In 2014 ninety-five percent of Americans consumed meat (Watters n.pag.), which preserves the meat industry’s place as one of the largest and most profitable markets in this country. Accordingly, because meat production must keep up with this huge demand, the methods of producing commercial meats have remained largely heinous for many years. We have allowed myriad farm animals (pigs, goats, cows, chickens, turkeys, ducks, and other profitable creatures) to suffer at the hands of humans because we cannot see past the profitability or use-value of nonhuman animals. As a result of our anthropocentrism, commercial farming practices in the United States perpetuate the ontological separation of human and nonhuman animals. These farming practices are inhumane and, as humans, we have a responsibility to the nonhuman animals in our care to change this relationship.

 

It would not be until 1966 when the Animal Welfare Act was passed that we even started to consider our treatment of other animals in this country (US Dept. of Agriculture n.pag.). Even then, this law was the “minimum acceptable standard [by which to] regulat[e] the treatment of animals in research, exhibition, transport, and by dealers” (n.pag.), leaving out any considerations for the treatment of farm animals, or animals for consumption. This Aristotelian way of thinking prevailed in this country for years until the public generated greater concern for human health based on the potential for consuming contaminated meat. In 1978, the United States Department of Agriculture passed the Humane Methods of Slaughter Act, which created more stringent laws on meat quality, namely requiring that “meat [...] for use as human food be produced from livestock slaughtered by humane methods” (Food Safety and Inspection Service n.pag.). In essence, farm animals were effectively voiceless with very little human intervention for better treatment until very recently. Even with the introduction of basic laws we have yet to significantly improve the lives of the beings we base the largest portion of our diets on.

 

The treatment of nonhuman animals in the farms where they are raised is horrific and yet is perpetuated by what critic Cathy Glenn calls “doublespeak”, or the way we think about discursive practices on factory farms. She argues that though doublespeak is descriptive, it is “intentionally misleading by being ambiguous or disingenuous” and promotes taking farm animals for granted as “objects for our use and consumption” (64). The way we understand the nature of using nonhuman animals on these factory farms allows for the mistreatment to continue. In the earlier example, chickens’ beaks are sliced off with hot knives, which is a common practice. But, we deem this justifiable because it is an attempt to eliminate detrimental (and sometimes fatal) pecking that occurs when chickens are held in extremely close quarters and confined to a single, small cage with not even enough room to fully spread their wings (Park and Singer n.pag.). We as humans seem to have developed blinders because the state of factory farm industry discourse currently “helps construct how [Americans] think about animals in ways that—tacitly and oftentimes unintentionally—endorse industry practices even in the face of serious concerns raised by environmental and animal advocates” (Glenn 65).

One of the most widespread and more egregious shortcomings of our meat industry is the treatment of pigs. Unfortunately, pigs receive some of the worst treatment of all farm animals and are held as one of the most intelligent animals that we consume. Perhaps the most contested, if not the most violent, method of handling of pigs comes in various forms of confinement. In production facilities, pigs:

are confined in pens so small they cannot turn around or groom themselves. Soon after birth, their tails are amputated, their teeth clipped, their ears notched, and males are castrated - all without anesthesia. Upon reaching breeding age, females are inseminated and then confined for months at a time in ‘gestation crates’ too small to permit foraging or nest building. Shortly before birthing, they are transferred to a ‘farrowing crate’ designed to prevent all activity except eating, drinking, and keeping teats exposed to the piglets. When the piglets are forcibly weaned after roughly nineteen days (fifty-six days is the norm under non-factory conditions), the breeding cycle begins again for the sows. When the sows become too weak to gestate, they are killed (Cassuto 65).

These cruel gestation and farrowing cages are being slowly phased out in the United States, but the confinement and physical assault will continue. However, because advertisements do not show these inhumanities which occur on all factory farms, we do not take the time to notice how barbaric our practices truly are. Consequently we rarely, if ever, think about the relationship humans have with animals, and if we do it is only to notice that we eat them.