Home My MySpace Photobook A Survey of Tanna Home of a Creative Writer Poet Book Hardcore College Essays Discovering Paris The Old Revamped Email Me!	The Free Range Diet 2006 When a child opens a book about a farm, hens run with their yellow chicks around a dusty barnyard, a farmer sits on a stool milking a cow, and pigs wallow in the mud. My kindergarten field trip was to a farm, and indeed, the pigs wallowed, the cows grazed in a field, and chickens had free range of the entire property. Amazingly, the animals people see on a traditional farm, and learn about as children, are only a small percentage of the animals that make it to the dinner table of the average American household. At super markets, there are very few free range options, often only one free range alternative per five or six other factory farmed products, or more often no free range choices at all (most free range products are poultry in the form of meat and eggs). Farm animals do feel pain and are conscious of their experiences, which should be factored into utilitarian calculus, giving them moral consideration. If animals must be farmed, they need a free range, not confinement in a factory farm. Farm animals are those typically used in agriculture that are marketed to the public as meat products. These animals include, but are not limited to, cattle (for dairy, beef, and veal), pigs, chicken (for eggs and poultry), turkeys, goats, and farmed fish. I shall stick to these animals, namely cattle and poultry, because they are most familiar in American farming and culture. It is also important to define which animals deserve moral consideration. If one thinks that oysters on an oyster farm do not intrinsically deserve any moral consideration in utilitarian calculus, then there is no point in having a free range oyster. A good basis for moral consideration is sentience, which in utilitarian philosophy is essential to figuring if something should have weight in utilitarian calculus. Utilitarians explain that the quality of being sentient is the ability to experience pleasures and pains, but there is also an aspect of conscious awareness. “Consciousness” is a vaguer term than sentience, implying a range of conscious awareness from, say, being aware of having a foot, to being conscious that one is a an actor participating on a world stage, perhaps even ascribing a higher meaning to their life with goals, interests, and religion. I would like to define this nearly indefinable term as an internal process that takes information from the world and relates it to the individual in a way in which the being forms a sense of itself and its connection to the environment. In other words, the animal has an awareness of itself and feels the pain and distress of an undesirable situation, such as a factory farm, and the pleasure of living in a situation that suits its biological needs, on the free range. Different degrees of consciousness denote different levels of weights in utilitarian calculus, a higher form of consciousness deserving greater weight, and with forms of consideration based on the consciousness level of the individual. Most farm animals are conscious beings and therefore have sentience, which is at least the ability for conscious thought and feeling pain and pleasure. The ability to feel pain is an emotion-physical process that requires the knee-jerk physical reaction of feeling pain and the emotional processing center which relates that pain in a meaningful way to the individual. A bacterial organism has the knee-jerk response of moving away from a hazardous chemical, but does not have the emotional processing center in the brain, in this case entirely lacking the brain, to find meaning in pain. It is thought that in vertebrates, who tend to live long lives as compared to invertebrates, the pain response, both emotional and physical, teaches the animal to avoid a pain-causing behavior thus increasing chances of survival. The emotional aspect of pain, most important in dealing with sentience and consciousness, originates in a highly developed cerebral hemispheres that is possessed by mammals and many bird species, including fowl. The enlarged hemispheres, and mainly the outer layer known as the neocortex, are thought to be responsible for conscious awareness and the ability to emotionally process pain. All farmed animals discussed in this paper possess the emotional processing center of the brain that is closely allied with consciousness, thus feeling pain in a way that is meaningful to them. So by taking the animals out of an environment for which their biology is designed and placing them in an psychologically and physically devastating environment such as a factory farm, one causes suffering that must be weighed up against the benefits of causing that suffering. Free range farming allows animals to live lives that coincide with their biology, whereas factory farming does not. The benefits of the nutritional value humans gain from meat do not outweigh the suffering caused by factory farming conditions. For example, factory farms are a major component in contributing to disease. Since animals on these farms live in such close and unsanitary conditions, factory farm workers administer mass doses of antibiotics, often penicillin, to animal feed in hopes of preventing the widespread problem of bacterial disease. This profit maximizing measure to minimize loss of product and promote healthier livestock unintentionally creates antibiotic resistant bacteria. The factory farms are a factory for new strains of antibiotic resistant bacteria, resistant to penicillin, as well as other types of antibiotics, that prevent doctors from curing patients and increase the necessity for creating new pharmaceuticals. Factory farms are also the leading cause of food-borne illness in the United States (HFA). The squalid conditions of the farms lead to fecal contamination of meat products, and according to the Humane Farming Association (HFA), 80 percent of ground beef sampled, and nearly the same percentage in poultry, was contaminated with pathogens transmitted through fecal matter. Statistics from the General Accounting Office (GAO) conclude that 81 million Americans a year become sick from food-borne illness, and as many as 9,000 a year die, costing nearly $22 billion dollars a year. These statistics do not include illness and death from drug resistant infections. Not only are factory farms a wide spread center for disease, but they are also a major component in air and water pollution. Manure is stored in large lagoons for later use as fertilizer, but as it waits, it releases large quantities of methane, a greenhouse gas that is a major component in global warming, into the atmosphere as well as seeping into underground water supplies, threatening the quality of U.S. drinking water. