What Is Animal Agriculture & How Does It Affect Global Warming?

But understanding where our food comes from is important, especially if you want to learn how to vote with your dollar and choose products that cause the least amount of harm. Of course, there’s a reason we don’t often know where our food comes from. The real picture of animal agriculture—which accounts for a large proportion of the total food consumed in developed economies, like the US—is not a very pretty one.

Does Agriculture Include Animals?

Agriculture is the practice of growing food. Agriculture includes plants, such as spinach and corn, and animals, including sheep, cows, pigs, and even insects like bees! Humans have been practicing agriculture for thousands of years, after we evolved from societies that were more nomadic, in which food was largely gathered from uncultivated ecosystems.

Today, agriculture is used to produce most of the food on the planet—and much of this includes animals.

What Is Animal Agriculture?

Vast, dimly lit indoor spaces without windows. An overpowering stench of feces. The sound of endless gnawing on bars. Slaughterhouses filled with screams of dying animals.

This is animal agriculture in the US, today. In fact, it’s how 99% of all animals are raised for food in the US.

Animal agriculture involves holding animals hostage simply so humans can eat their meat or their secretions, such as milk and eggs. Animals are dominated and controlled for their entire lives on these factory farms, also known as Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations (CAFOs). They are prevented from exploring the world and living in accord with their natural instincts and behaviors. Instead, they are subjected to various tortures that force their bodies to produce the maximum amount of product (and profit) for companies, be it eggs, gallons of milk, or the muscles and flesh from their own bodies.

Animal agriculture has always been cruel, but with the rise of factory farming, the practice of raising, killing, and eating animals is more fraught than ever.

What Is Animal Agriculture Called?

If you are confused by the various terms you’ve heard to describe animal agriculture, don’t worry! Animal agriculture goes by many names, but there are three common ones worth knowing:

1. Intensive animal agriculture
2. Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations (CAFOs)
3. Factory farms

These terms all refer to the same thing: the practice of confining huge numbers of animals together in extremely small spaces, all to exploit their bodies for human consumption. Sadly, each of these words is synonymous with animal suffering, since it’s impossible for any farmed animal to be happy on a factory farm.

Virtually all animal agriculture in the US is considered intensive animal agriculture. That means that all those products in the grocery store that appear so harmless, and may even be marketed and labeled as “healthy,” are really the result of the terrible, abusive treatment animals face on factory farms.

Intensive animal agriculture is not restricted to any one species or type of animal. Instead, every animal raised for food often falls victim to this cruel, confined method of agriculture.

Factory Farmed Chickens

Imagine being a bird who could never fly, whose feathers are worn away from stress. This condition is sadly very common for chickens raised for food in the US and all around the world. Chickens are subjected to factory farming for two reasons: eggs and meat.

Egg-laying chickens are known as layer hens. These poor birds endure some of the most heart-wrenching cruelty of any farmed animal. The majority of layer hens in the US are confined to battery cages, where they suffer in spaces that are so small they cannot even fully stretch out their wings.

Chickens raised for meat are known as broilers. These birds are confined to broiler barns, which are often filthy, dimly-lit sheds, crammed with thousands of birds—and sometimes even hundreds of thousands. Broiler chickens are only kept alive for a matter of weeks before they are slaughtered. This means that all those chicken wings, strips of chicken breast, chicken nuggets, and rotisserie chickens come from young birds, who’d naturally still be with their mothers if not raised for meat in a factory farm.

Factory Farmed Cows

Forget the image of the happy cow you may have seen in advertisements or on milk cartons. Cows who produce milk are known as dairy cows, and life for them is certainly not a grass-filled day on the pasture. Many factory-farmed dairy cows spend their whole lives confined indoors, where they are forcibly impregnated so that they lactate—meaning they produce milk—after they’ve given birth. But if you think that the mother’s milk goes to her calf, think again. Newborn calves are ripped away from their mothers forever shortly after birth, often resulting in extreme anguish for the mother, who may call out and cry for days afterward, and of course for the baby calf who needs his mother.

If reading this makes you want to ditch dairy, you’re not alone. There are so many plant-based milks, butters, cheeses, and non-dairy ice creams to keep you satiated without this suffering.

You can get started here with some simple tips, and recipes.

Factory Farmed Pigs

Those strips of bacon and slices of ham you might enjoy for breakfast come from pigs, whose meat is also called pork. Pig factory farms, sometimes called hog farms, employ some of the harshest treatment of animals imaginable—and just like with mother cows, pregnant pigs are subjected to some of the worst psychological tortures.

Sows, as pregnant pigs are called, are forced into gestation crates, similar to the battery cages layer hens endure. These crates are not much bigger than the pig’s own body, preventing them from even turning around. Forced to face the same direction for months on end, staring at the same view in front of them, prevented from walking, socializing, or doing anything other than eating or drinking, these conditions can be so unbearable that sows can be driven slowly insane.

Why Is Animal Agriculture Bad?

