Animal Factory: The Looming Threat Of Industrial Pig, Dairy, And Poultry Farms To Humans And The Environment (2010) - Plot & Excerpts
My first job after graduate school was in Harrisonburg, Va., a largely rural community with several poultry-processing plants. My second apartment there was a few blocks from the biggest plant, and driving home from work or the gym I would frequently get stuck behind semi-trucks heading there with cages full of chickens. The cages were tiny, crammed onto the flatbed of the semis, and left open to the air during transport. The chickens were small and white, and feathers typically flew whenever the truck moved. They made me cry every single time.As I get older and deal with various health issues, I'm increasingly interested in where my food comes from. I have been a vegetarian since I was 13, but I care deeply about animal welfare, and while I knew this book would be disturbing and difficult, I wanted to read it. I'm glad I did. I didn't realize when I picked it up how much factory farming takes place in North Carolina and how barbaric it really is. Some facts:Dairy, hog, poultry and egg CAFO "farms" - concentrated animal feeding operations - place literally thousands of animals in long, concrete buildings with no windows. These animals spend their entire lives indoors in spaces so small they can't stand up, turn around, stretch their limbs and, in the case of the chickens, move at all. Piglets are taken from nursing sows before they are properly weaned. Slaughter is frequently inhumane. From the book, some specifics about poultry CAFOs. The chickens sit in cages about the width/length of a sheet of paper. Their food is delivered to them on conveyer belts, their water is delivered via a pick right above their heads, and their litter is taken away on another conveyor belt. Broiler chickens, the kind you typically buy at the grocery store, are bred specifically to grow fast - so fast it's uncomfortable and painful for the birds."As birds got bigger, contractors were required to raise the level of the pans each week with a motorized pulley system. 'They don't want chickens have to bend down to reach the food,' Carole [a former contract farmer] explained. 'That would be wasting energy. And they make sure there's plenty of feed in the pans at all times - those birds eat constantly.' The same is done with drinking-water lines, only these were kept slightly above beak level...'The company really wants water in that bird - it makes them grow faster. And arsenic makes it drink more. They also put salt in the feed. Those are some VERY thirsty chickens.'The brutal heat and humidity of eastern shore summers also took its toll on the birds. Normally, the way chickens cool off, aside from panting, is to stand up, lift their wings, and let all that heat under them escape. 'But now, they are bred and ed in such a way that, after about five weeks, they are just too darn big to walk or even get up. So they just sit there,' Carole said. 'They will die of heat if you don't do something. So during the summer, someone has to go into each confinement building every hour to 'walk the chickens' - physically force them to get up and flap their wings around, otherwise they'd just sit there and die.' ... As the birds got bigger, the heat really became hard for them to handle. 'You constantly have to pull out all the dead birds, up to one hundred or two hundred per day, per building,' Carole said. 'Many of them die of heart attacks or kidney failure, because they are growing so fast their internal organs cannot keep up with their muscles and skeletons.' Industrial chickens are 'on the verge of structural collapse' because they grow so fast, she said. One study found that 90 percent of all meat chickens have leg problems and structural deformities, and more than a quarter live with the chronic pain of bone disease."This is some of the LESS disturbing information in the book. CAFOs also contribute to human illness by overusing antibiotics as a preventive measure, which leads to antibiotic-resistant strains of illness (i.e. swine flu - literally, cultivated at a hog CAFO in Mexico and transmitted to humans). The massive amounts of waste from these facilities is sprayed on already-saturated fields, leading to water pollution (including the Neuse and Cape Fear rivers). Waste lagoons emit foul stenches that make nearby residents sick and cause property values to plummet. I could go on.If you're interested in animal welfare, environmental health, agriculture or simply the origins of your food, I can't recommend this book enough. The problem is complicated and at the consumer level, so is the solution - not everyone (myself included) can afford to buy all-organic, 100 percent humane food. The book touches on that as well. A wonderfully researched and written, if wholly disturbing, look at the agricultural system in the United States.Cons: A bit too long, in my opinion. I think Kirby had more research than he knew what to do with. It takes a lot for me to put a book down before finishing it. In fact, this may be only the third tme I've ever done so. And I know this book has received many plaudits, but I just can't do it anymore. It's too boring. Nothing is sourced. The conversations and dialogue are trite.It's basically a book about how three separate groups fight off factory farms. (I made it 70 percent through) but there is no continuity and honestly not enough of a difference between the three groups to warrant three separate tellings. It reads like a bad college essay. It's slow and basically cobbles together a bunch of newspaper articles. I never could care for the characters. OK, having never written a book, I don't want to sit here and dump all over this guy's work so I'll leave it there.
What do You think about Animal Factory: The Looming Threat Of Industrial Pig, Dairy, And Poultry Farms To Humans And The Environment (2010)?
I am going to finish this one another time. I ran out of time and had to return it to the library.
—valerie
Wasn't as informative as I had expected. Still a good read , opens your eyes to the farming wys.
—Tracy
Good information, ruined by a hilariously predictable narrative style.
—pn5592
