I saw evil today, when I watched for the first time the now infamous video of cow abuse by workers at Hallmark Meat Packing Company. If you haven’t seen this, go with a strong stomach to the Humane Society of the US’s website at http://www.hsus.org/. The undercover video documents the reprehensible treatment of so-called “downer” cows – cows that for some reason are no longer able to walk on their own. Despite USDA guidelines that prohibit these disabled creatures from entering the food supply, daily quotas are clearly of greater importance to the meat packers, and they resort to whatever means necessary to get cows into the slaughterhouse: whether by dragging their struggling and howling bodies with chains or by pushing them with fork lifts and front loaders.

The Humane society says that this video is a “five-alarm call for action by the USDA to ensure basic levels of humane treatment for farm animals.” CNN quoted Senator Dick Durbin, D-Illinois as saying “The treatment of animals in this video is appalling, but more than that, it raises significant concerns about the safety of the food being served to our nation’s children. The apparent slaughter of sick and weak animals not only appears to violate USDA regulations, but could be a danger to our nation’s food supply” (emphasis mine). Translation? The problem here is not a moral one, just a regulatory and a quality control one. Forget the mistreatment; ignore the system of livestock management that leads to “downers” and other sick or injured animals in the first place. Instead let’s focus on drafting new and more costly regulations like the NAIS (national animal identification system) that act as a bandage and not a cure, and threaten the financial viability of small farmers who don’t struggle with these food safety issues to begin with.

It is telling that this controversy comes so long after the supposed reform of practices in the poultry industry. Remember the last five-alarm call for action over the so-called “Animal Care Certified” cage-keeping standards for industrial poultry and egg production? The industry responded with a flurry of new product labeling initiatives that many thought would allow consumers to use their purchasing power to solve the mistreatment problem. But while these new, cage-free systems generally offer hens a somewhat higher level of animal welfare than do the old “battery cage” systems, most cage-free hens still live crammed together in filthy sheds, in flocks that can consist of many thousands, never going outside. They stay in the same quarters for years, of course until their egg production starts to wane and they’re sent to slaughter. They also still have their beaks burned off, a painful mutilation performed to reduce the impact of stress-induced aggression. The labels “free-range” and “organic” have also proven inefficient, thanks to a USDA ruling that allows farmers to keep chickens “may be temporarily confined” for “reasons of health, safety, the animal’s stage of production or to protect soil or water quality.” This loophole is big enough to drive a truck through, and thus the majority of these birds still never see the light of day.

If Senator Durbin is indeed worried about the healthfulness of school lunches, there are a great deal more issues to worry about than contamination from sick and mistreated cows. To have healthy beef and poultry you have to raise healthy cows and chickens. And to raise healthy cows and chickens you need to feed them healthy food and you need to treat them with care. But our industrial production methods are designed to only give care to the bottom line, to the efficiency of production not the humanity of it.

Consider the stench and sickness in this video, or as recounted by Pollan in Omnivore’s Dilemma, that greet feedlot cattle at every step of their journey from birth to a McDonald’s wrapper. Then compare that cow’s experience to the life history of a Dell laptop, as it travels through the assembly-line and to the consumer. Then look at that computer, or your cell phone, or your automobile, or your television, and then compare it to the cow trying to walk on two broken legs in the video. Care in handling, constant quality assurance, clean environments, all of these are expected and valued in the production of consumer goods but not in the production of our food.

If we can’t bring ourselves to treat our food, the most essential requirement of life, with at least the level of respect that we treat our toys, how can we expect people to change in other ways: to stop raping the environment, or for that matter to stop raping each other? Look around the world and you will see continuum of this evil, not just in alleyways or war zones but also in homes, schools, shopping markets and churches. This video depicts a hate crime; it is spousal abuse; it is bullying at school. Many people believe that this kind of behavior is inevitable – that it is our nature, and there will always be evil in the world because we are a flawed species. I say that our species would hardly have lasted 2.5 billion years if we were so tragically flawed. After all, evolution makes no exceptions and shows no favoritism.

No, blaming nature is a cop-out. Instead, blame belongs with the contemporary circumstances of our civilization that lead people to patterns of selfish behavior, not merely by rewarding selfish behavior but by requiring it. It is tragic, really, because by forsaking the well being of others we are slowly forsaking the well being of our entire species. We need one another, and I don’t just mean other people but also other cows and trees and polar bears. Daniel Quinn once said, “The world is not in danger from itself. The world is not, in any sense, in danger at all. It is we who are in danger.” On a metaphysical level I am certain that this selfish evil we enact is the reason our species is in such dire circumstances. Call it karma, evolution, or even the vengeance of a vengeful god, but whatever you call it, you can be sure the rest of the world won’t miss us when we’re gone.

This entry was posted on Monday, February 11th, 2008 at 12:34 pm by Philip Loring and is filed under Food, Spirituality. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.