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Why Animals Matter: The Case for Animal Protection
The authors’ strongest point is made in their expose of the meat industry. The reader gets much more than a moral lecture on why to be a vegetarian. The book documents how factory farm methods not only slaughter animals but also force them to live lives of daily torture as they are confined in dark, small, crowded pens, in their own urine and feces. To combat the resulting ill health, they are pumped with antibiotics and growth hormones that make them more susceptible to painful and debilitating deformations.
Birds’ beaks are cropped; even eating causes them pain. Cow’s tails are cropped; they cannot even swish away biting flies. The authors write, “They (animals) often have no fresh air, do not feel the earth under their feet, and do not enjoy sunlight. Hundreds of millions of them are virtually immobilized. They can hardly perform any of their most important natural behaviors or experience even the most basic pleasures.”
When it’s time for slaughter, meat animals experience horrific fear and excruciating pain. For example, they are shipped long distances with little care given to food, water or rest and hung on hooks or scalded in boiling water often while conscious. Spent hens are crammed into dumpsters while still alive.
Human costs
Meanwhile, the underpaid workers in these operations are often immigrants who dare not speak up. The authors write, “…they slip and fall in the blood, feces, and other fluids that cover the floors; they are kicked and cut by animals struggling for their lives; they are cut by knives that disembowel and disassemble animals; they endure painful and chronic repetitive motion injuries. The industry’s ever-increasing line-speeds increase the risk of being cut, bruised, burned, stabbed, blinded, dismembered, disfigured and worse.”
In addition, slaughterhouse workers breathe air contaminated with airborne feces, E coli, campylobacter and listeria. Workers on factory farms endure similar subhuman working conditions and routinely develop sinusitis, chronic bronchitis and organic dust toxic syndrome. The book notes, “Factory farm workers are also exposed to infectious diseases such as anthrax, psittacosis, brucellosis, leptospirosis, swine influenza A, and avian influenza A, as well as several other diseases and conditions…”
Workers are not the only human health victims of the meat industry. Widespread use of antibiotics has created several antibiotic resistant bacteria, such as MRSA, which are in the beginning stages of causing pandemics among the general public in the US and around the world.
Environmental consequences
According to Williams and DeMello, “… animal agribusiness and its use of ever-increasing numbers of animals is among the most serious causes of environmental degradation.” U.S. factory farms produce more than 500 million tons of manure a year, waste that is hundreds of times stronger than untreated domestic sewage. Overgrazing is the leading cause of desertification, and subsequent loss of native plant species, in the U.S.
Factory farms growing animals account for more than 50% of all water use. In addition, manure spills contaminate our water supplies. “Each year, pollution from animal agriculture creates a ‘dead zone’ in the Gulf of Mexico, killing much of the marine life in an area the size of Massachusetts,” the authors report.
Data supporting humane change
In subsequent chapters, Why Animals Matter presents well documented, full treatments of other ways our capitalistic society subjugates and abuses animals. The authors show that hunting has very little to do with conservation; the fur industry subjects farm raised and trapped fur animals to ongoing pain and cruelty; animal laboratory research is more about big bucks than science; and zoos, rodeos, circuses and the TV/motion picture industry all victimize animals, though to differing extents. Nor is the pet industry exempt. Its powerful lobbyists make sure legislation favors profit over fair treatment of the very animals Americans hold most dear.
Each section of the book concludes with action steps readers can take to work against the vast market forces that see all animals as units to be sold for profit. For example, the chapter on the meat industry–while encouraging readers to adopt a meat-free diet–also offers the options of reducing meat and dairy consumption or limiting purchase to products from free range animals that have been raised and slaughtered humanely.
Excerpts about animal friends rescued from the factory farm, puppy mill, greyhound track and laboratory also inspire readers to make the world a better place for animals–and hence, a better world for humans, too.
Erin E. Williams and Margo DeMello, Why Animals Matter: The Case for Animal Protection, (Prometheus Books, 2007). A new book by Erin E. Williams and Margo DeMello explores the treatment of animals and how the pursuit of profit has led to horrendous treatment of animals in the United States.
Why Animals Matter: The Case for Animal Protection
Why Animals Matter: The Case for Animal Protection exposes how capitalism has degraded yet another ages old human institution: our relationship to animals. This contemporary pursuit of profit–as animals are used for food, hunting, pets, research and entertainment–inflicts extreme cruelty upon animals, places many of their human counterparts in danger and destroys the environment.
