by the folk music I discovered during high school, stuck with me.”

So during high school, Gene volunteered with terminally ill kids at children’s hospitals; in college, he worked with troubled adolescents and, later, with environmental and public interest groups. Eventually Gene became involved in the nascent movement promoting the ethical treatment of animals and, with his wife at the time, founded Farm Sanctuary. “By the mid-1980s, this was the issue that meant the most to me—and one that was not getting a lot of attention.

“Over the years I have seen terrible things—people being extraordinarily cruel to animals, becoming monsters. I remember once watching some guys at a stockyard using electric prods to move the cows through the pens, and one man was shocking a cow’s genitals—inflicting pain just for the fun of it.

“That’s one of the scariest things we see—people in the industry engaging in purely sadistic behavior. The people who work at these places don’t look at the animals’ faces: These animals are nothing but pieces of meat to them. People in slaughterhouses become accustomed to killing, to thinking of violence as normal.

“But it’s not all bad news. When we first got our farm in Watkins Glen, New York, a fur farmer lived across the street. We were unhappy about it but were always friendly and invited him to our events. A couple of years later, he came over and told us, ‘I don’t want to kill animals this way anymore,’ and quit the fur business.

“That’s what makes the work worthwhile. Visitors come to the farm and leave changed people. They realize that we are what we eat. When we eat meat, we eat misery. These animals know nothing but abject cruelty their whole lives. They are killed in violent ways, and meat eaters ingest that. It’s impossible for me to believe that food that is the product of violence and misery can be good for us.”

From studies of their sensory systems, including brain structure and functionality, scientists have long understood that fish feel pain and distress. That means that a fish’s pain receptors respond much the same way to barbed hooks as those of the anglers who accidentally hook themselves. Wild fish caught in gill nets may be trapped for days; sudden decompression can kill those quickly raised from deep water, and still others don’t survive being netted in the first place. Those who make it to the ship’s deck alive are left to suffocate or are cut open. Purse-seine nets are used to catch large fish such as tuna, cod, and haddock, who are fully conscious when their gills are slit and their bodies disemboweled. Meanwhile, bottom trawling is one of the most environmentally damaging fishing methods, destroying endangered coral as trawlers indiscriminately scrape the ocean floor much like loggers clear-cutting a forest.

The story is worse for farmed fish: Much like chickens in battery cages, they face high stocking densities that lead to frequent injury and mortality, and they are starved for a week before slaughter in order to clear their intestines. As with land animals used for food, there are no federal welfare regulations for raising or catching fish.

Two facts are indisputable: The number of farm animals used worldwide for food is growing dramatically, and the treatment of these animals has become increasingly inhumane.

Plant foods, such as grains, legumes, nuts, seeds, fruits and vegetables, are more efficient to produce than animal foods; as a result, the people of the rest of the world consume fewer animal products, per capita, than those of the more affluent countries. That is changing, however, with rising per-capita income and a world population forecasted to grow from 6.5 billion to 9 billion by 2050. As their incomes rise, people are eating more animal products.
The United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) predicts that meat consumption will more than double by 2050, and milk consumption will grow by 80 percent during that period.

The United States has no federal laws to protect farm animals. The Animal Welfare Act of 1970, which set standards for the confinement of animals, exempts animals used for food. And the Humane Slaughter Act doesn’t apply to rabbits, fish, or birds, even though chickens represent the vast majority of land animals killed for food in the United States. Most “humane” state laws exempt “standard agricultural practices,” which means cruelty is defined not by the degree of suffering inflicted on animals, but by whether this treatment is considered a normal part of farming.

As a result, all the cruel practices mentioned in this chapter are legal.

Animal activists’ recent exposure of the extent and magnitude of farm animals’ suffering has led to a coordinated response by the animal agriculture lobby at the state level. Their position is well summarized in a
New York Times
article titled “States Look to Ban Efforts to Reveal Farm Abuse” (April 14, 2011). That’s not a misprint. Legislators in Florida, Minnesota, and Iowa are working not to ban farm abuse but to ban
revealing
farm abuse.

The best way to reduce the suffering of farm animals is also the best way to improve your own health: Eat a plant-based diet. It’s that simple!

The conditions under which farm animals are being bred and slaughtered are slowly becoming known to the public—very slowly, and with increasing resistance from the farms themselves. But there are other negative consequences of an animal-based diet, ones that are having larger, planet-wide effects—effects that may well place not just farm animals but the entire planet in jeopardy.