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has declared 60 percent of U.S. rivers and streams as “impaired” due to agricultural runoff. The purpose of the factory farm is profit, and as such, workers run the care of animals as a business, not a place of animal welfare. To maximize the amount of product, animals are placed in rows, and sometimes stacks, of crates, so compact that the animals cannot move around or stretch. According to Farm Sanctuary, an organization committed to educating the public about the horrors of factory farming, egg laying hens live in battery cages, four hens to a cage, which usually measure no more than 16” across. In order to insure the highest quality of white meat, veal calves spend most of their short lives in a two foot wide veal crate in which they cannot move or turn around. These calves show more signs of stress than their free range counterparts, tossing their heads more frequently, kicking, scratching, and showing nervous chewing behavior. They require five times the medication of an uncrated calf, and their meat is more likely to bear drug residue that is harmful to humans. Chickens confined in their small battery cages are debeaked, a procedure in which one-half to two-thirds of a hen’s beak is amputated to prevent hens from damaging their cage mates. Veterinarians hired by British Parliament in 1965 assert that, “Between the horn and bone [of the beak] is a thin layer of highly sensitive soft tissue, resembling the quick of the human nail. The hot knife blade used in debeaking cuts through this complex horn, bone and sensitive tissue causing severe pain.” (UPC). A study in 1990 by Michael Gentle, and published in Applied Animal Behavior Science, Vol. 27, found that chickens experience prolonged pain after the debeaking process. Gentle found that, “The avian beak is a complex sensory organ which not only serves to grasp and manipulate food particles prior to ingestion, but is also used to manipulate non-food articles in nesting behavior and exploration, drinking, preening, and as a weapon in defensive and aggressive encounters… Beak amputation results in extensive neuromas [tumors] being formed in the healed stump of the beak which give rise to [pain].” There is no other time in the life of a farmed animal more stressful than the time of slaughter. Slaughter of factory farmed animals takes place in two stages: stunning and then exsanguination, killing by draining the blood. During the stunning process, the animal is stunned by electricity or a captive bolt to render it unconscious, and at no point should it regain consciousness. The criterion for determining if an animal has been properly stunned is if it no longer tries to right itself from a vertical dangling position, though many animals are so weak by the time of slaughter they could not do this anyway. The next task, exsanguination, involves slitting an animal’s throat while it is hanging upside down and to let it bleed out. If the animal is not properly stunned, exsanguination can be a very painful process. So let us bring out the scales and weigh the benefits of eating factory farmed meat to the detriments of factoring farming. In the first pan there is the pleasure derived from a person who enjoys eating a good steak as well as the nutritional content of eating a balanced diet of lean protein (notably, what most Americans fail to do, eating copious amounts of high fat red meat). In the other pan, the suffering of the animals on the factory farms, as well as the health and environmental threats that the factory farms produce. By my calculus, the pan with the consequences far outweighs the benefits, but with free range, it should be the opposite. There is, however, a problem with free range products on the market. In the United States, meat can be marked as “free range” if the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) certifies that an animal had access to the outdoors. There is no other criterion, and it does not take into account the area of the outdoor space, the amount of animals per square foot, or the environmental quality of the particular outdoor lot. One USDA staffer told the United Poultry Concerns (UPC), a nonprofit organization that addresses the treatment of domestic fowl in scientific research, educational facilities, entertainment, human companion situations, and largely agriculture, that, "Places I've visited may have just a gravel yard with no alfalfa or other vegetation. The birds can exercise, but cannot range—that is, sustain themselves." (UPC). Furthermore, free range hens are often debeaked like factory farm hens. Food labeled at the market as free range may not really encompass the true idea of free range. The idea of true free range, or “spirit” free range, is the type of free range that holds more weight philosophically. This spirit free range embraces the values of traditional farming where chickens do have range of the property, pigs roll in the mud, and cows graze. Walnut Acres, a free range facility run by Tim and Kari O’Brien in Grants Pass, Oregon, defines the essence of free range, though on a small scale. They raise animals mostly for farmer’s markets and their own subsistence, feeding their animals daily, never using hormones or antibiotics, except in veterinary situations, and allowing their animals permanent pasture time. Karyn Arnold, daughter of Kari O’Brien, explains that, “Chickens roost in the barn but have an open hole in the wall from which they can come and go, wandering the entire property, especially when the dogs are inside.” She explains that her family respects the animals on the farm, but always keep in mind that the animals will some day be food. When it comes time to slaughter, the animals are taking out back and are given a quick gunshot to the head. They are not frightened and do not feel pain. The animals of Walnut Acres live the lives that they are biologically designed to do, and experience a great amount of pleasure in free range existence before a painless death. While farmed animals possess a level of consciousness where they can have a pain experience that they relate to themselves, they do not have a conscious experience in which they have desires for the future, so their future cannot be weighed in utilitarian pans. Ruth Cigman believes that “the ability or inability of animals to imagine a future for themselves makes all the difference insofar as the morality of killing them is concerned.” (Taylor, 98). Most animal species lack the capacity for these futuristic desires Cigman calls “categorical” desires, or wishes to remain alive to do something with one’s life, like be a great painter or a teacher. Animals lack these desires because they do not strive and achieve goals, but simply survive, eating grass and wallowing in the mud. Their desires are based on day-to-day events, like the desire to eat, the desires to procreate, and the desire to not feel pain. Because they lack these desires, it is not wrong to kill them for food, so long as they have had their day-to-day desires met while still living. How long to let them live is uncertain, but certainly long enough to allow them to procreate since that is one of their desires. Free range calculus is as follows: in the first pan, we have the happy lives of animals and a healthy dietary consumption of meat. In the other pan, there is the actual painless death of the animal. The weight of pain and suffering from the factory farm is not added to this pan, nor is the great a detriment to human health and the environment. For the free range, the pans tip in favor of the farm. On the free range farm, calves stay with their mothers, chickens keep their beaks, and cows graze in the fields all day long, uninhibited by cramped stalls. They live the lives that they are biologically designed to do, and do not experience a painful or stressful death. The consequence pan of the factory farm far outweighs the benefits, weighing down a heavy verdict of their abolishment, while the weight of the free range pans tips in favor of the farm. The supermarkets need to sell real free range products, not just brands that give the animals minimal access to the outdoors. The pans have been weighed, and the only option: freedom.

