My original post:
Factory farmed meat, being literally tortured flesh, is kind of the anti-communion.
Pack ten thousand pigs into a horrible building in cages no larger than their bodies. They never move until it is time to be slaughtered. The horror of this life time! Whatever awareness these animals have is hell. Do remember from time to time that this is happening, that our civilization is wreaking pure horror every day; this is how we are feeding us.
Since my baptism I have noticed I am especially sensitive to these fallen things. I took communion for the first time and then the next day I was given a ham sandwich on an airplane. It was literally sickening although objectively not bad as far as airplane food goes.
Let’s go ahead and remember the horror that we are partaking in when we eat tortured creatures. Stick to God’s flesh and we’ll come out of it alright.
(Meat as such, however, is very yummy and strictly moral to eat, as long as we (or our fellows) have been in right relationship to the creature)
My friend’s response:
It would benefit you to actually spend some time at a intensive livestock industry facility; I’m assuming from this article that you have not. Lucas, please don’t just believe what you hear or see on popular leftwing media regarding our livestock industry. Things are not as you are falsely led to believe.
Me:
Can you elaborate?
My friend:
Here are some of our livestock industry’s responses to common misperceptions:
- We in the livestock production industry actually like animals! This is often a main part of the reason we entered this industry in the first place. The liking of animals is not limited to people who live in the concrete jungle, who do not actually own and care for animals on a large scale. So it stands to reason that we would want to take care of them, just because we like them.
- Our livelihood: money for all those necessities like power, gasoline, groceries, clothing, kids’ lessons and activities, etc- this livelihood is made possible by our caring for our animals. So even if we wouldn’t “like” them, we have to take the best care of them we can, or else they won’t perform optimally, sell well, and enable us to live.
- As regards antibiotics and other human/animal crossover drugs, the implication tends to be that, once again, the non-livestock-owning urbanite claims more knowledge than the farmer caring for his stock. This is fallacious on several counts: first, why would we spend unnecessary money treating an animal which doesn’t need treatment? Second, we are very aware of reduced efficacy over time due to overuse, and we too care about continuing efficacy both for our animals and for ourselves and our descendants. Third, every time a herd animal is handled by humans, it is caused to undergo stress. That stress is exactly what we want to avoid, as it can reduce disease resistance, facilitate unwanted weight reduction, cause unnecessary suffering to the animal, and lower our profit.
- As regards large-scale intensive livestock operations such as Hutterite colonies, bigger is almost always better, in terms of animal welfare. And this is where public perception, typically fuelled by the left-leaning media, is at best misinformed and naïve; at worst, dangerously ignorant. You will not find a pig cared for anywhere so well as on a Hutterite colony! Their state-of-the-art feeding, ventilation, waste-removal, lighting, and space requirements are not only vet-supervised, but far exceed national legal standards (yes, those do actually exist, haha.) You must understand that there is very high level of pride and competition which Hutterite colonies have with one another to achieve the highest ratings with their intensive livestock production. Please spend some time looking into the Canadian research dollars spent annually in the hog, dairy, and poultry industries. To my knowledge, there is no human corrolary for the perfectly balanced feed rations, knowledge and implementation of exact space and light requirements, or disease prevention and immediate care, with which these intensive livestock facilities take care of their non-sentient, non-human charges.
- We in the cow-calf beef industry have our animals more spread out, in pastures, (which is almost always non-aerable land,) but that does not mean that there is not a very high level of research annually spent on their care. We receive several monthly or bimonthly industry publications, such as Beef Business, Canadian Cattleman, and the Western Producer, each of which has several articles written by veterinarians or other degreed, relevant professionals. There are conferences and seminars which we are encouraged to attend.
- Back to large-scale operations being worse or better, and misperception: it may be the urban perception that the modern “homesteader” with his two pigs in the back yard has happier pigs, but perception is not always reality. What are they fed? Is it consistent, or is it primarily the kitchen refuse? Does this have high enough protein and fat for them to keep warm? Do they actually have adequate bedding? Does that mud hole over in the corner harbour disease, and does the mud facilitate warmth, or perhaps not? And does that recent “homesteader,” who has decided to leave the urban sprawl and his desk job, have any generational knowledge of how to spot symptoms of disease before they take hold, and doe he have the facilities and ability to handle his sick pigs so as to cause them the least possible stress? Do they sunburn in summer because they don’t have adequate shade? And if one of those pigs is injured or sick, does that newbie backyard producer have the ability and facilities to separate that pig so the others don’t cannibalize it? (Pigs do that.)
