Dr. Michael Fox: Animal Rights

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Furthermore, inhumane conditions — which will vary from one type of animal to another and, of course, from one livestock-raising operation to another — are compounded by the antibiotic-laden diet that I mentioned before, which is necessary to control illness in disease-encouraging environments . . . and by conditions that don't allow the animals to engage in the social activities (such as grooming, stretching, preening, or even lying down) that are necessary to their well-being.

PLOWBOY: Are you, in effect, making some strong accusations against the American farmer?

FOX: Absolutely not. I want to stress that I have no intention of even implying that the men and women involved in intensive livestock raising are cruel. Instead, such individuals are themselves caught in a very cruel economic bind. They've been coerced and propagandized — by the agribusiness industries and their "front" organizations and publications — to adopt systems that, because of the huge investments required, can't be abandoned once they're committed to. And these same systems often force the farmers to ignore the very husbandry practices — relating both to livestock and to the land itself — that can make farming among the most noble of occupations.

PLOWBOY: You refer to the costliness of factory farming. Would you care to go into a little more detail on that subject?

FOX: Certainly. First of all, in terms of expense to the farmer, the buildings required for intensive livestock production are of the most costly kind. And as I've already noted, the immense initial expense of setting up on a factory-farm basis generally forces the farmer into a commitment to use whatever methods are necessary to sustain that system. After all, it's likely that he or she has had to go so far into debt to set up the "factory" that an attempt to break away from the intensive farming methods would mean bankruptcy.

Furthermore, as another example of the treadmill created by the factory-farm system, the pathogenic conditions generated by crowding and such require, as I've explained, the constant administering of antibiotics to the animals. The average annual cost of these drugs — of those sold in the form of feed additives alone — now runs to about $125 million.

One also has to consider the cost to society represented by the meat, and animal lives, wasted as a result of improper treatment and — especially — inhumane transport. John Macfarlane, a professional livestock consultant, estimates that if all the livestock that die in transit in an average year, plus the parts of animals that have to be discarded after butchering as a result of bruising and crippling, were loaded into railroad cars — with each car containing 38,000 pounds of meat — there'd be enough of such wasted protein to fill a stock train 40 miles long!

PLOWBOY: I assume that, since you're devoting all of your efforts to welfare-related problems, you must believe there's a way out of this whole fix that could benefit farmers, consumers, and livestock.

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