Mikaella McInerney
Chickens, cows, pigs, and other animals raised for food are collectively called farm animals. But it's a misleading term that belies their reality—they are farmed animals.
I grew up in a city, which means I spent my childhood fantasizing about that exotic, marvelous place—the farm. My picture books featured chickens searching for seeds in grassy barnyards, goats roaming free on alpine slopes, pigs wallowing in mud, cows with bright eyes and cheerful bells around their necks.
The storylines emphasized animals and humans working together to produce food for grateful communities. Happy farmers collected eggs, which happy chickens were glad to give them. The books drew a discreet curtain across anything bad that might happen to those animals.
These books were fiction in more ways than one. The fantasy they depicted was, tragically, no more real than my fairytale collections. The eggs I ate for breakfast did not come from these harmonious farms, but from chickens crammed into claustrophobic, traumatic environments—forced to produce as many eggs as possible. The milk my small bones needed to ‘grow strong’ did not come from cows living in a cheerful community, but from brutal dairy farms that separate mother cows from their children, over and over again. And of course, none of the happy endings featured the cruel reality of a slaughterhouse, where factory farms cut animals’ lives brutally short in terrifying and traumatic final moments.
If those books told the real story about factory farms—the places where we get most of our meat, eggs, milk, and other ‘animal products’ from—they would not be kept in the children’s section. The ongoing abuse of animals is the subject of nightmares, not fantasy, and unlike my favorite childhood tales, it is all too real. But those idyllic stories persist, and not just for children. The mental fantasy of that wholesome barnyard “is a place of safety, harmony and comfort, into which we subconsciously burrow at times of unease.” That makes me curious: Did animals once live in that happy fantasy, before the nightmare of factory farming intervened? Is there a way to return to it? And is a barnyard really the natural habit of the animals we associate with it?
Did farmed animals enjoy better treatment before the industrial revolution?
Much of the abuse inflicted on animals by factory farms is a result of the Industrial Revolution, which equipped humanity with the resources and tools to scale up our farming efforts into today’s maximalist, profit-driven industry. During the Industrial Revolution, people developed and adopted new technologies at an extremely rapid speed, creating machinery to help plant, harvest, and process crops, as well as slaughtering animals at an industrial pace. The 20th century saw even more technological advancement, which allowed us to treat animals even more poorly—antibiotic abuse, or accelerated slaughterhouse and captivity processes.
If you take away this new technology, what does farming look like?
Certainly, in many ways life was better for farmed animals pre-Industrial Revolution. Most importantly, many of the particularly cruel practices in factory farming are about maximizing profit, essentially treating animals as objects from whom we want to harvest as much meat as possible. Pre-Industrial Revolution, most people in agriculture practiced subsistence farming, which meant growing crops and farming animals only for their own survival. Farms were run by families or small communities, and they did not create the conveyor belt of cruelty at scale that modern factory farming practices.
Also, because of the nature of subsistence farming, people lived in close contact with the animals they kept. Cows, especially, were all-important, providing milk and helping grow crops in a pre-tractor world. This meant that there was less abstract cruelty; part of the reason factory farms can treat animals with such abusive horror is that most of the time, as consumers, we don’t have to look at it. It’s one thing to eat a hamburger, and another to look at an abused, miserable cow. Those pre-industrial farmers who lived in close contact with the animals they would eventually eat built relationships despite that fact, based on trust and familiarity. They were less likely to abuse them as a result. Early American agricultural literature advises readers to “rub and cherish” their animals, and emphasizes the importance of “patience, mildness, and even caresses.”
Similarly, because humans lacked scientific knowledge and treatment for viruses, they knew that animals and humans would suffer together. In medieval villages, “chickens ran free between the houses, pecked seeds and worms from the garbage heap, and built nests in the barn. If an ambitious peasant tried to lock 1,000 chickens inside a crowded coop, a deadly bird-flu epidemic would probably have resulted, wiping out all the chickens, as well as many villagers.” This equality of circumstance between animals and humans, for better or worse, means that if animals are doing poorly, their humans probably are, too. An excerpt from the medieval poem Pierce the Ploughman's Crede shows this in action, as the narrator reports: “I saw a simple man hanging on a plow./ His ragged coat was made of coarse material and his hood was full of holes… he was spattered with mud as he followed the plow… He sank in the fen almost to his ankles as he drove four feeble oxen that were so pitiful their ribs could be counted. His wife walked with him… Her short coat was torn, and she was wrapped in a winding sheet for protection from the weather. Blood flowed on the ice from her bare feet.” Poor oxen… but poor man and wife, too.