Hers another perception example: it used to be the practice in village Europe to keep the family milk cow in a stanchion all winter. This practice was unfortunately brought to Canada by European immigrants. A stanchion is a yoke placed on the cow’s neck which disables her from any movement except to stand up or lie down. All winter. No walking, no reaching around to scratch her hip with her tongue, (cows do this) no rubbing against a post, just standing or lying down. With a yoke on her neck. But that’s the small-scale operation. That’s what people did who kept one family, “backyard” milk cow. Fortunately I have not heard of this for a long time— hopefully it is now outlawed!
All that to say, perception is not necessarily reality in whether many animals are cared for better or worse than few.
I hope this addresses some of your misconceptions.
My response to my friend:
Dear (friend),
You have adequately demonstrated that the factory farm is a very optimized machine. Inputs and outputs are dialed in, with billions of research dollars yielding evermore precise data.
“To my knowledge, there is no human corollary for the perfectly balanced feed rations, knowledge and implementation of exact space and light requirements, or disease prevention and immediate care, with which these intensive livestock facilities take care of their non-sentient, non-human charges.”
Well, first of all, I vehemently deny that animals are not sentient - this is particularly obvious in the case of the higher mammals like cats, dogs, pigs, and cows.
But there is a human corollary. I would draw a parallel to man’s life in the modern city, working some kind of affluent office email job: insofar as man is a machine, this way of life strives to achieve optimal inputs and outputs. It promises safety, comfort, and health. Vaccinations are all up to date. The human gets enough protein and takes vitamins to supplement his diet. I think this is a pretty fair analogy for your juxtaposition between the hypothetical “pigs in backyard” guy and the industrial mega-operation. It is unsurprising to me that the pig in the factory farm is healthier by measurable standards, just as the desk jockey in the city has better dental care than the majority of rural people. Yet I am not advocating for the backyard pigs. I am inveighing against factory farming.
You brought up a barbaric milking practice of pre-modern Europe. Don’t think I am merely a romantic who thinks everything in the past was better. Certainly fallen man has always found ample ways to abuse creation. I don’t doubt that backyard pigs and backyard cows are often in shoddy situations. I myself have seen several of these situations (as I lived and worked on a rural farming island for almost 3 years of my adult life; I am not merely the urban idealist which you are so keen to paint me as). I am unimpressed by “whataboutism.” Factory farming is not justified by the existence of worse arrangements. I do privately suspect that on the whole, small scale setups tend to be better - perhaps not in measurables, but at least there is a relationship there, and man’s role as steward of creation is personal. A dog who is loved by its owner but poorly fed is happier and better off than a dog which is fed top-of-the-line scientifically optimized dog food, but ignored and never played with. This is not a subjective judgement; it simply follows from the kind of creature which a dog is.
Here is my criterion for proper, ethical domestication: if man’s relationship to the creature is giving it a better life than it could have had in the wild. I am not interested in where factory farming compares favourably to some hypothetical dingy backyard setup of some urban yuppie, newly converted to the “trad” ideology, and haplessly taking care of animals, much to the detriment of the latter. I am interested if we are in right relationship with the creature, by real standards! And on a biblical worldview (or any worldview, really, save a modern-materialist one) I think this is the only possible standard to hold. If we are the steward and caretaker of all creation, then the question to be asked is whether we are doing a good job.
Scripture gives us a clear model of what constitutes proper care of animals.
“The Lord is my shepherd;
I shall not want.
He makes me to lie down in green pastures;
He leads me beside the still waters.
He restores my soul;
He leads me in the paths of righteousness
For His name’s sake.”
You do not hear “the Lord is my shepherd/He puts me in a building with a thousand other sheep/He meets my basic nutritional requirements/He optimizes my health for His bottom line’s sake”
The Lord does not have a bottom line. He wants to be in right relationship with His creatures; it is an end in itself. The factory farm, though I am sure it is a very optimal machine, where the animals are fed a precise balance of nutrients, and kept relatively physically healthy—is not an image of this relationship.
The arrangement described by the Psalmist is a relationship. The Lord is my shepherd, He leads me to still waters! At a large scale, there is no more relationship. Of necessity, the pigs become mere data. This is Wrong and it is bound to lead to mistreatment of the pigs, just as reducing human beings to mere data, as in Soviet Russia, is bound to lead to the mistreatment of humans.