The Free Range Diet

2006

When a child opens a book about a farm, hens run with their yellow chicks around a dusty barnyard, a farmer sits on a stool milking a cow, and pigs wallow in the mud. My kindergarten field trip was to a farm, and indeed, the pigs wallowed, the cows grazed in a field, and chickens had free range of the entire property. Amazingly, the animals people see on a traditional farm, and learn about as children, are only a small percentage of the animals that make it to the dinner table of the average American household. At super markets, there are very few free range options, often only one free range alternative per five or six other factory farmed products, or more often no free range choices at all (most free range products are poultry in the form of meat and eggs). Farm animals do feel pain and are conscious of their experiences, which should be factored into utilitarian calculus, giving them moral consideration. If animals must be farmed, they need a free range, not confinement in a factory farm.
Farm animals are those typically used in agriculture that are marketed to the public as meat products. These animals include, but are not limited to, cattle (for dairy, beef, and veal), pigs, chicken (for eggs and poultry), turkeys, goats, and farmed fish. I shall stick to these animals, namely cattle and poultry, because they are most familiar in American farming and culture.

It is also important to define which animals deserve moral consideration. If one thinks that oysters on an oyster farm do not intrinsically deserve any moral consideration in utilitarian calculus, then there is no point in having a free range oyster. A good basis for moral consideration is sentience, which in utilitarian philosophy is essential to figuring if something should have weight in utilitarian calculus. Utilitarians explain that the quality of being sentient is the ability to experience pleasures and pains, but there is also an aspect of conscious awareness.

“Consciousness” is a vaguer term than sentience, implying a range of conscious awareness from, say, being aware of having a foot, to being conscious that one is a an actor participating on a world stage, perhaps even ascribing a higher meaning to their life with goals, interests, and religion. I would like to define this nearly indefinable term as an internal process that takes information from the world and relates it to the individual in a way in which the being forms a sense of itself and its connection to the environment. In other words, the animal has an awareness of itself and feels the pain and distress of an undesirable situation, such as a factory farm, and the pleasure of living in a situation that suits its biological needs, on the free range. Different degrees of consciousness denote different levels of weights in utilitarian calculus, a higher form of consciousness deserving greater weight, and with forms of consideration based on the consciousness level of the individual.

