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Farmed Animals

Farmed Animals

Newborn piglets recognize their mothers’ voices and know their own names by the time they’re 2 weeks old. Mothers sometimes sing to their piglets while nursing! Check out this video on The Dodo!

Pigs are highly social; they naturally live in matriarchal herds. Even while sleeping, the herd remains close, always in physical contact—and research suggests that pigs dream!

Chickens experience empathy; mother hens show emotional distress when her chicks are upset.

Chickens perceive time and anticipate future events by using their memories of past experiences. They even exhibit self-control when anticipating a reward.

Cows have unique personalities, and their emotions can influence how they make decisions. Some calves consistently display optimistic or pessimistic tendencies.

Cows love to play, such as running, kicking, and leaping, and interacting with each other and toys. They tend to play more when their welfare is better, and calves who experience pain or are weaned early engage less in play.

Sheep experience a full range of complex emotions similar to humans, such as fear, anger, rage, despair, boredom, disgust, and happiness.

Animal Agriculture

Factory farming and environmental racism are linked in many ways. Not only does factory farming have adverse effects on its workers, who are often undocumented, low-income, and people of color, but it also harms communities who live near the farms through noxious production and waste facilities.

Over 15,000 people die every year from air-quality related deaths as a result of food production processes in the US. Animal waste, paired with common factory farm chemicals like hydrogen sulfide, ammonia, and aerosols have a huge impact on factory farm workers and surrounding communities.

In North Carolina there are more factory farmed pigs (10.1 million) than people (9.4 million). The nearly 812,000 hogs on factory farms in Bladen County, NC, produce as much untreated manure as the sewage from the Chicago and Atlanta metro areas combined.

There’s a reason a burger is cheaper than a salad. The US is tied with Portugal as the world’s largest consumer of meat per capita, in part due to the US offering significantly cheaper meat prices than other countries thanks to The Farm Bill subsidizing much of the animal agriculture industry. The vast majority of federal agricultural subsidies go toward producing commodity crops like corn and soybeans — not to feed people, but to feed animals raised in industrial meat, egg, and dairy operations.

Environment

According to the UN, the single most effective action you can take for the environment is to adopt a plant-based diet.

According to TIME magazine: “There may be no other single human activity that has a bigger impact on the planet than the raising of livestock.”

The primary cause behind global deforestation is beef production, accounting for approximately 41% of deforestation, equivalent to roughly half the size of the Netherlands. This equates to over 16.4 million trees lost each day as a result of animal agriculture.

Animal agriculture is a major producer of greenhouse gas emissions, equivalent to 14.5% of global emissions, which is approximately the same size as the transportation sector, says this report by the National Library of Medicine.

Your Health

According to this report from the World Health Organization, eating processed meat (think bacon or ham) increases your risk of cancer.

Consumer Reports in 2013 “dug into the unsavory details of pork production in which they tested 198 samples of pork chops and ground pork across the U.S. They found potentially harmful bacteria on most of the samples.”

Pork can carry a host of diseases; here’s a partial list from the US Pork Center of Excellence.

Plant based diets reduce your risk of heart disease, high blood pressure, diabetes, and obesity.

Excessive use of antibiotics to control disease on overcrowded pig farms could lead to antibiotic-resistant superbugs, according to this report from the National Academy of Sciences. 50% of antibiotics used for livestock will end up in freshwater sources.

Living near an industrial farm or slaughterhouse increases your risk of exposure to poisonous gasses and pollution. Factory farms frequently take the tons of urine and feces stored in sewage lagoons and spray the liquid waste into the air, impacting the health of those living in the vicinity.

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