Lara Winner

Environmental Ethics

February 19, 2001

In the third chapter of Animal Liberation, Peter Singer attempts to demonstrate how modern livestock raising practices, which he refers to as "factory farming," are extremely harmful to the animals raised and therefore unethical. On Singer’s view, all the animals in question—chickens, pigs, cows, and other livestock—are sentient creatures, and therefore moral subjects whose interests, in the form of pains and pleasures, should be given equal consideration with human interests. Doing so would require radical changes in how livestock are currently treated, Singer argues. Despite Singer’s claim to use only purely rational arguments, rather than sentiment, to advance his views, this chapter seems calibrated for maximum emotional impact. He begins by discussing the particular case of chickens, both those raised for meat and those raised to lay eggs; he then moves on to the case of pigs, which he reminds us are at least as intelligent, if not more intelligent, than dogs (and therefore suffer proportionately greater from similar ill treatment by farmers). Singer then reaches his emotional and argumentative peak with the case of veal production, which he considers the extreme in cruelty both in degree of exploitation and inefficiency in converting feed to edible meat (the latter point is discussed primarily in Chapter 4). The chapter then ends with somewhat of a denouement, considering briefly the case of dairy and beef cattle as well as the slaughtering process for all livestock. This summary will limit itself to discussion of and commentary on the three major cases Singer considers—chickens, pigs, and veal.

Singer attempts to prove in this chapter that animals raised for human consumption "lead miserable lives from birth to slaughter." He first considers the plight of chickens, the animal with whom modern factory farming methods were pioneered. It was in the raising of chickens that the animals were first moved indoors for their entire lifespan, kept in overcrowded and artificially controlled conditions. It was here that the assembly-line concept of mass production was applied, altering the mental conception of the chicken from fellow living creature to feed-to-meat (or eggs) conversion ratio. Small farmers were driven out of business by the large corporate model of chicken production, and concern for the welfare of individual chickens was lost as tens of thousands came to be raised in a single shed by a single attendant. Those who raise other types of livestock came to view chicken farming as the ideal of efficient modern production toward which they should strive.

Using the agriculture industry’s own sources as evidence, Singer documents just how far from the happy mental picture of the family farm with its content animals the modern raising of chickens has come. On average, 5.3 billion birds are raised and slaughtered each year to satisfy contemporary demand for meat. To raise such vast numbers of broiler chickens (chickens raised for meat rather than to lay eggs), mass production methods are required. Chickens are raised, as alluded to above, by the tens of thousands in a single windowless shed equipped with an automatic feeder. Space is tight; each chicken averages living space less than the area covered by an 8½x11 sheet of paper. In traditional-sized flocks of a few hundred birds at most, a social hierarchy, or pecking order, would form; this social behavior is impossible in modern sheds, where each chicken would have to memorize thousands of different individuals. The stress of these living conditions causes chickens to exhibit unnatural behaviors such as pecking at each other’s feathers and even cannibalism; rather than ameliorate the living conditions, however, modern farmers try to prevent the negative behaviors by debeaking the chickens and keeping the light level low in the sheds, which makes the birds less active.

The overcrowding of chicken sheds results in higher rates of death and of crippling physical deformities in chickens, but this is not considered problematic as long as overall production efficiency is not threatened. That these living conditions also cause chickens great suffering is amply documented both by their inability to engage in species-typical behaviors and the negative behaviors with which they act out, Singer argues. On his view, therefore, modern broiler chicken farming is unethical.

Singer makes similar arguments in the case of egg-laying chickens as well. In fact, this case is in many ways stronger; since the chickens live an average of two years, rather than the seven-week lifespan of broiler chickens, any suffering they endure is of much greater quantity due to their greater length of life. Laying chickens are kept four to five to a single cage, rather than en masse on the shed floor, but their living space is no greater. The cages are angled so that the eggs laid roll down and onto conveyor belts. Because they live longer, laying chickens are often debeaked twice; sometimes they are also inadvertently immobilized when their toenails grow around the mesh of the cage floor. Some laying chickens are also subjected to forced molting in the belief that this will stimulate egg production in older birds. Male chicks are of course useless as layers, so they are often gassed to death or simply thrown into a large bag—the weight of the chicks on top of them assures that they will soon suffocate. Death rates are rather high for laying chickens, as high as 10-15 percent, but again, as long as overall productivity remains acceptable, the fate of individual chickens is of little concern.

