Nature's Revenge

Essay by Colin Tudge
printed in the UK Daily Mail August 28, 1999

There is simple Biblical justice in the warning by Government scientists that antibiotics vital in human medicine are being ruined through overuse in the feed of farm animals.
Modern livestock farming, abetted by the highest of high technology and sanctified by governments worldwide, is rooted in cruelty and driven by greed.
The plagues that such farming generates - salmonella, E. coil, BSE and the rest - plus the growing pharmacopoeia of drugs that no longer work, are all entirely predictable; indeed, the first official report on the dangers of antibiotics in animal feed appeared with the Swann Committee nearly 30 years ago.
Yet the blame cannot be laid exclusively with farmers and governments, although they must certainly take their share.
The main source of all the evils is our desire for cheap food, which obliges producers to cut corners.
Add to that an over-opulent diet that relies far too heavily on meat, so boosting the production of livestock far beyond what is sensible, and an indifference, however hypocritically concealed, to the suffering of our fellow creatures and the result comes roaring straight from the Old Testament: 'As you sow, so shall you reap.'
The logic is inexorable. Farmers feed a range of antibiotics to farm livestock -791,000 tonnes of it last year - as 'growth promoters'.
Since antibiotics are natural agents that are produced by fungi to fight off attack by bacteria, it is not exactly obvious why they should enhance the growth of animals; without them,  presumably, the benighted creatures would be stunted by infection.
And why is that? Because they are crammed so tightly together; and because, it seems safe to assume, their immune systems are suppressed by permanent stress.
The stress is common to all species, though the details differ from one to another.
Young pigs are raised en masse in weaner pools; hens in batteries, four to a tiny cage;
poultry for meat - broiler chickens, ducks and turkeys - are packed in vast flocks on deep litter.
It is as if we were to spend our entire lives in a football crowd; fun for an hour or two, but not if we were condemned to it from birth to grave.
The modern dairy cow, the adman's symbol of contentment is perhaps more put upon than any.
Production levels of 2 000 gallons of milk per animal per year is fairly  standard  - roughly eight times what a wild cow would produce for her calf.
There are unmeasurable social pressures, too; for wild cattle live in herds of a dozen or so with each individual knowing its place, while domestic cows live in herds of 100 or more.
And while they once grazed on meadows enriched by the scents and flavours of wild flowers  - dozens of species per field - cows now feed on mono-cultural, fast-growing, custom- bred rye-grass.
But even that is not enough for they must also consume increasing quantities of 'concentrate' - extra-high protein' gunge which they stuff down while they are being milked.
Such concentrates contained the ground-up sheet meat that harboured the agent of scrapie that became BSE which, in turn, might be transformed into the appalling Creutzfeld-Jacob Disease that destroys the brains of human beings.
Mercifully, CJD has remained rare. But it might not have done, and the farmers' game is not over yet.
Only this month, we heard that French farmers had been using raw sewage - the sludge left in sewage tanks after water treatment - to 'bulk out' the concentrate they were feeding their animals.
So why keep animals in this way? Oddly, many of the practices that seem so harsh were introduced to improve welfare. The battery cage and the deep-litter flock developed after the Fifties, partly to reduce the infections and parasites that chickens endured as they took their chances in the farmyard, and to protect them against the weather.
Traditional farms were not as we choose to remember them. The agrarian reformer William Cobbett, in the early 19th century, described the interiors of the little thatched cottages that looked so beguiling in the Romantic paintings of the day: damp, dark, bare and stinking.
But it was even worse for the animals. Pigs in traditional sties could be belly-deep in freezing mud and ordure.
Cows were often tied permanently by the neck - their grass and hay were brought to them. In the end, this could save labour and reduced damage to the fields.
We can trace the trail of animal misery even further back, to the wild sheep, cattle and pigs from which livestock began to evolve at least 3,000 years ago (and perhaps much further back than this).
Traditional ancient historians argued that human beings simply coerced these wild creatures into domestication - for as Genesis tells us, people were given 'dominion' over the beasts of the fields.
But in truth, the creatures that became domesticated simply gave themselves up. The dogs sheep, cattle, pigs and poultry that learned to live alongside the burgeoning tribes of humans fared better than those that stayed in the wild. They did not consciously decide to throw in their lot with our ancestors, but the ones who did so bred a lot faster than those that stayed wild.
Hence, modern domestic cattle are the most common large animals on Earth while their wild ancestor the aurochs - is extinct and many other wild species of cattle are endangered.
Although the earliest farming often improved on life in the wild, it was still harsh, and often downright vicious. To some extent, the modem techniques evolved as an antidote to traditional cruelties.
But the pendulum has swung too far and the modern housing, feeding and veterinary care that once seemed so benign have been transformed into relentless pressure, with the animals reduced to production machines.