Most farm animals are conscious beings and therefore have sentience, which is at least the ability for conscious thought and feeling pain and pleasure. The ability to feel pain is an emotion-physical process that requires the knee-jerk physical reaction of feeling pain and the emotional processing center which relates that pain in a meaningful way to the individual. A bacterial organism has the knee-jerk response of moving away from a hazardous chemical, but does not have the emotional processing center in the brain, in this case entirely lacking the brain, to find meaning in pain. It is thought that in vertebrates, who tend to live long lives as compared to invertebrates, the pain response, both emotional and physical, teaches the animal to avoid a pain-causing behavior thus increasing chances of survival. The emotional aspect of pain, most important in dealing with sentience and consciousness, originates in a highly developed cerebral hemispheres that is possessed by mammals and many bird species, including fowl. The enlarged hemispheres, and mainly the outer layer known as the neocortex, are thought to be responsible for conscious awareness and the ability to emotionally process pain.

All farmed animals discussed in this paper possess the emotional processing center of the brain that is closely allied with consciousness, thus feeling pain in a way that is meaningful to them. So by taking the animals out of an environment for which their biology is designed and placing them in an psychologically and physically devastating environment such as a factory farm, one causes suffering that must be weighed up against the benefits of causing that suffering. Free range farming allows animals to live lives that coincide with their biology, whereas factory farming does not.

The benefits of the nutritional value humans gain from meat do not outweigh the suffering caused by factory farming conditions. For example, factory farms are a major component in contributing to disease. Since animals on these farms live in such close and unsanitary conditions, factory farm workers administer mass doses of antibiotics, often penicillin, to animal feed in hopes of preventing the widespread problem of bacterial disease. This profit maximizing measure to minimize loss of product and promote healthier livestock unintentionally creates antibiotic resistant bacteria. The factory farms are a factory for new strains of antibiotic resistant bacteria, resistant to penicillin, as well as other types of antibiotics, that prevent doctors from curing patients and increase the necessity for creating new pharmaceuticals.

Factory farms are also the leading cause of food-borne illness in the United States (HFA). The squalid conditions of the farms lead to fecal contamination of meat products, and according to the Humane Farming Association (HFA), 80 percent of ground beef sampled, and nearly the same percentage in poultry, was contaminated with pathogens transmitted through fecal matter. Statistics from the General Accounting Office (GAO) conclude that 81 million Americans a year become sick from food-borne illness, and as many as 9,000 a year die, costing nearly $22 billion dollars a year. These statistics do not include illness and death from drug resistant infections.

Not only are factory farms a wide spread center for disease, but they are also a major component in air and water pollution. Manure is stored in large lagoons for later use as fertilizer, but as it waits, it releases large quantities of methane, a greenhouse gas that is a major component in global warming, into the atmosphere as well as seeping into underground water supplies, threatening the quality of U.S. drinking water. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has declared 60 percent of U.S. rivers and streams as “impaired” due to agricultural runoff.

The purpose of the factory farm is profit, and as such, workers run the care of animals as a business, not a place of animal welfare. To maximize the amount of product, animals are placed in rows, and sometimes stacks, of crates, so compact that the animals cannot move around or stretch. According to Farm Sanctuary, an organization committed to educating the public about the horrors of factory farming, egg laying hens live in battery cages, four hens to a cage, which usually measure no more than 16” across. In order to insure the highest quality of white meat, veal calves spend most of their short lives in a two foot wide veal crate in which they cannot move or turn around. These calves show more signs of stress than their free range counterparts, tossing their heads more frequently, kicking, scratching, and showing nervous chewing behavior. They require five times the medication of an uncrated calf, and their meat is more likely to bear drug residue that is harmful to humans.

Chickens confined in their small battery cages are debeaked, a procedure in which one-half to two-thirds of a hen’s beak is amputated to prevent hens from damaging their cage mates. Veterinarians hired by British Parliament in 1965 assert that, “Between the horn and bone [of the beak] is a thin layer of highly sensitive soft tissue, resembling the quick of the human nail. The hot knife blade used in debeaking cuts through this complex horn, bone and sensitive tissue causing severe pain.” (UPC). A study in 1990 by Michael Gentle, and published in Applied Animal Behavior Science, Vol. 27, found that chickens experience prolonged pain after the debeaking process. Gentle found that, “The avian beak is a complex sensory organ which not only serves to grasp and manipulate food particles prior to ingestion, but is also used to manipulate non-food articles in nesting behavior and exploration, drinking, preening, and as a weapon in defensive and aggressive encounters… Beak amputation results in extensive neuromas [tumors] being formed in the healed stump of the beak which give rise to [pain].”

