By Lucy Cavener

Animal treatment in factory farms is dangerous for humans, disastrous for our future, and unethical to the extreme. The way that factory farms raise their chickens, without light or space, injecting them with antibiotics and letting them live in their own waste, is immoral as well as damaging to the people who eat them. The disrepair that America’s food industry is currently in is an extremely important problem that the USA faces, and influencing the state of the factory farm production system is a good place to start fixing it.

Firstly, the way that the animals on factory farms are treated is horrible, and should be stropped. Pigs, chickens, cows, even fish, are all cramped into unnaturally small spaces. Adult female pigs are forced into small metal barred cages after they are forced to breed. The sows live in these confined spaces, lying in their own waste until they give birth, when their piglets are taken from them and the mothers are forced to become pregnant again. Most pigs go insane after a while, gnawing on their cage bars. This type of treatment happens to other animals, including pigs, cows, and chickens, and the uncleanliness with which they are raised is unthinkable. We, as humans, should not let ourselves treat other creatures experience things like this. It is practically like what happened in concentration camps during the control of Hitler, but this is happening for our enjoyment, our nourishment. This should not even be a problem.

Secondly, the uncleanliness that was mentioned previously is not only unethical; it is affecting humans who eat the animals directly. As would be expected, letting the animals that will be shortly consumed live in their own waste is causing the bacteria in feces (E. coli) live on the meat that is about to be packaged and used in our dinners and breakfasts. Already, there have been numerous cases of E. coli outbreaks in large quantities – from cooked hamburgers in fast food megachains – and the food industry is doing nothing about it. There have been several deadly cases of E.coli, including the death of Kevin Kowalcyk, a 2 1⁄2 year old boy. When on vacation with his family, he was fed a hamburger that had been contaminated with E. coli O157:H7. A week or so later, he developed the deadly hemolytic- uremic syndrome and died within days. His mother Barbara has since become involved in a fight against food-borne illness, including co-founding the Center for Foodborne Illness Research & Prevention. She has proposed a law, nicknamed Kevin’s Law, in order to put limits on meat factories that repeatedly test positive for deadly contaminants like E. coli O157:H7. Kevin’s Law has still not passed.

Finally, the ways that the food industry’s agribusinesses are handling the poisoned meat is causing even more long-term problems. The salmonella and E. coli poisoned meat problem is not being handled at the root of the problem, as it should. Instead of testing their facilities and making factories smaller and cleaner, they try to cleanse the finished meat with chemicals like ammonia (commonly found in window cleaner) and inject their cows full of antibiotics. Although these methods currently keep some of the meat clean, it seems even worse that people should be consuming hazardous chemicals. If you were to go home and grab a bottle of Windex and chug it down, you’d probably be hospitalized and die. There have been safety concerns relating to the ammonia used to cleanse beef, although they have not gotten near toxic levels. And though the antibiotics that are used to try and keep E. coli out of cows are currently working, the E. coli bacteria are starting to become stronger and more immune to the antibiotics. If we continue to use antibiotics on cows, the bacteria will become to strong for us to stop, and this would be a major problem of safety.

Though the main companies that are controlling our food industry might say that animals are treated fairly, and their meat is clean and nutritious, these are lies. The way that they house their animals is appalling, and frankly, disgusting. Who wants their child to die just because they ate a seemingly innocent hamburger? Who wants to encourage an E. coli epidemic? And certainly no one could let thousands and thousands of innocent animals be tortured and bred so that their own legs could not hold them up, living in their own waste.

Lucy is a student at Hamilton Middle School. She wrote the article for an editorial assignment in response to the film, Food Inc.