My standard for ethical relationship to domesticated animals is not some idyllic urbanite fantasy of homesteading. It is simply the shepherd; Psalm 23.
The shepherd leads his sheep to the best pastures and clean flowing water to drink. He protects them from predators, carries the weak, tends to the sick. It is literally the best sheep existence imaginable that the shepherd is providing. This is all much better than the sheep could do on its own. And then the shepherd takes wool, and kills, and eats flesh. The relationship is sound and beautiful. This is the ideal: to provide a domesticated existence that is better than wild existence. The shepherd is helping the sheep be more what it is. That’s how God treats us and that is how we are called to treat creation. Surely you can see that in industrial livestock production, the animals are made less than what they are.
It is a high bar, but I think it is the only bar. “The best sheep existence imaginable” is a pretty simple task when we apply all our human creativity and will. But we can only be as good as the standards we set for ourselves. If we think that factory farming is fine, good enough, then it will certainly dominate the market, and we will all feed on these stagnant and distressed creatures all the days of our lives.
To your point that the farmer is incentivized to keep the animal in an optimal state so as to optimize the meat: this is not true. Mass industrial production of anything is not striving for an optimal product: it is striving for a standardized, commodifiable, good-enough product. An example will clearly illustrate in the case of pig farming.
The best cured ham in the world is called jamón ibérico de bellota. The curing takes several years, but the artisanal process begins when the pig is born. Now here is a pig-life which is truly being optimized. During the fattening season, the pigs roam oak forests, feeding on acorns, wild grasses, herbs, roots, and mushrooms: they forage all this, it is their natural state. Yet they are domesticated creatures, and the conditions for their lives are provided by humans. When the fattening season is up, around February or March, they are slaughtered. We are in right relationship with these pigs because we gave them a really wonderful season, and provided a better life for them then they could have had in the wild: the best pig life imaginable. And you can taste the difference.
Now, clearly, it is unrealistic for all of our meat to be raised like this. In order to maintain the unproductive urban population with their email jobs and their mass-media-influenced misconceptions, we need scale. I say: let us eat less meat. Factory farming should not exist, as it is a moral catastrophe. Better we eat free-range animals once a month than factory farmed meat a few times a week.
I resisted the urge to use the phrase “tortured flesh” again there, because it is intense language. However, I do believe it is perfectly descriptive. In order for you to understand my position, I ought to define my terms.
First of all, I would consider solitary confinement a form of torture. Man’s primary purpose and telos is to be in relationship. God became man for this reason. To put someone in a situation where they are unable to be in relationship is to put them in conditions which are out of alignment with their highest nature. It is a form of abuse. And sure enough everyone who’s in solitary confinement for more than a week or two goes mad.
But that’s not all. I would also consider many jobs to be torturous, albeit in an ambient and low-level way. I am back in Brazil at the moment where seemingly upwards of 50% of the jobs on the market consist in sitting still and doing nothing. Like the person in the toll booth who hands you the card reader. There are so many of these jobs in Brazil and they are seemingly constantly making new ones. Keynes was quite right that eventually we would need to be hiring people to dig meaningless ditches, and hence all the bullshit email jobs in the first world; but in Brazil, they are less creative, so all the jobs of this type that they create lack even the pretense of meaning.
It is not good for man to sit still and do nothing all the days of his life. We have all kinds of faculties. When we are sitting stagnant, I do think it is torture. Yet without these sitting still and doing nothing-jobs, the economy would surely collapse. Nobody wants another Great Depression, so there must be an endless proliferation of these jobs, and every shoe store in Brazil has upwards of ten idle salespeople at all times, and five security guards.
This is not torture as such. But it is a torture-d existence. The flow of time becomes a burden. All higher functions atrophy. The people who work these jobs take their unfulfillment home; it affects their children.
A tortured existence, then, is one in which the creature is so far out of alignment with its natural telos that all energy is turned inward. A tiger in the zoo is tortured. Sisyphus is tortured just as much as Prometheus.
For a social animal like a pig, it is an objectively extremely stressful situation to be in a crowd all your life. Think about how we feel being in a crowd for just a few minutes! Imagine your whole life was spent in the biggest football stadium in the United States, and it was packed full of people, and you never left your seat, but you were fed perfectly balanced meals and kept as physically healthy as possible, but you never had the chance to do anything or make any choices. This is not the kind of life which God gives to us; it is not the kind of life we should give to our own charges.
Pigs are very social and intelligent creatures. If they are cannibalizing each other then they are deeply disturbed. I would happily make this a criterion of whether a pig farming practice is teleologically aligned or not - analogous to how people killing themselves is indicative of something deeply wrong with our lifestyle.