The authors’ strongest point is made in their expose of the meat industry. The reader gets much more than a moral lecture on why to be a vegetarian. The book documents how factory farm methods not only slaughter animals but also force them to live lives of daily torture as they are confined in dark, small, crowded pens, in their own urine and feces. To combat the resulting ill health, they are pumped with antibiotics and growth hormones that make them more susceptible to painful and debilitating deformations.
Birds’ beaks are cropped; even eating causes them pain. Cow’s tails are cropped; they cannot even swish away biting flies. The authors write, “They (animals) often have no fresh air, do not feel the earth under their feet, and do not enjoy sunlight. Hundreds of millions of them are virtually immobilized. They can hardly perform any of their most important natural behaviors or experience even the most basic pleasures.”
When it’s time for slaughter, meat animals experience horrific fear and excruciating pain. For example, they are shipped long distances with little care given to food, water or rest and hung on hooks or scalded in boiling water often while conscious. Spent hens are crammed into dumpsters while still alive.
Human costs
Meanwhile, the underpaid workers in these operations are often immigrants who dare not speak up. The authors write, “…they slip and fall in the blood, feces, and other fluids that cover the floors; they are kicked and cut by animals struggling for their lives; they are cut by knives that disembowel and disassemble animals; they endure painful and chronic repetitive motion injuries. The industry’s ever-increasing line-speeds increase the risk of being cut, bruised, burned, stabbed, blinded, dismembered, disfigured and worse.”
In addition, slaughterhouse workers breathe air contaminated with airborne feces, E coli, campylobacter and listeria. Workers on factory farms endure similar subhuman working conditions and routinely develop sinusitis, chronic bronchitis and organic dust toxic syndrome. The book notes, “Factory farm workers are also exposed to infectious diseases such as anthrax, psittacosis, brucellosis, leptospirosis, swine influenza A, and avian influenza A, as well as several other diseases and conditions…”
Workers are not the only human health victims of the meat industry. Widespread use of antibiotics has created several antibiotic resistant bacteria, such as MRSA, which are in the beginning stages of causing pandemics among the general public in the US and around the world.
Environmental consequences
According to Williams and DeMello, “… animal agribusiness and its use of ever-increasing numbers of animals is among the most serious causes of environmental degradation.” U.S. factory farms produce more than 500 million tons of manure a year, waste that is hundreds of times stronger than untreated domestic sewage. Overgrazing is the leading cause of desertification, and subsequent loss of native plant species, in the U.S.
Factory farms growing animals account for more than 50% of all water use. In addition, manure spills contaminate our water supplies. “Each year, pollution from animal agriculture creates a ‘dead zone’ in the Gulf of Mexico, killing much of the marine life in an area the size of Massachusetts,” the authors report.
Data supporting humane change
In subsequent chapters, Why Animals Matter presents well documented, full treatments of other ways our capitalistic society subjugates and abuses animals. The authors show that hunting has very little to do with conservation; the fur industry subjects farm raised and trapped fur animals to ongoing pain and cruelty; animal laboratory research is more about big bucks than science; and zoos, rodeos, circuses and the TV/motion picture industry all victimize animals, though to differing extents. Nor is the pet industry exempt. Its powerful lobbyists make sure legislation favors profit over fair treatment of the very animals Americans hold most dear.
Each section of the book concludes with action steps readers can take to work against the vast market forces that see all animals as units to be sold for profit. For example, the chapter on the meat industry–while encouraging readers to adopt a meat-free diet–also offers the options of reducing meat and dairy consumption or limiting purchase to products from free range animals that have been raised and slaughtered humanely.
Excerpts about animal friends rescued from the factory farm, puppy mill, greyhound track and laboratory also inspire readers to make the world a better place for animals–and hence, a better world for humans, too.
Erin E. Williams and Margo DeMello, Why Animals Matter: The Case for Animal Protection
What an all important book, specifically for those who shy away from learning the true facts regarding our society’s mistreatment of animals – the wholesale betrayal to the creatures of our planet. Shame on our government, profit driven animal enterprises, elected officials and on us for allowing this to happen. Thanks for great article, info and inspiration to work harder and speak for the billions of voiceless victims behind the closed door of harsh industrial animal production, transporation and slaughter system. So sad – too sad for words. BEWARE of MAN!
Great write-up for a great book and important issue.