The United Nations has determined that raising livestock for food purposes generates more climate-heating gases than do all carbon-dioxide-emitting vehicles combined—in other words, cows are worse than cars. Some startling figures: The livestock sector accounts for nearly 10 percent of human-induced carbon dioxide emissions, 37 percent of methane emissions (methane is about 23 times more powerful than CO
₂
as a greenhouse gas). It also produces 65 percent of nitrous oxide emissions (nitrous oxide is 296 times more powerful
than CO
₂
) and 64 percent of human-induced ammonia emissions, a significant contributor to acid rain.

While CO
₂
is responsible for roughly half of human-related greenhouse gas emissions since the Industrial Revolution, methane and nitrous oxide (both of which are released via livestock’s natural digestive processes) are responsible for one third.

Collectively, farm animals themselves are responsible for a fifth of all human-induced greenhouse gases—and this number doesn’t include the carbon emissions that result from the massive infrastructure required to transport livestock. A report in
New Scientist
estimated that driving a hybrid car could save about one ton of CO
₂
emissions per year but adopting a plant-based diet would save nearly one and a half tons over a comparable period.

According to a recent German study, a meat-centric diet is responsible for the emission of more than seven times as much greenhouse gas as a plant-based diet.

In 2011, livestock operations account for 30 percent of the earth’s entire land surface use—much of which has been deforested to create pastureland. For example, nearly 70 percent of deforested land in the Amazon is exploited for grazing, resulting in the destruction of fragile ecosystems and exacerbating excess carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, because unlike standing trees, which capture and store CO
₂
, felled trees release the gas.

A land area equivalent to seven football fields is destroyed in the Amazon basin every minute. For each hamburger produced from animals raised on rainforest land, approximately 55 square feet of forest have been destroyed.

Many of these problems are intensified by the inherent inefficiencies of the livestock industry. The process of rearing animals for slaughter is far less efficient than directly harvesting the same crops for human consumption. Studies have shown that a person living exclusively on animal products requires ten times more land than a person growing his or her own plant-based foods.

According to a 1997 report by the Senate Agriculture Committee, animals raised for slaughter produce 130 times as much waste as the entire human population. Our waste is chemically treated in sanitation plants, but animal waste is not: Typically, it is sprayed onto land, then much of it runs off to pollute groundwater or streams.

A comparable number of issues relate to water usage. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency estimates that one pound of processed beef requires 2,500 gallons of water. Contrast that with the 250 gallons needed per pound of soy, or the 25 gallons per pound of wheat.

And then there are issues with the water itself. Much of the land harvested exclusively for animal feed is saturated with pesticides and fertilizers used to grow crops as rapidly as possible. These chemicals don’t disappear—they seep into groundwater and spill into rivers and oceans. Once in the water they create plumes of toxic chemicals which deplete oxygen in the water, killing fish and other animals.

On top of that, the livestock waste further contaminates the water supply with hormones and antibiotics excreted by the animals.

Then there’s the issue of how just how much water it takes to raise animals for food. Worldwide, water use is two to five times greater for crops grown to feed animals than for basic crops. The world’s freshwater supply is not evenly distributed, and with increasing demand for water, researchers project that 64 percent of the world’s population will live in water-stressed basins by 2025. In the United States, raising animals for food consumes more than half of all the water used, and 80 percent of U.S. freshwater resources are used for agriculture.

All told, the meat industry causes more water pollution in the United States than all other industries combined. According to an article written by Barry Popkin, a professor of nutrition at the University of North Carolina, and published in the
Archives of Internal Medicine
, “In the United States, livestock production accounts for 55 percent of the erosion process, 37 percent of pesticides applied, 50 percent of antibiotics consumed, and a third of total discharge of nitrogen and phosphorus to surface water.”

It’s not just the water, but the life within the water that’s harmed: Advanced fishing technologies and bottom trawling have led to a massive increase in global fishing, leaving 76 percent of fish stocks either fully exploited, overexploited, or depleted. Given the decimation of desirable wild fish, industry has turned to farmed ones, but these need to be fed: Fishermen are fishing further down the marine food web, catching up to twenty wild fish as feedstock for every single carnivorous fish they raise. As of 2010, the top six types of fish now eaten in the United States are farmed.

It isn’t just fish that are disappearing: Worldwide, we are now losing animal species at a rate that will put us in a state of mass extinction—an event that has occurred five times in the last 540 million years. Top causes include natural habitat destruction, overfishing, hunting, pollution, and desertification. The systematic elimination of whales, wolves, sharks, tigers, mountain lions, and other predators also causes irreversible changes throughout the entire food chain.

We could soon be seeing the sixth mass extinction in the earth’s history, and it will be the first one of human origin. Researchers attribute this crisis to “multiple, atypical high-intensity ecological stressors, including rapid, unusual climate change.” Extinction of sea life is on the fastest time line: Scientists project that the populations of all commercial fish and seafood species may collapse by 2048.