Pigs in the wild do not cannibalize each other. Nor do the pigs raised for jamon de bellota. Pigs cannibalize under the following conditions: (quote:)
Overcrowding: Too many pigs, too little space
Boredom/lack of enrichment: Pigs are intelligent and need stimulation. In barren environments, they develop abnormal behaviors
Tail biting → cannibalism: This often starts as redirected rooting behavior (pigs naturally root with their snouts). With nothing to root, they bite each other’s tails. Once blood is drawn, other pigs join in
Stress/hierarchy breakdown: Natural pig social structures break down in confinement
As you know, the industry typically practices tail docking to avoid the tail-biting and ensuing cannibalism. But treating the symptom only ameliorates measurables. The rot is still there. The pigs are still disturbed.
Pastured, free-range pigs do not cannibalize each other. This symptom emerges under conditions that violate the creature’s nature.
You said that people in the livestock industry like animals - I have no doubt that they do, as this is natural to all people. However, this is no guarantee of sound treatment. Parents tend to love their children, and yet the majority of them still send those beloved children to public school, which is a travesty and a tragedy every single time; they are killing their children’s potential, sending them to prison every day.
Circumstance and convention are unfortunately very powerful at subtly redirecting the flow of love. The devil would be foolish to challenge our love head-on. Instead, he encourages us to channel our love in the wrong direction, and rationalize our increasing estrangement from the Good with reference to that very love! I submit that this is what has happened with factory farming, as with the development of liberal modernity in general. The devil could never pervert something all-at-once. And it is even more his joy to pervert things when there is a great love involved. In short, that industrial livestock farmers go into the business with an affinity for animals is no guarantee that the animals will be treated well in the long run. As you say, they have to feed their families, so they are abundantly incentivized to make “compromises.”
Goose liver paté is considered a delicacy in France. Huge industrial quantities are achieved by force-feeding each goose through a tube constantly, so that its liver swells to many times its natural size. You could, of course, just raise a goose normally, kill it, eat the meat, and have the small normal-size liver as a treat; but this is not the most efficient way to do it according to market logic. And the force-fed goose liver, while I’m sure it tastes slightly worse than a small natural goose liver, is worth the monetary tradeoff. According to the French, it is delicious.
This goose is clearly a tortured beast, yet the product is acceptable by the metrics of the market. And the people raising the goose started out as animal lovers. They found some way to make their peace with their work, with which they feed their families.
We can only speculate as to the second-order consequences of eating tortured beings. Is it perhaps related to the low testosterone among modern men, or to the memetic vulnerability to mob crazes like the trans movement? Impossible to say.
Ultimately the crucial point is this: the system reduces everything to measurables. Therefore, I don’t doubt that it produces good measurables, at least by its own standards. But the telos of man’s stewardship of creation is relationship.
Proper relationship to animals is giving them an existence which is better than their existence would have been, in the wild, without any human intervention. The shepherd passes this test, as does the farmer raising the jamon de bellota pigs. Factory farming, even a very clean hutterite setup, does not; it is improper in kind. There are too many pigs; it scrambles their social circuits. They are terminally bored; there’s nothing to do but get fed and die. It’s a tortured existence because it is less than what the pig is capable of.
We might think, surely it’s better to give them food and safety, rather than them having to forage and possibly get killed by predators. No. An animal designed by God to forage wants to forage. In the absence of its proper relationship to reality, it becomes disturbed. It is very much analogous to the situation of man. Getting fed by the machine and living in physical safety and sitting still doing nothing for your whole life is a recipe for a miserable creature.
And I would close by saying: God doesn’t just lead us to green pastures and still waters. He also leads us through the valley of the shadow of death, because He wants to strengthen us. Because He wants to deify us and call us to Himself, that we might share in the divine life. I think we are also supposed to practice an image of this, when it comes to animals. A war horse or sheepdog approaches the dignity of Man. As I said, through our relationship with the animal, we help it be more of what it is. Much as God sanctifies our nature as He pulls us to Himself.
There’s a tendency in Protestantism to cede everything to the materialist worldview, except man. So animals and plants and the sun and all created reality is indeed reducible to some kind of automaton—but man alone is not. But this is untenable. The whole thing is absolutely enchanted and shimmering with God’s presence, and everything is alive and enspirited. And Christ was not ever being cute or merely poetic when he said “this is My Body.”