Farm Animal Welfare

The modern, industrialized way in which we produce meat, dairy and other animal products has turned animals into units of production rather than being seen as sentient beings. Many animals raised for food or fiber are subject to inhumane treatment and living conditions. Fortunately, consumer pressure is beginning to turn the tide and leading to real improvements in some areas of farm animal welfare.

What Is Farm Animal Welfare?

Animals have played a critical role in agriculture throughout human history, providing us with labor, fiber and food and enriching the soil with their waste. Animals and crops have always been in a symbiotic relationship with one another; now, however, rather than viewing animals as sentient beings and part of the large interdependent systems, we have come to view animals as units of production. Their health and welfare are not considered as being fundamentally connected to the health of the whole; the main concern is only for the final product. To maximize efficiency and profits, operators of concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs), also known as factory farms, and the companies they are accountable to generally prioritize rapid growth and production over animal health and welfare.

People approach animal welfare from many different perspectives: some choose not to consume animal products at all, while others do so in keeping with a set of ethical standards. These varying ideas generally converge around diminishing as much as possible (if not eliminating) the pain and suffering that animals experience in the production process. A 2023 survey commissioned by the ASPCA found that 79 percent of Americans are are concerned about the impact of factory farming on animal welfare, with 74 percent of respondents in favor of banning new CAFOs in the U.S. ¹

In animal agriculture, there is a broad range of animal treatment, ranging from CAFOs with the lowest animal welfare standards to confinement operations that have more humane practices, to pasture-based farms, which have a range of practices.

The Worst Farm Animal Welfare Practices

Some of the worst farm animal welfare practices in CAFOs include very crowded facilities, routine amputations and inhumane slaughter techniques. Besides the animal discomfort and health issues that can arise under such conditions, they can cause symptoms that have consequences higher up the food chain as well; animals subject to stress and pain are more prone to disease and produce lower quality meat, milk or eggs. ⁴ Dairy cows are sometimes tethered in a barn for long periods, unable to take more than a few steps, side to side. Female hogs, known as sows, are confined to gestation crates shortly before giving birth and while nursing. These are cages only slightly larger than their bodies, not big enough inside for the animals to turn around. The system was developed to keep sows from accidentally crushing piglets; however, research is showing that sows kept in other systems do not have significantly higher piglet mortality rates.

Antibiotics and other drugs are used, in part, to control diseases in these overcrowded, unhealthy conditions. Antibiotics have been used in livestock feed since the 1940s, when studies showed that the drugs caused animals to grow faster and put on weight more efficiently, increasing meat producers’ profits. ⁶

Physical Manipulations

Amputations are common practice in CAFOs, and are generally performed without anesthesia. Chickens are regularly debeaked and the tails of cows and hogs removed, called docking. ⁸⁹

Chickens, owing to their small size, are perhaps manipulated more than any other animal in the industrial system. Many layers undergo forced molting. Molting is when chickens stop laying eggs, and shed and re-grow their feathers before beginning to lay again. The most common way to force molting is to withhold food and sometimes water for seven days or up to two weeks. Forced molting is uncommon in Canada and prohibited in the European Union, and United Egg Producers (an industry group) condemns the practice; yet 75 to 80 percent of US hens are subject to the procedure. ¹⁰¹¹ The vast majority of broiler chickens are subject to some form of nearly continuous very low lighting, which can cause abnormal development and various health problems. ¹²

Industrially raised animals are bred for rapid growth and maximum production. In the 1940s, a broiler chicken reached slaughter weight in 14 weeks; today it takes just five and a half weeks, or around 40 days. ¹³¹⁴

Broiler chickens grow so quickly that their legs often cannot support their weight by the time they are harvested. ¹⁵ Layer hens and dairy cows are pushed to such high output that they end up exhausted after just a few years. In 1950, the average dairy cow produced almost 5,300 pounds of milk a year; today, she produces nearly 20,000 pounds. ¹⁶ When cows’ production slows, at around four to six years of age, they are shipped off to slaughter, even though they could live for another 15 or 20 years. Similarly, hens’ egg-laying frequency and quality decline after a year; though their natural life expectancy would be another five to eleven years, in many production systems, they are slaughtered after one year.

