Treating animals better

In the essay “An Animal’s Place”, Michael Pollan describes in detail what goes on behind the scenes in the meat industry. He argues that if people actually knew what happened to the animals we eat every day, we wouldn’t be able to stomach it. The time has come to get the meat industry to change their methods, from a profit-driven approach to a more humane way of doing business.

It’s no secret that the life of an animal destined to be supper probably isn’t a pleasant one, but there is no reason to deliberately make it as awful as possible. Practices like cutting off a chicken’s beak and snipping a pig’s tail to a painful stump are wholly unnecessary. The companies say that these things are done to prevent a chicken from cannibalizing its cagemates and to force pigs to defend themselves when another pig chews on its tail, but what about the practices that drive these animals to those behaviors in the first place?

Hens are stuffed into cages without enough room to stretch their wings, and left there for their entire (brief) lives. The cramped confinement causes them to exhibit unnatural behavior, like trying to eat the other hens, and rubbing themselves against the wire cage until they are bleeding and featherless (Pollan). If the chickens were allowed enough space to move about and live a bit freely, they wouldn’t need their beaks snipped off, and the farm wouldn’t lose the production of all the chickens that are killed by one another or bleed to death or simply die from captivity.

Pigs have it every bit as bad as chickens. The reason they chew on each others’ tail is because they are weaned from their mothers ten days after birth, as opposed to the thirteen weeks it takes them to be weaned naturally. They develop an intense desire to suck and chew on something, and the tail of the pig in front of them is a handy target. Pigs in captivity are so depressed they do nothing to fight back until their tails are infected and they are put down, written off as waste (Pollan). Ripping off enough of the tail to make it much more painful is the industry’s solution to this problem. Why not just let the piglets be weaned naturally and give them the space to move around so that they don’t become completely demoralized?

The humane approach would seem like common sense. Animals can feel pain, the point is to minimize what they have to endure to become food. It is unlikely that the people who institute these practices actually enjoy causing so much undue pain on the animal, but they have their sights set on profit, and have learned not to care about the suffering of other living creatures. Big farms could certainly survive if they produced less animals at a higher price but lower overall profit, but they don’t want to. The average consumer is probably inclined to buy meat from a more humane farm at a slightly higher cost (provided they have at least some idea what goes on in many slaughterhouses), but will not go out of their way to seek it. If “free range” or “free farmed” or “organic” meat was readily available in more grocery stores, more people would convert to it, but if it is not in the supermarket they already frequent, it is unlikely they will look for somewhere that does carry it.

The solution would be to petition major grocery chains to start carrying organic meat. If more of the market share were going to the free range farms, big businesses might take a look at their own practices and reevaluate them, especially if consumers were educated on how an animal ends up as meat on a big business farm as opposed to a humane one. People will go on eating animals for the definite future, but perhaps they can be persuaded to change how they eat those animals.


Works cited:

Pollan, Michael. "An Animal's Place." The New York Times Magazine 10 Nov. 2002.
7 Oct. 2008 .