Dr. Michael Fox: Animal Rights

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PLOWBOY: Is there any hard evidence to indicate that the meat, eggs, milk, and such produced by factory farms can be unhealthful to the consumer?

FOX: Some, but not enough yet, I'm afraid. But the few bits of information that we do have are quite horrifying. As I mentioned before, livestock animals are — because of the pathogenic environment typical of factory farms — regularly dosed with antibiotics. Well, we now have documented cases of human bacterial diseases, in farmworkers, that have developed resistant strains as a result of the people's constant contact with those medicines!

PLOWBOY: It sort of makes you wonder what the effects of eating that meat might be!

FOX: Yes, and it's just too soon to tell. Why, California is only now experiencing an outbreak of bladder cancer that's related to a particular agricultural chemical that was once used to control nematodes and now contaminates drinking water. The pesticide was banned many years ago, but the cancer problem has only just shown up. These things are often very difficult to tease out. In many cases we're dealing with multiple contaminants that are going to be around for a good long time.

PLOWBOY: When one considers that many nutritionists believe we can't even predict what the long-term health effects of the modern American diet might be, it certainly is frightening to see agribusiness continuing to throw more variables into the situation.

FOX: Along that line, I recently heard about some research being done in England that's aimed at countering the effects of somatostasin in the body. Somatostasin, as you may or may not know, is the substance that inhibits growth hormones . . . it's what makes a given creature stop growing once it reaches a certain size. I've seen photographs of sheep treated with this "anti-somatostasin chemical block" that are twice as big as normal animals . . . and the scientists are hoping to get the same results with pigs and cattle.

Earlier researchers tried to accomplish much the same goal by using electrodes to destroy parts of a steer's brain, for example, in order to make the animal eat continuously. That practice proved to be too costly, but this new technique might just come into widespread use.

PLOWBOY: There's definitely some nightmare potential in that!

FOX: Well, genetically, our factory farms are already doing much the same thing to broiler chickens.

PLOWBOY: To fowls whose meat is being sold on the market?

FOX: Oh yes. They are, in a sense, rather monstrous birds, too. A laying hen will — like most creatures — eat until she satisfies her metabolic and production needs, and then stop. The broiler strain, though, will always eat to capacity. That's why the birds have so much fat in their bodies when they're slaughtered . . . and it's one of the reasons that the heart-failure phenomenon known as keel-over or flip-over has become such a problem in factory broiler farms. The birds' hearts often simply can't keep up with the tremendous metabolic activity in their bodies . . . the constant laying on of meat.

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