Alejandra De La Torre
Engl 1302-S04
April 30, 2015
Research Paper
Factory Farm Facades
Over the last few decades, America’s happy family farms have been replaced with mass producing corporatized farms. This new way of farming has enhanced the danger of pathogens such as Salmonella and E.coli, releasing large amounts of pollutants into our air, as well as creating huge controversial issues on animal welfare. While there are different sides of this issue animals feeling pain is the main issue. The grueling process to becoming someone’s dinner is simply inhumane. The sad thing is though many people still seem to agree with factory farming for three main reasons. One of them is economic prosperity. Factory farming has opened up a lot of job opportunities, it is efficient, and it is extremely cheap. While corporations are efficiently producing the high demand of affordable food, public health, animal welfare, and environmental degradation are starting to be questioned.
The question we all have today is not the welfare of the animal, but the price of the product. Everyone seems to forget that animals have a moral dignity of their own; from birth to death, all animals should be treated with compassion and protected from any type of torture. In order to abide by this we must embrace and enforce the set of rights that animals deserve. Opponents such as myself, feel that factory farming is not necessary because there are more humane and cleaner methods that exist; however, proponents of factory farming feel that it is efficient and economical; moreover, there are multiple options to this, such as, buying directly from farms and changing your diet and food sources.
A more common substitute for factory farm foods is “genetically engineered.” Most of what comes into our supermarkets have been tested positive for GMOs. The government must take legal action to undress nutrition labels covering up the growth hormones and antimicrobials that are usually held in factory farmed meats and dairy products. Jennifer Weeks, in her scholarly article, Factory Farms, quotes, “An estimated two-thirds of all United States cattle raised for slaughter are injected with growth hormones. These hormones produce a considerable decline in consumer health. Meat from hormone injected animals infects buyers with breast, prostate, and colon cancers.”(38) In order to unshadow factory farm illusionists, the American government must action immediately. Along with disease ridden food, animal welfare is another huge concern. In, Pro-Life, Pro-Animal, Matthew Scully explains the life of a dairy cow, “Downers”—dairy cows and other farm animals too sick or lame even to walk to their own death—for years have been beaten, prodded, and lifted or dragged to slaughter by bulldozers, and it still happens in disregard of minimal regulatory safeguards.” (36)America and its government must stop this meat gluttony. For factory farming does not only harm the consumer, but as well as the animals that are raised.
With such a high demand for product, factory farming seems like the proper way to go. Many argue that factory farming has helped America in multiple ways by opening up job opportunities, being extremely efficient, lucrative, and inexpensive. The lesser cost seems to be one of the bigger reasons. Some people like, Adam Quinney, believes factory farming is a rather fallacious word for what he refers to “large scale farming.” In Quinney’s article defending the poultry industry, he states, “Descriptions of broiler production as "an indoor industrial process" are neither factual nor helpful and conjure up emotive images bringing animal health and welfare into the debate - even though this has nothing to do with the size of farm or production system. There is absolutely no evidence large-scale farms compromise animal welfare, even though certain NGOs will claim otherwise.”(1) He also claims that this way of farming is about, “ …efficiency and economies of scale.”(1) This