THE FREAKS OF THE FARMYARD; COVER STORY
September 3, 1997
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LONDON TIMES from Dialog via Individual Inc. : Millions of farm animals suffer because of inhumane breeding policies to produce cheap food. Colin Tudge reports
The Arnold Schwarzenegger of the cattle world was on parade this week: a Belgian Blue bull; a caricature of muscle more Incredible Hulk than Michelangelo, weighing three-quarters of a tonne and with a fifth more beef on him than is normal. Typically, it was brought into the world by caesarean section.
Geneticists announced that they had identified the particular mutant gene that underpins its muscularity and, as they grow more skilled in genetic engineering, they will doubtless transfer it to other breeds.
Meat should become cheaper yet again - and farming yet more cruel. So where and when will we draw the line?
The muscles on the new Belgian Blue are hardly functional. They are not designed for movement; they are merely sacs of flesh. If children were afflicted with a mutation such as this, it would be seen as a genetic disease and a charity would be founded to root it out, just as there are charities for cystic fibrosis and muscular dystrophy.
The wild ancestor of Europe's cattle, the auroch, is extinct, but there are plenty of other wild cattle around which show that even the biggest are as lithe as light-heavyweight boxers. The gaur of India is two metres tall and can leap a fence of its own height almost from a standing jump. The fighting bulls of Spain, albeit domestic and small by the standards of the wild, retain the natural agility of their ancestors. But I have seen Belgian Blues, and other such pitiable beasts, at agricultural shows and they can scarcely walk. They shuffle round the show-ring, trailing their feet. To be sure, no farmer wants a bull that can leap like a stag, but neither should he breed cripples.
Such hugeness can be attained by several physiological routes. Some mutant genes simply cause certain muscles to duplicate: so-called " double-muscling" as seen, for example, in some Charolais cattle.
Such a deformity is as grotesque in its way as two heads would be, or six legs, even though it is evident only to those versed in anatomy.
Other genes change the relative rates of growth of body tissues. In young mammals, in general, the bones develop first - which is why foals seem all legs and puppies are all knees. The muscles develop next, so that adolescents of all species tend to be skinny but agile. Fat is laid down last of all, so that mature beasts - and people - "fill out". But to the farmer, muscle is meat and fat is succulence or "finish", while bones are a dead loss. So animals bred to become muscle-bound are obese even before they have the bones to support their flesh. For this reason, modern turkeys can hardly stand, and poultry handlers often break the bones of chickens just by lifting them from the cages. When did you last see an unbroken chicken wishbone? Overweight, feeble-boned pigs that should stand on tip-toes slump on to their hocks, while hulking Belgian Blues can scarcely walk.
So should we all become vegetarians?
Well no, of course, if vegetarianism is defined in the usual mealy mouthed fashion, and allows consumption of milk and eggs. After all, no animals are treated more harshly than dairy cattle and hens.
The genetic equivalent of the benighted Belgian Blue is the super-milky Friesian. Many already give 2,000 gallons per year - about six times as much as a wild cow - but they are now being bred to provide 4,000 gallons - with a little help from genetic engineers, who are fitting them with genes to boost their growth hormone. Such monsters must be milked four times a day.
Before these beasts can produce milk at all, they must first give birth, but only about one in ten of the calves is required as a herd replacement.
What do "lacto" vegetarians imagine happens to the other nine? They are, of course, slaughtered - and, since this must be the case, it seems almost sinful just to throw their carcasses away. It is certainly profligate.
From all points of view it is surely more sensible and, indeed, ethically more justified to raise them for a couple of years on grass and then slaughter them for beef.
The ovo component of the lacto-ovo vegetarian diet is similarly flawed. Modern hens are expected to produce at least 300 eggs in a year, which is probably at least ten times as many as they would lay in the wild: and doubtless the genetic engineers will soon be extracting even more, with less food. Old hens - which these days means any that are more than about 18 months old - are knocked on the head, just like old cows.
Taken all in all, the lacto-ovo vegetarians have hardly less blood on them than the rest of us.
Should we then eschew all animal products, as vegans do? Not if we accept the principal of ethics proposed by the German philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724-1804), which says that we should do nothing that we would not in conscience recommend to everyone; and that veganism worldwide would be a disaster, both agriculturally and nutritionally. Of course, we can produce ten times or more protein or calories by growing cereal for bread than we could by feeding that same cereal to livestock and then eating the meat. But this merely proves that it is profligate, in general, to give food to animals that we might have eaten ourselves. It certainly does not demonstrate that food production based totally on plants is more efficient, taken overall, than an agriculture that also includes some animals. Livestock can be raised on land that cannot be used for crops - on steep hills, for example, or in semi-deserts - and can be fed on by-products and leftovers that human beings cannot eat, from pea stalks and straw to "tail-corn".
Of course, all-plant agriculture should be enormously productive, but no matter how bountiful it is, it would always be possible to squeeze in a few animals without substantially increasing inputs.
For most people in the world, too, animal products provide only a small proportion of the total energy and protein, and it may look, at first sight, as if they could do without them altogether. Yet that small proportion is crucial. Animal protein is of high quality and animal products in general are a vital source of recondite micronutrients, such as calcium and zinc. A worldwide policy of veganism (assuming such a thing were feasible) would sign many millions of death warrants.
