What is it about factory farming that particularly harbours disease?
“Animals bred for yield not disease resistance create extra strain especially when they live in unhygienic conditions and have no chance to express normal behaviours. “
and yet the UK government claim
“We have the highest animal welfare standards in the world” 🇬🇧 UK Government.
What do zoonotic Disease Experts say?
“the intensification of animal production itself increases the size and density of animal populations in production facilities, which can facilitate disease spread between animals and between animals and workers”
“This coupled with low genetic diversity on confined animal feeding operations creates conditions where both zoonotic and non-zoonotic diseases can spread more easily.”
🔗 Source: A Public Health Ethics Case for Mitigating Zoonotic Disease Risk in Food Production
Increasing yield, comes at the expense of welfare 🐄
Milk production has increased from 24 litres a cow a day on average in 2013 to the current herd average of 51 litres a cow. The couple say the improvement has been a direct result of switching to robotic milking coupled with high attention to the detail of the management and nutrition of the herd. When the robots were first installed, the cows continued to graze in the summer months, but two years ago the decision was made to house all-year-round (AYR) as they were seeing a marked drop-off in both yield and fertility at turnout
🔗 Source: How UK herd achieved world top 10 ranking for milk yield
“Milk production per cow has more than doubled in the past 40 years”
🔗 Source: Farm Animals Dairy Cows
50 litres = 90 pints. By contrast a cow farmed for beef produces about 10 pints per day
🔗 Source: Beef Cow Nutrition Before and After Calving
How meat chickens have been bred to increase yield, at the expense of their welfare. 🐓
1957
1978
2005
🔗 Source: Growth, efficiency, and yield of commercial broilers from 1957, 1978, and 2005
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/25260522/
The reality of ‘higher welfare’ factory farming in the UK
“We have the highest animal welfare standards in the world” 🇬🇧 UK Government
We tracked 15 exposés - all showing unhygienic conditions. Some were “higher welfare” farms
- 1 is now closed.
- 1 was allowed to expand.
- Some are £million businesses.
- Some are still operating.
- Status of others - Unknown.
RSPCA Assured egg farm, Sussex - still operating.
Pig Farm, Yorkshire - allowed to expand
Red Tractor pig farm, Cheshire - Still operating
Turkey Farm, Essex - Status Unkown
Despite prohibition painful, stressful mutilation is routine 🐖
“Despite routine mutilations being prohibited, the mutilation of farmed animals in the UK is very much a routine practice. Approximately 84% of slaughter pigs in the UK have docked tails, and tail biting is still extremely common. For reference, Finland, Norway, Sweden and Switzerland dock less than 5%.”
“Since 1994, European legislation has stipulated that this procedure cannot be done routinely and only if there is evidence of tail biting and if other measures have first been taken to prevent tail biting but have failed. Suggested measures to be taken include improving husbandry and environmental conditions, increasing the space allowance, modifying the management system or providing additional enrichment material”
🔗 Source: Phasing out pig tail docking in the EU - present state, challenges and possibilities
https://porcinehealthmanagement.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s40813-018-0103-8
“The tail is severed using clippers, a hot cauterising iron or a scalpel within 7 days of birth, without anaesthesia or analgesia”.
🔗 Source: UK pig facts and figures – 2019
But why are tails docked or teeth clipped? 🐖
“Tail biting is associated with pain, stress and frustration and negatively affects food safety. It has the potential for evoking short- as well as long-term physiological and behavioural changes indicative of pain. It can be triggered by a wide range of factors, often in combination, including: overstocking, feed and drinking water deficiencies or competition for these resources, incorrect or fluctuating temperature levels, inadequate ventilation, noise, draught, high levels of dust and noxious gases (i.e. ammonia), lack of opportunities to escape dominant animals, genetic factors, lack of environmental enrichment such as rooting material, and also general health problems. Tail docking is used to reduce the risk of tail biting. Nevertheless, tail docking is in itself a welfare problem, as it causes pain to the pigs, can lead to the formation of spinal abscesses, impairs the physical integrity of the animals, and facilitates suboptimal production methods from a welfare point-of-view and it does not completely remove the risk for tail biting”
🔗 Source: Phasing out pig tail docking in the EU - present state, challenges and possibilities
https://porcinehealthmanagement.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s40813-018-0103-8
Modern sows now regularly achieve litter sizes of 20+ piglets (average litter size in 2018 in the UK was 12.6 piglets for outdoor herds and 14.6 indoor), where wild swine would farrow just 3-5 piglets per litter.
Teeth reduction has become a necessary mutilation to prevent piglets damaging teats or developing facial necrosis (facial tissues become damaged and infected then rot away) as a result of fighting over teats.
🔗 Source: UK pig facts and figures – 2019
A piglet being tooth clipped – like beak trimming and tail docking this is a common occurrence on factory farms and is generally done without anaesthetic or pain relief
“The percentage of piglets having their teeth reduced by clipping or grinding is much more difficult to quantify given that this is something which cannot be assessed externally, and therefore recording is minimal. “
Former livestock vet
“Most of the 9 million piglets born in the UK each year experience some form of mutilation. Mutilations involve handling stress, acute pain (short term, arising from tissue damage during the procedure) and the possibility of chronic pain (longer term, arising from nerve damage). On a number of occasions in the past two decades, FAWC [the Government’s advisory body] has advised Government about its concerns about mutilations.”.
