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by Gary Varner
A professor at a major state university has received federal funding for a program on ethics which life sciences professors from around the country will attend. The professor is a vegetarian on moral grounds. In making arrangements for the five-day program, he specifies that all of the (optional) lunches will be lacto-ovo vegetarian. Several of the participants are outraged. In fact, one sends a long, angry email message to professors across the country and to highly placed personnel in federal funding organizations, including the National Science Foundation, which funded the program.
Note: The following cases, which each involve relatively specific management
issues in farm animalwelfare in the United States, are all based on information
in Bernard Rollin's Farm Animal Welfare: Social, Bioethical, and Research
Issues (Iowa State University Press, 1995).
Case #1: On p. 11 Rollin quotes the following moral dilenirna from the
Canadian Veterinary Journal: "You (as a veterinarian) are called
to a 500-sow farrow-to-finish swine operation to examine a problem with vaginal
discharges in sows. There are three full-time employees and one manager overseeing
approximately 5000 animals. As you examine several sows in the crated gestation
unit, you notice one with a hind leg at an unusual angle and inquire about her
status. You are told 'She broke her leg yesterday and she's due to farrow next
week. We'll let her farrow in here and then we'll shoot her and foster off the
pigs'."
Then Rollin writes: "Before commenting on this case, I spoke to the veterinarian
who had experienced this incident, a swine practitioner. He explained that such
operations run on tiny profit margins and minimal labor. Thus, even when he
offered to splint the leg at cost, he was told that the operation could not
afford the manpower entailed by separating this sow and caring for her..."
Question: Should immediate euthanization of such animals be required by law?
Why or why not?
Case #2: Polling, or de-horning, is an issue on both range and feedlot
beef operations and on dairy farms. Cattle with horns are more difficult to
handle safely, they require more room in transportation and confinement systems,
and the presence of horns can exacerbate problems associated with dominance
hierarchies.
Dehorning is done several ways: by treatment, at a very early age, with a caustic
chemical, which causes some irritation; by burning the horn bud with a hot iron,
also when the calf is quite young, which causes pain because the interior of
the horn is innervated; and using a " dehoming spoon," which levers
the horn out of the skull, a procedure which becomes increasingly painful and
bloody as the calf ages. Cattle with the poll (hornfree) gene are born homless,
so it would be possible to breed cattle to have no horns. However, a dairy and
reproduction specialist estimates that introducing the poll gene while preserving
other superior traits in Holsteins (a common dairy breed) would raise the price
of milk 4% or 5%.
Questions: Is solving the animal welfare problems associated with de-homing
worth a 4%-5% rise in the cost of milk? What if a number of other animal welfare
problems could each be solved at similar cost, with the aggregate rise in cost
associated with virtually eliminating problems involved in management, housing,
transportation, and slaughter all being solved for a 50% rise in the cost of
meat and animal byproducts? Would an ideally humane animal agriculture be worth
that? If so, should the changes be mandated and how should the transition be
phased in?
Case #3: Kosher slaughter rules prohibit stunning the animals before
slitting their throats. Studies show that in animals "stunned" with
the captive bolt pistols used in almost all contemporary slaughter plants, loss
of visual and somatosensory evoked response is immediate and irreversible, and
loss of spontaneous cortical activity occurs within 10 seconds.
In kosher slaughtered animals, by contrast, loss of evoked responses takes between
20 and 126 seconds with a mean of 77 for somatosensory responses and a mean
of 55 for visual responses. Loss of spontaneous cortical activity in kosher
slaughtered animals takes between 19 and 113 seconds with a mean of 75 seconds
after cutting.
Questions: Some countries (e.g. New Zealand) have banned slaughter without stunning.
Should the United States? Would such a ban interfere with the free exercise
of religion? If so, is this a sufficient reason not to ban it?
