Entry#11 Final Essay Draft

Yunhan Li

Dr. C. Jason Smith

English 101

May 20, 2014

The Dark Side of Factory Farming

     The new way of farming, factory farming was first appeared in 1926 at Delmarva Peninsula. It was by accident, with the delivery of 450 chickens to the small farm, instead of overage, the farm owner decide to keep the chickens indoor through the cold winter. The first factory farm was not made by design. But the rest was specially made in a way where they are able to reduce the work force needed at the farm and compact everything into a tight space, while at the same the profit will be multiplied. During the 1950's, because of the raise of large factory farms, many traditional family farms has been forced to closure. Factory Farming packs hundreds and thousands of farm animals in one confined space, often a very tight space, those animals often are fed with growth hormones to accelerate the speed of their growth and also to grow more meat. And workers at the farm tend to abuse the animals once when the animals move to slow, or the animals that is just borne. The waste produced by the factory farm each year is also toxicity, it will pollute the community and break the ecosystem around that area.

     Bird Animals was the first animals been farmed in factory farming, chickens are used in factory farms to get mass productions of eggs. Bird animals are also get abused in factory farm the most. Chickens get nervous when they are placed in a confined and tight space, thus there are often cock-fights, many times result in chicken are badly injured. But injured chicken are not good for the business. To prevent any cock fight from happening, the workers in the farm removed all of the chicken's beakers while they are still chicks. With the opening of new fast food restaurants, the demand of chicken has increased dramatically. The traditional method of raising chickens is no longer satisfy of the demand of chickens. Therefore, a new way of "raising" chickens is invented. By inject growth hormones into the chickens, this new way can make the chickens grow insanely fast, and also make the chicken grow more meat. Chickens raised by this method often suffered from weight from their body that exceed the limit of their bone structure's strength, and it will lead to bone fracture. One way of identify chickens raised by injection of hormones is the often have lots of missing feathers. Weak chicks at factory farms often are throw into metal dividers and later drown to death. But chickens are not the only bird animals that get abused in the factory farm. Goose is another animal which get farmed and abused in factory farm. In order to meet the requirement of the consumers of fatty liver, factory workers have force the geese to eat food by put the metal pipe in their throats. With this behavior of producing fatty liver, after knowing how it was produced, many restaurants now have removed foie gras from their menu.

     Bird animals were not the only animal that get abused in the farm. Pigs got abused the most. All
unhealthy baby pigs had their head slammed onto the floor by factory workers, the pigs felt so much pain, all they can do and able to do is moan on the floor and move their legs around and wait to die. When they are thrown to the big plastic bucket, some of the pigs are still breathing painfully. Because no one would purchase pig tails, the workers have cut off all the tails of baby pigs. Pregnant pigs are abused the most, since they are too heavy to walk on their own, workers at the factory farm often use kicking to move the pregnant pig and punch them in their stomachs. Worst of all, in order to avoid more pig getting pregnant, all the male baby pigs have their scrotum removed from them.

Cattle are locked up in individual but tight cages, and that often make them become sick, and somehow they hardly eat the food given to them by the workers, most likely the cows had their head pushed in their food bucket to eat the foods provided to them. In the winter times when cows are loaded onto trucks and been taken to meat factories to get slaughtered. They often suffer from freezing winds while been transferred to the meat factories. After they arrived, they often are too cold to walk, thus the workers will try to kick the cows to make them move. While they been slaughtered, they were shot by captive bolt pistols, which when used properly will induce unconsciousness. But more than often, the workers don’t know how to use the pistol properly, thus the cow have full consciousness when they getting dissected by the chainsaw, a very painful and brutal scene for the slaughtered cows.

Beyond the animal abuse in factory farms, animal’s wastes are also a big problem that society concerned about. Factory farm is a big donor to air pollution. Animal waste can produce odors, odor are produced by the breakdown of organic carbon and nitrogen compound found in manure. While in the process of decomposition, the noxious levels of gases are emitted, result in workers and nearby residents are at the risk of developing numbers of acute and chronic illnesses. As in the picture shown below, the farm animals make around 900 million tons of waste annually. One cow is able to produce around 14.6 tons of waste per year.

       Animal wastes are great way to fertilize the farm soil . Fertilizer could make the vegetables grow bigger, stronger and tastier as they absorb the energy from the animal manures. But animals in factory farms are often lived in a compacted place, it would be hard to clear the animal waste. And mostly it would be expensive to transport the fertilizer to farms to fertilize the soil. More then often, workers just store the animal waste near the factor farm. It did not only pollute the air, but it can also pollute the water. Animal manures can pollute both the surface water and the ground water, because there is excessive amount of manure in an limited land, and manure can pollute by water storage tanks if the pipe of the tank is leaking. Animal wastes in excessive amounts can have a dangerous level of phosphorus and nitrogen, within the excessive amount of nitrogen in water, it will take the oxygen out of water and result in destroying the aquatic life. Drinking contaminated water can lead to many health concerns, such as nausea, vomiting, cramps and diarrhea. Contaminated waters are often polluted by chemical wastes produced in factories, but factory farms have also paid their fair shares to to pollute the water.

                                                           

     According to the sources from https://www.dosomething.org, factory farms are account for 37 percent of methane emissions, methane have 20 times the potential of CO2. That means CO2 produced by cars and factories is no longer the biggest threat to global warming. Recently in China, with so much chemical wastes produced by the factories, there is a strange climate in the cities of China. It is like a haze, where there is dust, smoke and other things that form something looked like a giant fog surround the city, the fog is harmful too, breathing in the haze will cause some illness eventually. With factories and factory farms producing