One line of defense offered by the farming industry is that their animals (including, but not limited to, chickens) would not develop and put on weight as quickly if they were truly miserable; they would wither away and die instead. Decent treatment of livestock and profits go hand in hand, the producers say. Singer rejects this argument. The need to eat for survival continues unabated even in wretched living conditions, he says, so animals continue to eat and struggle to survive even under the most adverse of circumstances. The fact that livestock manage to survive and prosper to the extent that they do happens in spite of, not because of, their living conditions.

Singer then moves on to consider the case of pig farming. Because pigs are more intelligent than chickens, their capacity for suffering is proportionately greater, on Singer’s view; equal consideration of interests does not require identical treatment, but rather treatment that reflects each species’ or individual’s capacity to feel physical pain or to suffer mentally. Therefore, pigs are done more harm by being kept in conditions similar to those in which chickens are kept (although, as Singer admits, total indoor confinement of pigs is not yet a universal practice). The overcrowding and lack of mental stimulation in the pigs’ environment causes, in their case, the vice of tail-biting; because pigs cannot be debeaked, farmers take preventive action instead by removing pigs’ tail. Pigs also die from a condition known as porcine stress syndrome, caused primarily by boredom and stress; producers are making serious attempts to cure it, but only because the economic investment per animal is much greater for pigs than for chickens.

The emotional escalation used by Singer in this chapter comes to completion with his discussion of the methods used to produce veal. Veal is the tender, pale flesh that a calf has prior to its beginning to eat grass at a few weeks of age. Before the 1950s, then, veal calves were killed at a very young age. But then a Dutch farmer perfected a liquid diet which could be fed to calves to keep them alive until 16 weeks of age; this yielded 400 pounds of veal per calf rather than the relatively meager 90 pounds per calf of the old method. To keep the calves’ flesh in ideal condition, however, extreme methods are required. Calves must be kept motionless in wooden stalls so that they do not toughen their muscles. They must be kept anemic, so all sources of metal, including iron stall latches, are kept from them. Because of their diet and confinement (the latter preventing regular grooming), digestive and skin disorders are common. The environment is kept both dim (to reduce restlessness) and warm and humid (to encourage overeating, since calves’ liquid diet is their only source of water). Even by factory farming standards, Singer argues, this is cruel and unusual punishment.

Singer’s style of argumentation in this chapter raises several interesting issues. First, despite his claims to the contrary, this chapter depends as much on emotion as it does on reason. It is no accident, as suggested above, that Singer orders his examples the way he does; he is trying to achieve maximum emotional impact. Whether this method is inappropriate, however, is open to debate. Philosophers since the time of the ancient Greeks have talked about the emotions in relation to morality and moral conduct, how the emotions must be properly guided in order to develop a well-ordered moral sensibility. Indeed, perhaps the main reason sociopaths are considered deficient is that they are incapable of emotional attachment, of the kind of fellow-feeling that would allow them to empathize with their victims. If an emotional component is required for proper or normal moral sensitivity, then Singer does not leave the sphere of appropriate moral considerations when he appeals to his readers on an emotional level.

Second, in this chapter, at least, Singer’s description is one of animal suffering more than it is of animals being subjected to physical pain. While he does not attempt to draw a distinction between the two, such a distinction can easily be made. Debeaking and tail removal are presumably quite painful, and those individuals who suffer some type of physical deformity may also suffer pain as a result. Most of what is morally objectionable here, however, at least on Singer’s view, is what would be categorized as mental suffering: boredom, stress, and other negative emotional states. While Singer goes to a great deal of trouble to establish that animals are capable of suffering physical pain, he does not make a similar argument to show that they have emotional lives; to the extent that his argument depends on the premise that animals are subjected to negative emotional states, and therefore their interests are harmed, the argument is to that extent weakened.

Finally, Singer strays from his line of argumentation occasionally in this chapter by arguing that current practices may be harmful to humans. The large amounts of waste in animal sheds, for example, produce enough ammonia to be harmful not only to their animal inhabitants, but to their human keepers, Singer contends. He also cites evidence that slaughterhouses have among the highest rates of workplace injuries in the United States; they are dangerous to more than animals. Whatever the truth value of these claims, they definitely distract from the main thrust of Singer’s argument, which is that factory farming practices are wrong because of the pain and suffering they inflict on animals, not humans. These are claims which belong in a different sort of argument.

This is a thorough and accurate summary, and Lara's observations at the end about Singer's argumentative methods are astute. One thing she didn't mention was that according to Singer the denial that meat is the flesh of animals is implicit in our use of such terms as 'beef' and 'pork'. Likewise the term 'farm' is at best misleading when used in connection with agribusiness.

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