The Use Of Animals In Today's Factory Farms

All around the world we use factory farming as our main source of packaging and transporting food. But do you know what happens in the factories and farming facilities? This large industrial operation houses animals raised for food. They treat them with hormones and antibiotics to prevent disease and maximize their growth for food output. Then transported to the factories where they are killed if animals and put on a conveyor belt to be processed by workers.

Factory Farming is an increasing industry in the United States. These large farms, which evidently appear to be more like slaughterhouses than the typical farms a person can imagine are located throughout the United States. These factory farms contain animals ranging from chickens, sheep, goats, cows, turkeys, and pigs, they also contain dairy products. The conditions for the animals and the employees of these factory farms are inhumane and vile. Life behind the walls of the factory farm is both unsanitary for the animals and the employees. Employees are forced to endure long hours and poor treatment. Animals in these conditions withstand living in cages and are forced to live in uninhabitable ways.

Factory farming has many flaws in the system, animal abuse is one that is usually over looked by owners of these farms. Many works while on this farm are exposed to the cruelty that the animals go through but often can do very little to change it. “Factory farms pack animals into spaces so tight that most can barely move. Many have no access to the outdoors, spending their lives on open warehouse floors, or housed in cages or pens.” (aspca) Without the room to engage in natural behaviors, animals become exposed to severe physical and mental distress. Many animals become trampled to death and never experience the proper life

Factory farmed animals are not only poor, but also low quality. Since the animals, pigs for example, are in contact with each other so close, they are sprayed with antibiotics to keep germs from spreading. Those antibiotics are used many, many times, resulting in very low quality meat and are harmful to our human body.

The effects of factory farming is not worth the damage that is done to the health of the environment, animals, and people. The idea of a factory farm is to produce meat at a faster pace, but the way these companies accomplish this task makes life a living hell for the animals. For example, “They’re often given so little space that they can’t even turn around or lie down comfortably. Egg-laying hens are kept in small cages, chickens and pigs are kept in jam-packed sheds, and cows are kept on crowded, filthy feedlots”(Factory). The animals on these farms have to experience constant fear and agony, especially since most factory farmed animals will be genetically manipulated to grow larger or to produce more milk or eggs than they naturally would, and suffer severe pain throughout their entire life(Factory). Animals, especially cows, are being abused not only physically, but mentally as well.. For example, “just within hours of birth, calves are taken away from

Factory farms have abused these animals in way that is so horrific, it is not often revealed to the public what really goes on inside these “farms.” Animals such as chickens are shoved together into battery cages to the point where they are unable to move. Their beaks are cut off without anesthesia, and they are propelled with antibiotics and excessively fed for the purpose of making their breasts larger quickly. The excessive feeding makes their bodies grow unnaturally and disproportionally – causing heart failure, respiratory troubles, chronic pain, and leg weakness; after a hen’s egg production reduces at a certain age, the bird will be shocked into its final laying cycle and then be sent to slaughter to be used as food scraps – if they are not already killed on-farm. As for mother pigs, they spend up to four months in gestation crates with only limited mobility during their pregnancy. "Her piglets are

The poor housing of farm animals in factory farms is an issue because the stress factors and living conditions can cause the animals immune systems to weaken. According to an article about the practices of factory farming, “Common practices include packing pregnant pigs into gestation crates so small they cannot turn around, placing egg-laying hens in cages stacked on top of one another in massive enclosed buildings and raising cows on feedlots rather than the grass pastures many of us associate with ruminants” (Anomaly 1). This quote explains that the living space of animals in a factory farm is different from what consumers expect. When consumers go to the grocery store, they may see a picture of an old country farm with animals freely wondering, but in reality animals are stored as items and not free creatures. According to an article written by Bradley S. Miller, “As reported by a veterinarian, Dr. Bruce Feldman, When animals are intensively confined and under stress, as they are in factory farms, their auto-immune systems are weakened and they are prone to infectious diseases” (Miller 2). This quote speaks of how much the risk factors of sickness increase when animals are confined and under great amounts of stress. Overpopulated animal storage is an ethical and moral concern because it brings an unnecessary stress and a burden to animals. Not only is the storage of animals, both ethically and morally wrong, consequently, it is also a reason that disease outbreaks occur in many factory farms.

A poll conducted by the ASPCA revealed that 94% of Americans believe that production animals, specifically those raised for food, deserve to live a comfortable life free of cruelty and neglect. Despite this belief, many factory farm animals are abused and neglected in such ways that, if witnessed by consumers, would not be accepted. Over 99% of the United State’s farm animals live on factory farms that use them for means of profit, many of them violating the Animal Welfare Act and other laws put in place to protect the humane treatment of animals (ASPCA). This abuse is not limited to any specific type of farm animal. Although different animals are used for different purposes, they all share a common suffering and a need for humane care.