Studies show that there were close links between medieval farmers and the animals they kept. Walter of Henley, an English agricultural writer in the 13th century, recommended that cowherds and oxherds should be familiar with the animals they looked after, sleeping with them every night. Another 13th century text sweetly advises that an oxherd should “pleaseth them [oxen] with whistling and with song, to make them bear the yoke with the better will for liking of melody of the voice.” There is even a story about a peasant in 400 C.E. Gaul whose two oxen were stolen. The peasant loved his oxen above his own children; he “went home in the dark to lay inconsolably in the filth of the oxen’s empty stall, caressing their hoofprints,” until a local saint took pity on him and returned the oxen, upon which “the oxen and peasant embraced one another: they gently nuzzled their kindly lord and fawningly caressed his breast in turn. The horns of his beloved cattle did him no injury; he drew their heads as though they were soft to his proffered breast.”
But by no means was the pre-industrial world a haven for animals. Cruelty toward animals was common; in the medieval period, for example, whole towns would gather to torture cats. In medieval Europe and early American settlements, too, Christian scripture—which declared that animals were created to serve humans and did not have souls—dominated, “providing a means of exploiting animals while remaining impassive.” And, of course, animals were still being kept to provide food and labor for humans: chickens did not get to choose to raise their babies, and many animals lost their lives in the thousands in the service of humanity’s next meal. Similarly, while living close to the animals they slaughtered may have led some people to treat them better during the span of their lives, it could also create desensitization around killing animals.
From the 11th century onward, urban populations began to grow… and they demanded meat. While pre-industrial Europe could not offer anything like the widespread availability of meat today, sources still reveal an increase in eating cows, who would now only be alive for two or three years, offering less time to form bonds with their farmer. These elements allowed the seeds of what would bloom in factory farming: an ability to think of animals as less than us, their suffering unimportant, their lives negligible.
Pre-industrial attitudes, post-industrial expertise
The storybook appeal of a farm still holds strong. And despite the obvious cruelties that animals suffered in pre-industrial settings, there are elements that might feel appealing: the shared living space and intimacy between humans and animals, along with more modern attitudes toward animal welfare. Could organic farming provide a solution that offers a more egalitarian road forward for both humans and animals?
Organic farming is one answer to this need. Organic farming centers on using natural, sustainable, and environmentally-friendly agricultural practices,—everything from “soil health and animal welfare to weather resistance and biodiversity, with an overarching eye toward ensuring the long-term well-being of ecosystems, agricultural land and people who eat agricultural products.”
But organic farming is still built on the labor and the lives of animals. Animals are still dying young to provide us with meat. Animals are still suffering unnatural reproductive cycles to provide us with milk and eggs. Organic farming may offer a more humane version of farmed animals… but were animals born to be farmed at all?
Searching for the natural habitat of ‘farm animals’
The very name ‘farm animals’ is misleading. In fact, cows, chickens, goats, sheep, and the many animals who have been caught in the machinery of factory farms are farmed animals. We are working on their bodies, not with their bodies.
Would you like to know which animals evolved naturally living on farms? There are none. No animal ever first appeared in a barnyard; no animal’s evolutionary purpose is to provide meat for humans.
Modern cows are descended from a species called the auroch, a wild bovine species that roamed across Europe and Asia. They were domesticated 10,000 years ago. Julius Caesar described aurochs as almost as large as elephants, and they lived in swamps, steppes, forests, and mountains, in communal herds of up to 30 animals, with a lifespan of 25 to 30 years.
Domestic sheep are descended from the wild Asian mouflon in southwest Asia. The chicken evolved from the Southeast Asian Red Junglefowl. The bezoar ibex, a wild goat who is the ancestor of our modern goats, still roams the Caucasus and Zagros Mountains and is known for their sociable behavior. Eurasian wild boars, the evolutionary ancestors of domestic pigs, are known for their intelligence and formidable strength. All of these animals—along with every other animal we farm, from horses to fish—crossed the paths of humans, who saw the potential to keep them for food or labor. Over the course of thousands of years, humans domesticated and bred them to the familiar faces we see in our picture books today.
But we did not—could not—breed away the emotional traits and evolutionary impulses that make these animals their own curious, loving, intelligent individuals. Sheep can recognize individual faces; pigs retain their ancestors’ wily intelligence, but with an added dash of friendliness; chickens dream. Ancient wild cows were social animals who learned necessary survival skills through an intense need to bond with their mothers, and evolution hasn’t removed this natural impulse—but baby calves are still ripped traumatically away from their mothers.
Humans have given animals a miserable reward for these losses: they have succeeded in growing their population beyond the wildest evolutionary dreams. There are an estimated 1.5 billion cows in the world and one billion pigs; farmed animals have not had to worry about the same existential threats like endangerment and extinction as their wild cousins. But again, to spread to these massive, environmentally-destructive numbers was never an evolutionary, social, or emotional goal for farmed animals. The overpopulation of farmed animals is terrible for our environment, and it has a huge impact beyond the environmental, taking up cereal crops that we could use to feed people and spreading disease. The goal of evolution is to survive, not to conquer.
The heartwarming picture books and the very words ‘farm animals’ tell a lie: that this is where animals belong. But we took the animals from their natural habitats. We broke up their social groups. Certainly, we helped them survive and multiply—but at a terrible cost.
