That ringing you hear is the sound of the death knell for the "don't ask, don't smell" era of factory farming. Oprah Winfrey's Tuesday show, "How We Treat The Animals We Eat," blew the lid off the battery cage egg industry, shining a long-overdue light on the bleak, black underbelly of sunny-side up.
The way we treat farm animals in this country is a crime - well, actually, it's not, because our animal cruelty laws don't apply to farm animals. This is really convenient for the livestock producers who cram their cows and chickens into those industrialized concentration camps known as CAFOs (confined animal feeding operations) and force them to live out their short, miserable lives in pain and filth.
You can't imagine how awful the lives of these animals are, and if you're a fast food aficionado, you don't want to. But I'm determined to penetrate that deep-fried crust of complacency that's coating your tender, inner self like some kind of karmic Chicken McNugget. So I'm asking you to please take five minutes to watch "Overlooked: The Lives of Animals Raised For Food," the latest video from The Humane Society.
Narrated by James Cromwell, who played the farmer in "Babe," the video poignantly documents just how oxymoronic the term "factory farm" is. Back in the day, a farm meant acres of open pasture where animals had unlimited access to sun and fresh air. A factory is the antithesis of a farm, with its hard concrete floors, fluorescent lights, and--in the case of the CAFOs--stalls or cages so confining that animals are restricted within an inch of their lives for their entire lives.
Before the advent of industrial agriculture and its economies of scale, lambs and calves got to gambol and graze; chickens could roll in the dust and fluff their feathers; pigs could go rooting around in the soil; in short, they led a natural life right up till their unnatural death at the hands of man.
A factory farm or CAFO's very design denies the fact that these animas are living, breathing creatures capable of feeling both physical and emotional pain.
People sometimes ask me, "Why does it matter how we treat animals if we're just going to kill them and eat them, anyway?" You can argue that we shouldn't be eating animals at all, and treating them well doesn't mitigate the wrongness of slaughtering innocent creatures because we like the way they taste.
Here's the thing, though; the vast majority of Americans, something like 95% of us, are meat-eaters. And, as Mark Bittman noted in Sunday's New York Times, we eat an awful lot of it, to the detriment of our bodies and the planet. But many folks just can't imagine giving up their beloved burgers or bacon.
"Overlooked" encourages people to shift to a plant-based diet, but the Human Society's strategy is ultimately about harm reduction. PETA's militant anti-meat advocacy may persuade some people to go vegan, or at least vegetarian, but the Humane Society's campaign to educate consumers about the barbaric conditions in factory farms has the potential to get a far wider group of people to stop buying factory farmed meat, poultry, dairy or eggs and seek out more humanely raised alternatives.
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