Viewpoint: Eating animal products perpetuates suffering

You are what you eat, and what you eat might be much more than you bargained for. From anesthesia-free castration to being literally skinned alive, farm animals worldwide suffer from maltreatment.

Next week we celebrate World Farm Animals Day, and we ask citizens to consider the facts of animal farming. We are asking students to not only consider the cruel treatment of animals, but also their own health and the promotion of a healthy environment, both having strong links to animal farms.

Often, new methods of production are steamrolled into use without adequate evaluation. Virtually all milk, for example, comes from cows kept in cages, injected with recombinant bovine growth hormone (rBGH) to artificially increase their milk production. The chemical is too new to know for sure, but it seems to have links to cancer and disease. As dairy has become big business, rBGH's manufacturer, Monsanto, has taken measures to suppress information and discussion on the topic. Chemicals are stored in tissue, building up over a lifetime, so every time you eat meat you are being subjected to the toxins of husbandry, ranging from dangerous antibiotics to sedatives.

For the sake of profits, living conditions for animals have been reduced to the barest minimums to ensure that enough animals survive to reach market to maintain profitability. For example, chickens will have their beaks - a major sensory receptor on birds - burned off to prevent them from pecking each other a natural response to living in a literal sea of chickens. Likewise, pigs will have their tails snipped off to prevent them from being bitten. They will then live in a revolting, unsanitary pen packed solidly with other pigs and waste.

Often, hens will be subjected to "forced molting," a process of starvation for up to two weeks to throw off their natural cycle of production and squeeze out another batch of eggs. As well, hens in the U.S. are kept in battery cages - often just 400-sq. cm per bird. With nowhere to move, hens' feet commonly grow around the wire bottoms of the cage. These examples are by no means the exception - animal abuses are the norm in farming. Other concerns include veal crates, the non-enforcement of the Humane Methods of Slaughter Act on 1978 and general beatings. The connections between animal-based diets and human disease are certain. With increases in chemical use in farming, these trends will only become stronger. Environmental problems in farming animals are also well documented. To grow a pound of meat, perhaps a dozen pounds of vegetable protein which is more suitable for the human diet will be consumed. As well, animal farming accounts for perhaps half of all water consumed in the United States.

There doesn't seem to be a solution to these problems within the current system of farming. Reevaluation of our personal diets is the best place to start. Support vegan options in dorms, insist on your food being organic, don't support animal by-products such as leather and gelatin, and most importantly ask yourself "since I am what I eat," do I care where my food comes from?"

- This viewpoint was written by LSA senior Andrew Lurie.