New Report on Industrial Farm Animal Production in America: Industry has to Change
Posted May 6, 2008 by Colleen
"How pitiful and what poverty of mind, to have said that the
animals are machines deprived of understanding and feeling."
Voltaire, (1694 - 1778) (photo credit: Farm Sanctuary)
Last week, Pew Charitable Trusts and Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health released a report about factory farming called
You can download it here, either the full report or the summary.
The Washington Post covered the report release on April 28, 2008, Report Targets Cost of Factory Farming, and the article provides a good summary of the findings:
“..fails to provide the humane treatment of livestock..”
“The "economies of scale" used to justify factory farming practices are largely an illusion, perpetuated by a failure to account for associated costs.”
“…costs are human illnesses caused by drug-resistant bacteria associated with the rampant use of antibiotics on feedlots..”
“…degradation of land, water and air quality caused by animal waste too intensely concentrated to be neutralized by natural processes.”
“…modern agriculture is responsible for about 20 percent of the nation's greenhouse-gas production…”
Barbara Gowdy, author of the internationally acclaimed novel, The White Bone, said in a recent interview on Animal Voices,
A bleak thought but probably pretty dead-on at this point. Still, the message is getting out there for those who are willing to hear it and more people appear to be listening, eating less meat and buying it from more sustainable and humane sources or going veg.
Links of Interest
**A transcript of the report's page on Methicillin (Antibiotic)-Resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA)
Rethinking the Meat Guzzler, New York Times, January 28, 2008
**Our Decrepit Food Factories, New York Times, December 16, 2007
Union of Concerned Scientists
Factoryfarming.com
Life Behind Bars
Related Blog Entries
Darkness Shall Cover the Earth: The Dire Consequences of Factory Farming
The True Price of Bacon: The Miserable Lives of Pigs
**MRSA: The Evolution of a lethal new microbe
**Superbug found in Canadian Pork
Update on Horrific Animal Cruelty at California Slaughter Plant
The Dark Art of Denial
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