The Organic Standards: What They Mean for Animals

We strongly support sustainable farming but continue our work for the animals because so few people realize that sustainable practices are profoundly intertwined with industrial systems. The majority of organic regulations are designed to protect humans, and do little to protect animals. This means that organic milk and butter, for example, may be produced without antibiotics, hormones, and pesticides, but organic cows' lives are still intensely manipulated. Organic standards still allow:

o Animal branding with red-hot irons.

o Cows being artificially inseminated once a year.

o Cows being tied up in stalls and milked by machines.

o Calves, both male and female, being denied their mothers' milk. Males are sold to the veal industry, where they are consigned to crates for the duration of their painful, short lives. These calves cannot turn around and often live in their own excrement. Their lives are so miserable that 20% of these babies die before they reach the usual slaughtering age of 16 weeks.

o Female calves being kept in isolation-in structures similar to large doghouses-for the first 4 to 5 months of their lives. They have no contact with their mothers or other calves, nor are they free to roam.

o Exhausted from constant pregnancies and milking, dairy cows are sent to slaughter as early as the age of 4, or whenever milk production dwindles. (Cows can live up to the age of 25.) Legally, animals too weak to walk (called "downers") can be dragged by chains or pushed by forklifts, and their limbs may be broken in the process.

o Calves', lambs' and pigs' testicles can be pulled out or cut out without anesthesia or painkillers.

o There is no uniform industry standard governing housing for free-range hens. Chickens may still be caged, and layer chicks' beaks may be cut off with hot irons. Because they are considered useless, male layer chicks are ground alive or stuffed into garbage bags to suffocate. In the U.S., more than 200 million chicks are destroyed this way each year.

o Although chickens can live naturally for 15 years or more, all are killed while young. "Layers" are killed for meat when egg production drops off after a year or two. "Broilers" are killed when they are just a few weeks old. Chickens are subject to abusive handling on the way to, and during, slaughter.

o Turkeys don't fare much better. Their beaks and toes may still be cut, the same as with corporate production.

o Even "sustainably-produced" animals are crammed into trucks, deprived of water, and may travel for long distances in intense heat and bitter cold. Nearly all are slaughtered in commercial slaughterhouses.

The environmental and social justice implications of animal food production—even sustainable production—are enormous. Massive amounts of land are wasted: an acre that yields 165 pounds of beef could be used to produce, for example, many thousands of pounds of potatoes. Huge amounts of other resources (water and petroleum in particular) are also wasted. In fact, there is not nearly enough land in the world to produce meat at the rate it's consumed. Sustainably-produced meat is inherently affordable only by the well-to-do of the world; this is a problem that would dramatically worsen with the advent of true economic justice; i.e., if consumers paid what it actually costs to produce meat. #