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The cruel truth about organic and free-range meat and dairy
products
The Georgia Straight (Vancouver) February 26, 2009
http://www.straight.com/article-203802/becci-gindinclarke-cruel-truth-about-organic-and-freerange-meat-and-dairy-products
The
cruel truth about organic and free-range meat and dairy products
By Becci
Gindin-Clarke
When I first learned about factory farming, I was
disgusted. The
extreme confinement, the routine mutilations, the horrors of
transport, and the cruelty of slaughter-they all got to me in a big
way.
I decided that there had to be another option.
I began purchasing what I
hoped were more humane alternatives, like
free-range and organic products.
Then I did more research into what
it all meant, and I was troubled by what
I learned.
The first thing I discovered was that words like "free range"
and
"free run" don't mean very much. In Canada, the labels aren't
regulated at all. Typically, free-run animals are kept indoors for
their
entire lives, and, while free-range farms generally allow
access to the
outdoors, that "access" can be as laughable as a tiny
door leading to a
little gravel lot. The mutilations common on
factory farms-debeaking,
detoeing, dehorning, castration-are
perfectly legal, and performed without
anaesthesia. What's more,
free-range animals die just as young and in the
same slaughterhouses
as their factory-farmed counterparts.
When a
farm calls itself free range or free run, it might consist of
a few dozen
happy animals wandering around outside, but it's much
more likely to consist
of a few enormous sheds crowded with hundreds
of thousands of animals who
almost never see daylight until en route
to the slaughterhouse. I found it
disturbing that both types of farms
qualify as free range.
Organic
farms, I learned, tend to be superior. To qualify as organic,
farms must
adhere to a specific set of rules. Animals must be
provided with a certain
amount of daylight and outdoor access, and
their shelters must be clean.
Most importantly, there are third-party
verifiers who are expected to
monitor farms and ensure that they
qualify as organic. Looks good,
right?
Perhaps not good enough, since there are some things that didn't
change regardless of what kind of farm I examined. Even when one
assumes
that all the rules of organic farming are adhered to, there
are certain
unavoidable unpleasantries. For example, even organic
animals-whether raised
for meat or dairy or eggs-are sent to
slaughter at a fraction of their
natural lifespans. Chickens can live
for 10 years or more, but when raised
for meat, the organic ones die
just as young as free-range and
factory-farmed chickens-usually at
around 45 days old, sometimes as late as
81 days. And cows can live
into their 20s, but when raised for meat they are
slaughtered at only
a few years old. Egg-laying chickens are still
slaughtered when they
aren't producing enough eggs, usually when they are
about two, and
dairy cows and goats are held up to a similar
standard.
I also found out that, in B.C., there are no special hatcheries
for
organic egg-laying chickens. That means that they come from the same
hatcheries as factory-farmed and free-range chickens, where male
chicks
are slaughtered soon after birth-typically, by being ground up
in trash
compactors or simply thrown live into dumpsters. And just as
in conventional
farming, any males born to ever-pregnant dairy cows
and goats are usually
taken from their mothers almost immediately and
either slaughtered or raised
for meat-and not necessarily on an
organic farm.
And then we come to
the end of it all. Both free-range and organic
animals must be transported
to slaughter. Organic rules allow no more
than 24 hours without food or
water. There are no rules for
free-range animals, so they can travel more
than 36 hours, exposed to
the elements, to get to the same slaughterhouse as
any factory-farmed
animal. In B.C., organic animals are either taken to an
exclusively
organic slaughterhouse (there are two in the province) or a
qualified
conventional slaughterhouse, where they are killed before or after
all the non-organic animals, so that the equipment can be sterilized.
There does not appear to be any special "humane" slaughter for
organic
animals, though, so I can only assume that they die in the
same manner as
all the others.
In the end, I decided that, for me, "humane" isn't humane
enough.
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