Animal Treatment

How does the treatment of animals affect the food we eat?

-What do they eat or take in that can get into our food?

-How are the livestock killed?

-How inhumanely are these animals treated?

Thesis Statement

-The inhumane ways that livestock are treated and killed affects the quality and safety of our food.

Introduction 

With this assignment we wanted to learn more about the treatment of livestock and how that affects our food. Most of you have probably heard the horror stories of cattle being slaughtered and other animals living in tightly packed cages standing in their own feces. We wanted to learn other ways the animals are inhumanely treated and how that affects the food we eat everyday. We spent a lot of time searching on the internet for information about the mistreatment of animals, and most of that information came from animal rights activist groups' websites. We learned a lot from these websites along with others. One of the things we learned was that the inhumane ways that livestock are treated and killed affects the quality and safety of our food.

Our Report 

Animals that are going to be slaughtered live in horrible conditions. They are crammed into small spaces and forced to live in unsanitary buildings. According to one website, “Chickens spend a one-year life in a 16-inch cage – four hens to a cage to lay their eggs” (helium.com). They don’t have enough room to get any exercise or even turn around, and they are deprived of fresh air. The people who supposedly “take care” of the animals feed them antibiotics and other drugs in an attempt to make them fatter quicker and to keep them alive. Without these drugs, these conditions would most likely kill them. They’re genetically altered to grow faster and produce more products than they would if they were raised on a traditional farm. The genetic altering in these animals can sometimes cripple them and kill these animals. The animals that survive are then crowded into semi trucks to be transported to slaughterhouses. On the trucks, they become vulnerable to diseases. There are numerous diseases that come from just being on the truck. They travel many miles in the trucks without food or water. Sometimes they will travel thousands of miles before they reach a slaughterhouse, so they don’t always survive the trip (link to a Las Vegas news article were pigs were killed on the way to the slaughter house). According to a hog industry expert, "Death losses during transport are too high — amounting to more than $8 million per year. But it doesn't take a lot of imagination to figure out why we load as many hogs on a truck as we do. It's cheaper...(Overloading) a truck (saves) $.25 per head in the process, while the overcrowding contributes to the deaths of 80,000 hogs each year" (farmsanctuary.org). No animal should have to live in these conditions.

The conditions at the slaughterhouse don't get any better. At the slaughterhouse, by law any animal that can’t walk to where it is going to be slaughtered is not allowed to be slaughtered (link is of a website that has a video that shows the treatment animals are given). Unfortunately, most of them are tortured to try and force them to walk, and then slaughtered anyway (link to a news article about slaughter house employees treating animals). The Humane Society of the United States has captured videos of slaughterhouse employees “kicking cows, ramming them with the blades of a forklift, jabbing them in the eyes, applying painful electrical shocks and even torturing them with a hose and water” (humanesociety.com) just to try and make them walk. When the animals are about to be slaughtered, they are supposed to be stunned so that they become unconscious. There are reports that animal's throats are being cut when they are still wide awake. Undercover people have found that “Many remain conscious when they are plunged into the scalding-hot water of the defeathering or hair-removal tanks or while their bodies are being skinned or hacked apart” (peta.org). People are trying to do something about this but the companies are too powerful.

While all of this directly affects the animals, it also affects the food we eat. Cattle are fed all sorts of things, from chicken manure to dead pigs and chickens.  The manure that they are fed can contain a lot of bacteria, such as E-Coli and salmonella. According to the book Fast Food Nation by Eric Schlosser, the cattle are also fed “the waste products from poultry plants, including the sawdust and old newspapers used as litter” (a link to reviews of the book Fast Food Nation). Some of these bacteria can be killed with proper cooking, not all of them can. These animals are also fed antibiotics. This is unhealthy for the animals. Animals such as cattle were meant to eat grass and be outside in sunshine and fresh air. Some of the chemicals they are fed and the things they eat can easily kill them. Not only is this bad for the animals, but it's also bad for people. If people eat too much meat with these antibiotics, they can become immune to them. Then if one of those people needs to take an antibiotic for something, it won’t work. A lot of farmers and the employees become immune to antibiotics. They just don’t care enough to do anything about it.

A big contributor to the safety of people's food is the employees that work at the slaughterhouses. The slaughterhouse employees are careless, and a lot of them don’t even speak or write English (link to a news article about illegal workers at a slaughter house). For a job to be done carefully and cleanly, it takes a skilled worker and time. Unfortunately the workers are often unskilled and take the guts out of many cattle an hour. If the job isn’t done carefully, everything in the cow’s guts can easily get all over the table. Because the workers don’t care, they don’t clean off the table and continue slaughtering cows. If a cow had E-coli or any other bacteria in its intestines and a worker spills the guts, then all of the other cows who get slaughtered at that table could get contaminated. With the slaughter rate some places being up to sixty cows an hour, this could infect a lot of meat that gets shipped all over the country in a short amount of time. This is what causes breakouts of food-borne diseases across the country.

Here are two graphs that show the number of animals being killed across the country in one minute and five minutes. We got our information from a website that shows how many animals are being slaughtered at the moment in the United States. We copied down the numbers after the two time periods. The graphs show how easy it is to make a mistake, because there are a lot of animals being slaughtered at one time. They also make people think about how many animals could have been sick or infected by a disease.

Conclusion 

Overall, the meatpacking industry needs to make improvements. Employees at the slaughterhouses should be well trained and aware of the safety rules and regulations. They should keep their working area clean and do a thorough job. This will lower the chances of intestines being spilled and contaminating a lot of meat. Companies also need to make living conditions safer for the animals so that they can grow up happy and healthy. Animals should be fed real food that is not hazardous to their health. Not only is this better for the animal, but it is ultimately better for people. If animals have a healthy diet and are growing up in sanitary places, they are going to be less likely to contract a deadly disease and die. This also lowers the chances of dangerous diseases such as E-coli to be found in the meat people eat. 

Easybib

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Gandhi, Renu, and Suzanne M. Snedeker. "Consumer Concerns About Hormones in Food." Breast Cancer and Environmental Risk Factors. 31 Mar. 2010. Web. 14 Mar. 2011. <http://envirocancer.cornell.edu/Factsheet/Diet/fs37.hormones.cfm>.

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"Rampant Animal Cruelty at California Slaughter Plant : The Humane Society of the United States." The Humane Society of the United States : The Humane Society of the United States. 30 Jan. 2008. Web. 14 Mar. 2011. <http://www.humanesociety.org/news/news/2008/01/undercover_investigation_013008.html>.

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