Most of the animals under this condition will develop illnesses, abnormalities, go insane, or die before they make it to the slaughterhouse (Alfie, 2010). In the U.S., over 10 billion animals are raised and killed each year for food about 9 billion chickens, 250 million turkeys, 100 million pigs, 35 million cows. The vast majority of these are not raised on small family farms but, rather, in the major agricultural facilities called?factory farms, also known as Confined Animal Feeding Operations (CAFOs). The idea of factory farming originated in the 1920s with the discovery of vitamins A and D. When mixed with feed; farm animals were capable of growing without sunlight or exercise, which enabled them to be raised more efficiently in barns throughout the year (Fieser, 2015). Factory farming is a form of capitalism. Capitalism is an economic system that is privately controlled by owners for profit and self-interest (Fieser, 2015). Many philosophers have proposed the principle of equal consideration of interests, in some form or other, as a primary moral value; but, we shall see in more element shortly, not many of them have documented that this principle applies to members of other species as well as to our own. (Singer, 1989). In today society the consumer is much more interested in knowing how the chickens are raised, what they?ve been eating

Even though higher yields are met for demand and human consumption, factory farming is cruel to animals due to the fact animals are often subject to harsh living conditions, more susceptible to diseases and injuries and are treated inhumanely during the slaughtering process. Unfortunately, with an increase in human population worldwide, the strain on farmers to meet the demand increases as well. This in turn causes more animals to be subject to this cruelty.

Food manufacturers in America claim that Factory Farming is a much cheaper way of processing meat and other food items where they are able to increase their margins as well as provide the consumers with cheaper food. However, current research on the effects of factory farming suggests that the method is one of the best examples of animal cruelty (Park). “The conditions that the animals

“This is horrible! I can’t even watch this!” Those were my immediate thoughts the first time my eyes were opened to the inhumane animal cruelty on factory farms. Factory farming enables mass production to supply the demands of today’s society but also enables the cruel treatment of animals. We need to end the cruelty and abuse that these animals have to endure at the factory farms because it causes loss to the business, reduces the quality of the product produced, and endangers the health of those who buy the product. We can promote humane treatment of factory farm animals by prevention through education, by enforcing humane laws by being an example of humane animal treatment, and by donating and/or

They live over metal grates, and their waste is pushed through slats beneath them and flushed into huge pits.” "Modern Animal Farming." Vegan Outreach. Web. 27 Jan. 2016. . America and the rest of the world tends to stay ignorant to the real problems in society such as this. They want to think of the animals of having happy lives. When in reality the animals never experienced a happy life. From the time they are born they are born into factory farming, crowded, congested, unsafe place for mothers to give birth and the babies to grow up to be shipped straight to slaughter. Their lives only get worse and more stressful as they go on. Even back in the early 1900’s, while describing the slaughter houses Sinclair writes, “All day long the blazing midsummer sun beat down upon that square mile of abominations: upon tens of thousands of cattle crowded into pens whose wooden floors stank and steamed contagion; upon bare, blistering, cinder-strewn railroad tracks, and huge blocks of dingy meat factories, whose labyrinthine passages defied a breath of fresh air to penetrate them; and there were not merely rivers of hot blood, and carloads of moist flesh, and rendering vats and soap caldrons, glue factories and fertilizer tanks, that smelt like the craters of hell.” (Sinclair,

In his article ‘Puppies, Pigs, and People Eating and Marginal Cases’, Norcross makes the argument that buying factory raised meat and eating it can be morally compared to obtaining puppies and torturing them to extract cocoamone hormone for gustatory pleasure. He also states that meat-eaters that come to this realization should turn vegetarian. According to people who disagree with Norcross, they argue the fact that factory farmed animals are not puppies, most consumers do not torture or kill the factory farmed meat, and becoming vegetarian will not really make an impact and prevent animal suffering. If majority of the US population switched their diet to become vegetarian, there would be less animal suffering and would lead to a big impact

Animal rights are practically non-existent in many different ways today. Factory farming is probably the worst thing they can do to the poor helpless animals. Factory farming effects chickens, cows, pigs, and many other animals that are used for food, milk and eggs. One of the biggest organizations against factory farming is called Compassion Over Killing (COK). They go to great lengths to protest and inform people about animal cruelty.