Finally, in virtually all dairy systems, both industrial and pasture-based, calves are removed from their mothers shortly after birth. They are fed milk replacer or milk from another cow, while their mothers enter the herd to be milked for human consumption.

Culling

Because it is only the females of the species that produce milk and eggs, male offspring are not deemed necessary. This, too, is true in nearly all systems, but the methods of culling the males vary widely. In industrial systems, bull (male) calves are generally sold when they are only a few days old to be raised as veal. Many veal calves are still raised in crates where they do not have enough space to turn around, though the tide is turning, with eight states having banned the practice, and veal producers, including the largest in the country, moving to alternative, more humane systems.

The male chicks of laying hens, which are not of use for laying eggs and, as a layer breed rather than a meat breed, grow too slowly to be raised for meat, are culled at the hatchery, most often by being fed into an industrial grinder. Even farmers who raise laying hens on pasture do not generally hatch their layers from eggs, and instead purchase chicks from hatcheries that use this practice.

Slaughter

Humane methods of slaughter became law with the passage of the 1958 Human Slaughter Act, intended to prevent the “needless suffering” of livestock during slaughter, but adherence to the law in the half-century since has been inconsistent. In recent decades, scientist and animal welfare advocate Temple Grandin has worked with the meat industry to develop less stressful slaughter protocols; today her Animal Welfare Audit is the industry standard, with half of the cattle in North America being handled by equipment she designed.

However, the majority of beef cattle are slaughtered in facilities that process more than one million animals annually, or nearly 3,000 per day; and despite many improvements, at this speed, it is nearly impossible to guarantee that every animal is slaughtered within the regulations. ¹⁷¹⁸ For beef and other species, transport conditions before arriving at the slaughterhouse can be stressful, even resulting in death, and many facilities deny animals access to food or water while they wait, which can be for days. ¹⁹ Additionally, pre-slaughter stunning technology must be well-maintained and operated by trained workers; without these variables, stunning procedures regularly fail to render animals fully unconscious. ²⁰

In the case of poultry, there is evidence that the common method of electrical stunning may physically immobilize the bird, but not prevent the perception of pain. ²¹ In addition, birds must be hung upside down for stunning, which causes compression of their hearts and leg pain. ²⁴²⁵ Confinement hog barns generally have grated concrete or metal floors, which do not allow the animals to express their natural rooting and wallowing behaviors, leading to stress and aggression. Virtually all animals in confinement live directly in large quantities of their own manure, or very close to where it is collected and stored; the ammonia and other gases emitted by the waste can be toxic to animal health, causing respiratory and skin ailments.

However, standards vary by industry, company and buyer; with increasing consumer awareness of animal welfare in CAFOs, pressure both at the ballot box and in the grocery aisle have made some significant changes and improved on some of the worst practices. As long as the confinement model is the dominant way of raising animals, it is worth advocating for improved animal treatment within that model, as well as for increased support for pastured production.

For two decades, in the dairy industry, many cows were regularly injected with an artificial growth hormone known as rBST or rBGH to increase milk production. This practice requires cows to be milked three times per day and also increases rates of mastitis in animals. Due to widespread consumer pressure, the practice is being phased out, as retailers like Walmart pledged not to sell milk produced with the hormone. USDA reports that its use dropped from over 17 percent in 2007 to about 14 percent in 2014. ²⁶

• Look for the Animal Welfare Approved label to guarantee that animals were raised with the highest standards of well-being. Search the Animal Welfare Approved database for your nearest outlet.
• Know your farmer or local butcher, and ask them how the animals were raised and if they were slaughtered humanely. If you can, visit the farm and judge the conditions for yourself.
• Learn about food labels with our Food Label Guide and what they mean for farm animal welfare.