Case #4: Tight confinement of sows is recognized as the major welfare
issue in swine management. Feral swine develop complex social relations and
spend as much as half their time rooting. However, state of the art swine operations
today confine sows continuously, in gestation crates small enough that the animals
cannot turn around, and then, after parturition, in farrowing crates of approximately
the same size. The latter are claimed to be justified in terms of reducing piglet
mortality, since sows commonly crush small piglets, and the former allow large
numbers of animals to be housed in climate-controlled conditions.
Note: Information for the following cases, which each involve general animal
husbandry practices in theUnited States, was drawn from Bernard Rollin's Farm
Animal Welfare: Social, Bioethical, and Research Issues (Iowa State University
Press, 1995) and from Gary E. Varner, "What's Wrong With Animal By-products?"
Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics 7 (1994), pp. 7-17.
Case #l: Approximately 30 million cattle are slaughtered yearly in the
United States. When it comes to.the slaughter procedure itself, the large-scale,
state-of-the-art facilities capable of slaughtering as many as 400 or 600 animals
per hour are, perhaps contrary to popular belief, the most humane. The races
approaching the stunning chute can be designed to look just like those through
which cattle have traveled previously for routine veterinary care, experienced
handlers can move animals along without prodding, cattle do not "smell
blood in the chutes," and "stunning" is a misnomer for what happens
in the kill chute, since a properly placed shot with a "stun gun"
obliterates the animal's brain, making it impossible to regain consciousness.
Case #2: On average, milking cows spend between three and four years
in production, after which they are slaughtered for relatively low-grade beef.
Dairy farmers maintain high productivity by breeding cows to calve about yearly.
The calves are removed from their mothers immediately or within days, with most
of the female calves becoming replacement milk cows and almost all of the male
calves being raised for veal. Statistics indicate that about one seventh of
the cattle slaughtered yearly are from dairy herds.
Case #3: Today, over 90% of laying hens in the United States live caged
in intensive egg production facilities, which have increased the average yield
per hen from 70 in 1933 to 275 today. In these facilities, birds cannot forage,
flap their wings, dust-bathe, nest, establish dominance hierarchies, or even
preen themselves in natural ways; culling of injured birds is economically inefficient,
and the entire population of a battery operation is slaughtered and replaced
periodically (every 12-15 months on state of the art operations). Poultry are
still exempt from federal humane slaughter legislation and by comparison to
state of the art cattle slaughter facilities, poultry slaughter is still a relatively
indelicate affair; fully conscious birds are from their legs on conveyor belts
before being stunned and beheaded.
Note: Cases #1 and #3 are entirely fictional, but realistic. Case #2 below
is based on an actual situation in Yellowstone in the early 1960's, although
the contemporary management practice is not as described.
Case #1: Peter Kirk is a midwestem farmer who hunts deer every fall just
like his father and grandfather before him. Each year, Kirk spends several weekends
afield, tracking deer and eventually killing one. He cures and freezes the venison,
which is treated as a delicacy in his family.
Case #2: Rick Pearson is a National Park Service ranger in Yellowstone.
One of his jobs is to serve as a marksman during yearly culling of the northern
elk herd, which has repeatedly exceeded the carrying capacity of its range.
After extensive attempts at trapping and relocation, the Park Service killed
about 4000 animals (upwards of one third of the population at the time) during
the winter of 1961-62. The hunt was staged in the winter, when the animals are
concentrated at lower elevations, it used Park Service marksmen, and the carcasses
were processed on the scene, the meat being given to area Indian tribes.
The initial herd reduction caused a public outcry because the methods seemed
so unsporting or cruel, but an influential government report endorsed the technique
and now each winter, several hundred elk are shot under similar circumstances,
and this has stabilized the population within the carrying capacity of its range.
Case #3: Howard Stancer is a successful Hollywood actor who has traveled the world for years trophy hunting. He has heads of 19 big game animals on his wall and needs only the head of a rare cat to have completed the prestigious "big 20" of trophy hunting. So this summer he is going to a game ranch in central Texas and paying $3500 to be guaranteed a cat of the species in question. These cats, along with a dozen other exotic species, are bred on the ranch in one acre pens for the purpose of such "canned" hunts.