Why Should Factory Farming Be Banned?

Register to read the introduction… The welfare of animals has been completely disregarded in this so-called “business”. Every year, hundreds of thousands of animals that are raised for food experience terrible living conditions because the majority of meat, dairy, and poultry production in the U.S. take place in industrialized or factory farms (Food & Water Watch 4). Cows and calves and chickens and pigs and numerous other animals have been forced to live in unsanitary and cruel conditions. For example, these animals are kept in small cages, sheds or on disease-infested feedlots where they often have little to no space to turn around or even lie down comfortably. Many are deprives of exercise so that all their bodies' energy goes toward producing flesh, eggs, or milk for human consumption. Also, they are susceptible to be given drugs, antibiotics, or growth hormones which increase their growth rate or production rate in which case causes an over capacity of body mass leading them to be so weighed down that they cannot move, or they die on the amount of substances their bodies have been abused with. If they survive this horrible process and have grown large enough for the consumer’s demands and expectations, they are then raised for food and are crowded onto trucks to be transported over many miles through all weather extremes, typically without food or water, to the slaughterhouse. Those who manage to …show more content…
These factories are causing serious amounts of atmospherically and ecologically based pollution. For example, factory farms concentrate an unnatural number of animals in one place, which creates an unmanageable amount of waste. For example, a single hog excretes up to 17.5 pounds of manure and urine each day. If you put 1,000 hogs together, that’s six million pounds of waste each year. On a factory farm containing 35,000 hogs, over four million pounds of waste are produced each week and over 200 million pounds each year. Whereas on a sustainable farm animal waste can be a tool, in factory-farm amounts it becomes a major pollutant (Loehr 26). Manure carries with it other substances that are used on industrial farms. These include antibiotics and artificial growth hormones, which contaminate waterways and affect the plants and animals that live in them (National Risk Management Research Library 2). Salt, a common component of manure from industrial dairies can damage soil quality and contributes to erosion (Schneider 2). Factory farms also emit harmful gases such as methane and hydrogen sulfide, which contributes to global warming. This air pollution is a result from the overuse of machinery, the mismanagement of manure, and the irresponsible feeding practices that characterize industrial farming. Chemical fertilizers and pesticides have turned agriculture into a leading