There is no other time in the life of a farmed animal more stressful than the time of slaughter. Slaughter of factory farmed animals takes place in two stages: stunning and then exsanguination, killing by draining the blood. During the stunning process, the animal is stunned by electricity or a captive bolt to render it unconscious, and at no point should it regain consciousness. The criterion for determining if an animal has been properly stunned is if it no longer tries to right itself from a vertical dangling position, though many animals are so weak by the time of slaughter they could not do this anyway. The next task, exsanguination, involves slitting an animal’s throat while it is hanging upside down and to let it bleed out. If the animal is not properly stunned, exsanguination can be a very painful process.

So let us bring out the scales and weigh the benefits of eating factory farmed meat to the detriments of factoring farming. In the first pan there is the pleasure derived from a person who enjoys eating a good steak as well as the nutritional content of eating a balanced diet of lean protein (notably, what most Americans fail to do, eating copious amounts of high fat red meat). In the other pan, the suffering of the animals on the factory farms, as well as the health and environmental threats that the factory farms produce. By my calculus, the pan with the consequences far outweighs the benefits, but with free range, it should be the opposite.

There is, however, a problem with free range products on the market. In the United States, meat can be marked as “free range” if the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) certifies that an animal had access to the outdoors. There is no other criterion, and it does not take into account the area of the outdoor space, the amount of animals per square foot, or the environmental quality of the particular outdoor lot. One USDA staffer told the United Poultry Concerns (UPC), a nonprofit organization that addresses the treatment of domestic fowl in scientific research, educational facilities, entertainment, human companion situations, and largely agriculture, that, "Places I've visited may have just a gravel yard with no alfalfa or other vegetation. The birds can exercise, but cannot range—that is, sustain themselves." (UPC). Furthermore, free range hens are often debeaked like factory farm hens. Food labeled at the market as free range may not really encompass the true idea of free range.

The idea of true free range, or “spirit” free range, is the type of free range that holds more weight philosophically. This spirit free range embraces the values of traditional farming where chickens do have range of the property, pigs roll in the mud, and cows graze. Walnut Acres, a free range facility run by Tim and Kari O’Brien in Grants Pass, Oregon, defines the essence of free range, though on a small scale. They raise animals mostly for farmer’s markets and their own subsistence, feeding their animals daily, never using hormones or antibiotics, except in veterinary situations, and allowing their animals permanent pasture time. Karyn Arnold, daughter of Kari O’Brien, explains that, “Chickens roost in the barn but have an open hole in the wall from which they can come and go, wandering the entire property, especially when the dogs are inside.” She explains that her family respects the animals on the farm, but always keep in mind that the animals will some day be food. When it comes time to slaughter, the animals are taking out back and are given a quick gunshot to the head. They are not frightened and do not feel pain. The animals of Walnut Acres live the lives that they are biologically designed to do, and experience a great amount of pleasure in free range existence before a painless death.

While farmed animals possess a level of consciousness where they can have a pain experience that they relate to themselves, they do not have a conscious experience in which they have desires for the future, so their future cannot be weighed in utilitarian pans. Ruth Cigman believes that “the ability or inability of animals to imagine a future for themselves makes all the difference insofar as the morality of killing them is concerned.” (Taylor, 98). Most animal species lack the capacity for these futuristic desires Cigman calls “categorical” desires, or wishes to remain alive to do something with one’s life, like be a great painter or a teacher. Animals lack these desires because they do not strive and achieve goals, but simply survive, eating grass and wallowing in the mud.

Their desires are based on day-to-day events, like the desire to eat, the desires to procreate, and the desire to not feel pain. Because they lack these desires, it is not wrong to kill them for food, so long as they have had their day-to-day desires met while still living. How long to let them live is uncertain, but certainly long enough to allow them to procreate since that is one of their desires.

Free range calculus is as follows: in the first pan, we have the happy lives of animals and a healthy dietary consumption of meat. In the other pan, there is the actual painless death of the animal.

The weight of pain and suffering from the factory farm is not added to this pan, nor is the great a detriment to human health and the environment. For the free range, the pans tip in favor of the farm.

On the free range farm, calves stay with their mothers, chickens keep their beaks, and cows graze in the fields all day long, uninhibited by cramped stalls. They live the lives that they are biologically designed to do, and do not experience a painful or stressful death. The consequence pan of the factory farm far outweighs the benefits, weighing down a heavy verdict of their abolishment, while the weight of the free range pans tips in favor of the farm. The supermarkets need to sell real free range products, not just brands that give the animals minimal access to the outdoors. The pans have been weighed, and the only option: freedom.