🔗 Source: OPINION ON MUTILATIONS AND ENVIRONMENTAL ENRICHMENT IN PIGLETS AND GROWING PIGS
Why this matters - stressed animals can't fight diseases well. 🐓
“When a pathogen challenges a healthy immune system, the body responds with inflammation to fight it. But when an animal is stressed, the hormone cortisol is released. This causes the normal inflammatory response to change into a more limited activation of white blood cells. And this allows new pathogens to survive and multiply”
🔗 Source: Live animals are stressed in wet markets, and stressed animals are more likely to carry diseases
Chicks being beak trimmed
“The current pandemic also illustrates that, despite our experiences with emerging zoonotic diseases (EZDs) such as Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS), Ebola, and highly pathogenic H5N1 avian influenza, and subsequently improved national and global surveillance systems, humanity is not able to prevent new EZDs originating from animals. It is therefore crucial to re-evaluate potential sources of emerging pathogens at the animal-human interface and to examine whether we can minimize the risk for future pandemics at this point”.
🔗 Source: Emerging Zoonotic Diseases: Should We Rethink the Animal–Human Interface?
In July 2020, “research was published indicating that a new form of swine flu is circulating in farmed pigs. The researchers warn that the virus has "all the essential hallmarks of a possible pandemic”.
🔗Source: Meat and pandemics: the surprising link
In 5 months from Nov 2020 to March 2021 APHA* reported 26 outbreaks of Avian flu in
the UK, most were of high pathogenicity and most started on poultry farms.
🔗 Source: Avian influenza (bird flu): cases and disease control zones in England
Pathogens if they could express a preference would prefer factory farms
“Normally, when a new pathogen emerges in a host population, and assuming it is transmitted directly from host to host, it gradually moderates its virulence*1 in order to keep those hosts alive for long enough to spread it far and wide. But in a factory farm – where, say, chickens, are densely packed together and host-to-host transmission is easy – the evolutionary pressure on the pathogen to moderate its virulence is relieved. And because those chickens tend to be near genetic clones of each other – due to decades of selection for desirable traits such as lean meat – a pathogen introduced into that chicken population can race through it without any genetic “firebreak” to slow its progress. Experiments and field observations have both demonstrated that such serial passage through a host population can ratchet up the pathogen’s virulence”.
🔗 Source: We Need to Rethink Our Food System to Prevent the Next Pandemic April 2020 Time Magazine
Making the public health case against Factory Farming
“The threat of a pandemic like COVID-19 has been recognized for a long time by epidemiologists*and public health scholars, who have long called for closer attention to the link between intensive animal agriculture and zoonoses. In the wake of the SARS outbreak in 2002–2004, there were warnings of an impending “catastrophic storm of microbial threats,” (Smolinski et al. 2003) including the risk presented by “an influenza or severe respiratory syndrome epidemic.” (Benatar 2007)
Less than a decade later the United Nations Environment Program warned of the potential public health impact of zoonoses caused by the “Livestock Revolution paradigm” of food production, especially in developing countries (UNEP 2016).
While attempts have been made to suggest policy options for addressing emerging zoonoses (Coker et al. 2011), the status quo has prevailed, with individuals continuing to eat meat in growing quantities and governments failing to minimize the threat of zoonotic pandemics.
While there are urgent short-term public health measures that can mitigate the devastating effects of the COVID-19 pandemic, we must not lose sight of how to prevent the devastation of a future pandemic. When considering such measures, a natural thought is to focus on what public health agencies and local governments should do; they should be more prepared by having more tests and aggressive contact tracing, more personal protective equipment, more ventilators, or perhaps they should be prepared to institute strict social distancing measures sooner rather than later.
Yet while all of these approaches are worthwhile, they are not truly preventative in that they do not address a root cause: intensive animal agriculture.”
🔗 Source: A Public Health Ethics Case for Mitigating Zoonotic Disease Risk in Food Production.
Rethinking our food system - a worse pandemic is a WHEN not an IF
“Two relatively new and dangerous forms of avian flu, H5N1 and H7N9, are thought to have first spilled into humans in China, whose poultry industry underwent rapid industrialization from the 1980s on.”
Which continues
”Though it may not feel like it now, we have been let off lightly with SARS-CoV-2 [COVID 19]. Experts suggest that its case fatality rate – the proportion of those who fall sick who go on to die – will likely settle around 1 to 2 per cent, once all the data are in. It is undoubtedly a dangerous pathogen but H7N9 kills close to a third of the humans it infects, and H5N1 an even higher proportion. Neither of those have caused a pandemic – yet – but the prospect of their global spread doesn’t bear thinking about, and meanwhile new zoonoses continue to emerge. We can prevent or at least slow them, but to do so we need to start talking about our lifestyle choices and the industries that satisfy them. The time to do that is now.”
Powered by