Human beings are natural omnivores and, as such - since hunting on a globally significant scale is an obvious non-starter - we are effectively obliged to keep livestock. But this cannot mean that we should give ourselves carte blanche to treat them without respect. We should surely contrive to raise farm animals as kindly as possible and then, after a life as fulfilled as we can make it, to dispatch them quickly and efficiently.
The key is to find out what animals prefer, and then to match the husbandry to their preferences. Although it may seem hard to read the minds of cattle, pigs and poultry, much of the necessary research has already been carried out. Notably, the late David Woodgush at Edinburgh University in the late 1980s showed that sows, when given the opportunity, build nests of straw for their piglets and raise them in family groups while the boars, commonly considered to be murderous, stand by in happy attendance. This is the kind of husbandry we ought to encourage, and livestock should be bred accordingly. Berkshire pigs, for example, were traditionally selected and bred largely for their mothering skills - not to grow so quickly that they are obliged to stand more like bears than pigs.
At Oxford University, Marian Stamp Dawkins reveals the preferences of chickens by measuring the efforts they are prepared to make to achieve particular goals. She has found that they will work hard to find their way to a nestbox to lay their eggs. This matters more to them than the occasional sniff of grass that currently qualifies the farmers to sell them as "free range". In short, it is possible to discover what animals like and to treat them accordingly.
But meat, eggs and milk produced by truly humane methods of husbandry would be expensive. Present-day factory methods reduce the costs by several-fold - perhaps in some cases even ten-fold. Breeding brings the costs down still further; a Belgian Blue that packs hundreds of pounds of meat on to a skeleton like a clothes horse would almost certainly eat less than a primitive bull that was lean and lithe.
Rate of growth is even more important than the disposition of the flesh. If animals can grow twice as quickly, the throughput is doubled and the profit increases even more, since the fixed costs are spread over more beasts.
Every incremental rise in rate of growth, however, will mean that the meat will be cheaper for the consumer. Even so, if the cruelty simply led to greater profits for the food producers, we would protest more vehemently than we do, because then we could take the conventional snipe at the fat cats. But cheap food in Britain is perceived to serve a social purpose. It has achieved almost a religious status; a symbol of our enlightenment, of our innate humanity to our fellow human beings. Henry IV of France wanted to see a chicken in every peasant's pot and, though no one bothers with pots any more, there is poultry galore on every barbecue - and pork chops and beefsteaks as well.
In short we justify the cruelty by pretending that without it our fellow citizens would suffer more. Well-fed members of the middle class like me, who suggest that livestock farming should be humane and, therefore, that meat should be expensive, are seen merely to be effete.
But what a fake that argument is. Britain is a rich country, and if there are people here who cannot afford meat, then this is because we choose, as a matter of policy, to tolerate poverty. Cheap meat is the palliative; we ameliorate the injustice to human beings by being even more cruel to farm animals. What kind of morality is that? Then again, even the most dyed-in-the-wool champions of the free markets acknowledge that the economy of agriculture has to be manipulated, if only because the product is so vital, while the productivity is prey to factors that are beyond control and yet are potentially devastating - notably the weather. Even in Margaret Thatcher's day, Britain's farming was subject to the entire gamut of state interventions - quotas, grants, subsidies, support buying and all the rest. The alternative would be to allow farmers to go broke at every sneeze of climate and that would benefit nobody.
Because all the apparatus of intervention is in place, and any ideological objection would be fatuous, it would be relatively straightforward - if we cared enough - simply to outlaw cruelty, and to subsidise farmers and breeders to behave humanely. Most farmers would be delighted to be given the chance. Unless we call a halt, the cruelties will multiply. Genetic changes that have relied on chance mutation, and took several generations to consolidate, will in the future be achievable within a few months by genetic engineering. Indeed, future engineers will be able to alter animals in ways that are without precedent by inducing the required genetic changes at will. If profit is to remain our sole criterion, then the "Schwarzenegger" bull could be the symbol of the future. But we could go down the route of humanity, and then these sad, deformed creatures would represent the final flourish of the grisly past.
You pays your money and you takes your choice.
* Colin Tudge is a Research Fellow of the Centre for Philosophy at the London School of Economics.
ENGINEERED CATTLE
BEEF CATTLE:
Many are now so misshapen that caesarean deliveries are inevitable. They also suffer from lameness
PIGS:
Fast growth rates mean that legs are unable to keep up with the rest of the body. They suffer from painful joints
CHICKENS:
The modern broiler reaches its slaughter weight in just six weeks. Its bones are so feeble that they break on contact; It also suffers heart disease
DAIRY COWS:
Today's cow is producing ten times as much milk as her calf would have drunk; selective breeding is likely to double the output
TURKEYS:
Selective breeding means turkeys are so fleshy that they cannot physically mate. Artificial insemination is the only answer
EXPERTS SAY
* Donald Broom, Colleen Macleod Professor of Animal Welfare at Cambridge University's Veterinary School, on rearing animals so that their bodies are growing too fast for their legs: "It is like a child who is nine years old in weight having to stand on the legs, say, of a five-year-old."
On turkeys: "It is unreasonable that almost all members of a widely used breeding line are unable to perform a normal biological function like mating. "
* Professor John Webster, head of Bristol University's Veterinary School, on broilers: "It is absolutely not right that animals in their first few weeks of life should be experiencing heart disease...should be crippled by their breeding."
* The Farm Animal Welfare Council reported leg problems among broilers on nearly every farm it visited. Another study found that 90 per cent of intensively reared broilers had a detectable abnormality in their gait.