Should We Eat Meat?

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People concerned about animal welfare buy products with labels boasting of “humane” treatment. But such labels are primarily marketing gimmicks that provide little protection for animals.

One of the most heavily-marketed “animal welfare programs,” the “Swine Welfare Assurance Program” (SWAP), features a label that shows a gentle hand cradling a pig. In reality, SWAP allows all the worst abuses, including confining mother pigs to crates so small that they can't turn around and cutting off piglets' ears and tails and castrating them without painkillers. SWAP even allows farmers to kill sick piglets by slamming their heads into the pavement.

Government-regulated labels offer no better assurances. The U.S. Department of Agriculture requires that free-range animals have “access” to outdoor areas, but there is no provision for how much room they must have outside. Even if a farmer opened the door to a chicken coop and then closed it before any birds could get out, he would still be able to use the free-range label.

Nor is there such a thing as a “humane” slaughterhouse, especially for chickens, who are inexplicably exempt from the so-called Humane Slaughter Act, which is supposed to ensure that animals are rendered unconscious before their throats are slit and they are dismembered and skinned. However, because slaughterhouse lines move so fast, it is inevitable—and acceptable, by industry standards—that some animals will be improperly stunned or not stunned at all, meaning that they are fully conscious as they are shackled and hoisted aloft by one leg, their throats are slit, and their legs are sawed off. Chickens—who, by the billions, account for the largest numbers of animals killed for food—are not even afforded this minimal protection. They are dragged upside down through an electrified bath which renders them immobile but not necessarily unconscious. Many birds are still conscious when they are dunked into a scalding tank to remove their feathers, meaning that they are boiled alive.

From the “free-range” hen who smells fresh air for the first time on her way to slaughter to the cow whose male calf is taken from her and stuck in a crate to be raised for veal so that her “organic” milk can be consumed by humans, all animals who are raised and killed for food suffer. The only truly humane option is to choose delicious, healthy vegetarian foods.