By now, it may be clear as to why animal agriculture can be bad—very bad—especially intensive animal agriculture. But there’s even more reasons why our industrial food system needs a makeover—from the ground up.

Intense Confinement

The name ‘concentrated animal feeding operation’ pretty much says it all. Factory farms hold as many animals as possible within the smallest possible space in order to maximize profits and reduce costs. Animals are easier to manipulate when they’re kept in one place. After all, a caged hen can’t run away to lay her eggs in a hidden, safe place like she wants to, nor can a pregnant pig give birth in peace and lead her new family away from human captors to safety. Plus, space comes at a premium, since it costs money to provide things like heating and cooling for factory farms. Keeping animals in as small a space as possible minimizes costs and controls production.

Antibiotics

On factory farms, the conditions are so filthy with animal excrement and stressful due to the intensely unnatural confinement and poor living conditions, the immune systems of animals would become overwhelmed. Animals would likely succumb to disease within a matter of weeks or even days. To combat this, factory farms liberally dole out antibiotics as a preventative measure, often beginning shortly after an animal’s birth.

Antibiotics can also be given in order to force the bodies of animals to grow faster, like in the case of broiler chickens. The problem with overusing antibiotics, as factory farms habitually do, is that these drugs wind up in human bodies, either through people consuming animal products or drinking water contaminated by farmed animal waste. When people are continually exposed to antibiotics, these drugs become less useful in fighting infections in humans. This leads to the risk of antibiotic resistance—one of the biggest health threats currently facing the world.

In fact, according to the CDC, antibiotic resistance is one of the greatest global public health challenges of our time. The industry’s overuse of non-therapeutic antibiotics undermines the efficacy of crucial drugs in human medicine. The World Health Organization (WHO) estimates that 700,000 people die worldwide each year due to drug resistant diseases—enough people to fill 13 Yankee Stadiums each year.

Animal Abuse

A piglet is born into the world. Her mother is locked into a cage that prevents her from bending towards her newborns to sniff them, nurture them, or lick them clean. The piglet nurses from between bars. This is as close to her mother as she will ever be.

Things only get worse for the piglet from here.

She is picked up without care, and her tail gets cut without any painkillers. She screams with the shock of it. Her ear is then pierced with a tag that will identify her by a serial number—never a name. If she’s lucky enough not to be locked into a gestation crate like her mother, she’ll be thrown into a barren enclosure along with her brothers and sisters, forced to stand on concrete slats that hurt her feet and may make walking painful. There is no hay. She will never know the outdoors. She will be sent for slaughter at a very young age, where hopefully she will be rendered unconscious before being killed and dismembered.

Billions of pigs endure lives like this. And this cruelty extends to so many other species—including chickens and fish—who also face mutilations without any anesthesia, barren enclosures or cages, and the suppression of all desires. This is abuse, and it is torturous.

How Does Animal Agriculture Affect Global Warming?

Global warming, also known as the global climate crisis, is seriously exacerbated by animal agriculture. Here’s how:

Greenhouse Gas Emissions

Greenhouse gas emissions are known to trap the sun’s heat within the atmosphere, leading to planetary warming, which can disrupt normal weather patterns. Cars and planes are commonly-known culprits of greenhouse gas emissions, but did you know that animal agriculture generates huge volumes as well? It turns out that animal agriculture contributes an estimated 14.5% of all global greenhouse gas emissions—more than cars, planes, and the transportation sector at large. And, that’s a conservative estimate.

Deforestation

In places like the Amazon rainforest, animal agriculture is among the leading causes of deforestation. Forests are burned and cleared in order to make way for cattle pasture land. Forests are also replaced with mono-crops such as corn, soy, and wheat, that are turned into feed for the animals trapped on factory farms. Due to these two land-usage issues, animal agriculture is causing massive destruction of the world’s remaining forests.

Water Pollution

Factory farms pollute water through the enormous volumes of phosphorus- and nitrogen- rich waste produced by animals. In some cases, such as on hog farms, excrement is collected in vast, open-air waste lagoons that can seep into groundwater or spill into adjacent rivers or lakes. This pollution can cause algae blooms, which can result in massive die-offs of fish and other marine life.

Is Animal Agriculture Bad For Human Health?

The health impacts of factory farming are often hidden from people who live in cities. since these industrial facilities are located in rural, and often less affluent areas. For those unlucky enough to live near factory farms, life can be difficult or even unbearable. Hog farms are notorious for causing an awful stench that seeps into nearby homes, causing a range of debilitating conditions including headaches and mental health deterioration.

Of course, in the end, factory farming impacts us all. Its runoffs seep into our water and soil, its emissions cause climate change, and its products lead to human health risks, such as heart disease.

Animal Agriculture Facts and Statistics

1. To create more space for animal agriculture, roughly seven football fields of land are cleared or burned every single minute.
2. The amount of waste produced by animal agriculture is around 13 times more than that generated by the entire US population.
3. Cows around the world collectively produce around 150 billion gallons of methane every day, which directly contributes to climate change.