"Eating Animals"

Hello fellow AP English class bloggers. As our blogging project is drawing to a close, I felt it necessary to finally post about our animal welfare book, Eating Animals, by Jonathan Safran Foer. In his book, Foer brings to light various unknown facts about the food industry, generally focusing on animals (hence the title). Now as much as I honestly do not care about eating organic or picking healthy and economically friendly foods, I do care very much about animals. Believe it or not, I am an animal lover (as if you didn't surmise that from my last posts being about dogs). From owning multiple dogs in my lifetime, to the various rodents, birds, fish and reptiles my family has possessed, I have grown quite attached to animals. This is why I am in the animal welfare blogging group, and this is why I am posting this now...

While I may disagree with certain aspects of the purpose of this focus on the food we consume, I cannot ignore the impact that reading about the deplorable conditions that the animals I eat are raised and killed in has had on me. Those of you who have read Eating Animals as well already know what I am talking about. For the rest of you, however, allow me to fill you in. I will start out talking about pigs, one of the animals that I most love to eat (for Payton and Jack). As funny as Jim Gaffigan may be, the conditions of the lives of the pigs we eat are far from it. Like many animals, pigs are kept in pins that are so small that they are unable to turn around, let alone walk. Much like astronauts' bones and muscles atrophy in space, being confined in such small spaces without the ability to move causes the bones of these pigs to become less dense. Keeping large numbers of pigs in a confined space obviously results in a problem with waste and odor management. These pigs are often left to wallow in their own excrement. Obviously these crates are small, and small crates cause rubbing. This brutal combination of cramped living space, toxic living conditions and friction with their cages causes the perfect storm of medical problems, open sores and deformation. If only these pigs had been lucky enough to be the runts of their respective litters, in which case they are bludgeoned to death. This may not sound like a great alternative, but compared to being raised in torturous factory farms it may not be so bad.

Now for chickens. I mean who doesn't love Chick-fil-a or having some nice scrambled eggs for breakfast? Maybe you even enjoy both at once, ordering a chicken, egg and cheese bagel for breakfast at chick-fil-a. How nice. Eating a chicken as well as the egg that it has produced, a kind of full cycle, nothing goes to waste deal. Well, I hate to burst your bubble, but this notion is false. Now we have two kinds of chickens: layers and broilers. Oh yes, there are two different chickens for the two different edible aspects of chicken-hood. Lets begin with layer chickens, the chickens who lay the eggs that we eat. These chickens live in 67 square inches of space. That's slightly more than 8 inches X 8 inches. Sounds awesome, especially considering that the average sized chicken is almost 12 inches long. Now, small living space aside, being a layer can't be all that bad, right? Wrong again. Imagine being trapped in a dark elevator so tight that you can't move, and in some cases can't even touch the ground. That's right folks, chicken cages are stacked in tiers that can go up to 18 layers high. Imagine being a chicken on the bottom of these 18 stories, with 17 chickens almost genetically identically to you drizzling you with their wonderful excrement for literally your whole life. Now if you think about the idea of chickens breed for laying, a problem comes to mind. That pesky Y chromosome. What are you going to do with a chicken that is meant for laying, yet is a male? Simple enough. Kill it. This problem leads to the destruction of 250 MILLION male layers EVERY YEAR in the United States. Now how do we accomplish this chicken genocide? By sucking them through a series of pipes which eventually dump them onto an electrified plate. These are the lucky ones. The less fortunate are sent through devices known as the macerators. Ever seen Fargo (if not here, check it out: Fargo)? Ya, that's what macerators are. Ok then. Now onto the broilers, aka meat chickens. These chickens live in luxury compared to their egg laying brethren. With a whole square foot of space, they are living the life of great fortune, until you consider the fact that they are genetically engineered to be larger, effectively making this increase in space negligible. Due to the same gene manipulation that makes them so large, they also mature extremely quickly. They grow twice as fast in half the time as their organic predecessors. The life expectancy of a chicken is approximately 15-20 years (which means at least 15 more years of chickens in your back yard Mrs. Collier ;) ), but broilers are killed just six weeks after they are hatched. Because of their short lives and big size, it is obvious that they are growing rather quickly. In fact, their daily growth rate has increased 400% since the 1930's.

Alright. If you are still reading this, I applaud you, and I will not keep you for much longer. These are the two things I came to talk about, and I feel like a covered the general pigs and chickens that you eat pretty well. However, I am excluding some of the most disturbing and shameful aspects of factory farms because I don't wish to make some exceptionally cruel behavior by a minority of workers in the business appear to be common practice. If you wish to feel ashamed to be a human, I would strongly suggest reading this book (like I am doing now). If you just wish to become more aware of the problems and corruptions of the "meat making" industry, read it too. However, remember that I've warned you that some of it is pretty gruesome. And if you are STILL reading this post (Mrs. Collier, I know you are the only one left), I would like you to note that I told you that my final post was going to be a knockout.

-Zachary Ifkovits