Modern breeding techniques soon to be abetted by genetic engineering - are not intrinsically bad, but they could make things even worse.
A cow can be bred (or engineered) to produce not 2,000 gallons of milk in a year, but 4,000. Some freakish animals already do. They can barely walk because they are so heavy, and must be milked four times a day.
But if productivity and profit are the names of the game - indeed, they are the only names - then such creatures could become the norm.
Already, some pigs have been bred to grow so fast that they cannot stand properly.
Most turkeys are so misshapen after breeding programmes to enhance breast meat that they cannot physically mate, so artificial insemination is the norm.
But why should we suppose that animals that are well-fed, sheltered and less diseased than their wild predecessor are 'suffering'?
For 100 years, philosophers have been pointing out that we cannot understand animals if we are 'anthropomorphic' - if we suppose that they have the same kind of feelings as we do.
What scientific evidence is there that farm animals suffer? Isn't it just sentimental woolly-mindedness to suppose that they can and do?
This argument goes back least 300 years, to French philosopher Rene Descartes.
He declared that thinking depends upon language or, indeed, on speech. We think in words - or so it seemed - and since animals cannot speak, said Descartes, therefore they cannot think.
Animals behave in complicated ways, but so did the clockwork toys, the automata that were so popular Descartes's day.
Animals, he concluded, are simply automata. They may look as though they puzzle things out, or as if they are happy or miserable, but don't be fooled. A clever clockwork toy can do the same.
Descartes's idea that animals are just automata has under-pinned most of the science of animal psychology throughout the 20th century.
Scientists can study only what they can measure. Behaviour can be measured (ask any rat in a laboratory maze), but the thoughts that lie behind the behaviour cannot be analysed.
So the 'behavioural' scientists, such as Descartes, have simply regarded animals as machines To assume they were like us thinking and feeling creature was 'unscientific' or anthropomorphic'.
But it has become increasingly clear that we cannot explain all the things that animals do if we assume they are simply clockwork toys.
The chimpanzees which Jane Goodall studied throughout the Sixties clearly had thoughts and feelings.
As Herb Terrace, of Columbia University in New York, commented in the mid-Eighties: 'We now have to explain how animals think even though they don't speak.' In Britain, Professor Pat Bateson, of Cambridge University, has said that if we really want to understand animals, it is at least as sensible to assume they think and feel as it is to assume, as Descartes did, that they are just machines.
In short, most modern biologists agree with what the apparently woolly-minded animal lovers were saying all along. True we cannot get inside the head of a cow or a pig, so we do not know that it is suffering. But then we cannot get inside each other's heads, either.
We simply assume that when children fall over and cry; it is because they are in pain and when an old man chuckles, it is because he feels the same contentment that we do.
We just have to be guided by common sense. But there are also some objective ways of gauging happiness and misery. All mammals produce the hormone cortisol when they are stressed, and it has been shown that when hens or pigs are deliberately provoked, their cortisol levels rise.
But in the end, common sense must be our guide in this matter. It is safest to assume that if an animal can hardly walk because it is carrying too much milk, then it is miserable.
However we should not assume that animals are made happy or miserable by the same things that we find pleasing or distressing. To treat them well, we have to find out what they want.
Thus in Edinburgh the late Dr Michael Woodgush kept domestic pigs in woods with the freedom to do whatever they wanted.
The pregnant sows built nests, and they never rolled on their piglets and crushed them as they often do on farms. The boars - murderous beasts in a farmland setting - pottered around harmlessly, like couch-potato husbands.
Similar experiments have shown that hens like to lay their eggs in nests (surprise, surprise!), scratch for food and perch when they sleep.
Marian Dawkins at Oxford has found that chickens will brave significant hazards to fulfil such goals. In short, the route to benign farming methods seems straightforward: find out what animals do when left to themselves, and then build the husbandry around their preferences.
Pigs would be raised in outdoor pens with shelters, in quasi-family groups; hens on clean grass or free to roam woods with nest boxes and shelters; cows in meadows in herds of a dozen or so  while producing not more than 1,000 gallons a year.
No antibiotics would be needed in such systems - or not, at least, as standard feed additives  because in such conditions infection is minimal. So why don't we raise livestock like this? Partly because we don't give a damn. Even if animals do suffer; it is easy to say: 'So what?'
But the main and most obvious reason is money. It costs more to raise chickens in small flocks, with perches and nests, than it does to ram them into wire boxes.
A cow that produces only 1,000 gallons of milk a year (though that would have been considered amazing just 50 years ago) costs almost as much to feed as one that produces 2,000.
You get more pigs to the square metre in a weaner pool than you would in a wooded
pen - and it is much easier.
Feed is money, space is money, labour is money. So ram them in, stuff in the feed and pile in the drugs, or the whole horrendous stewpot will boil over.
Most people seem to want cheap food. They even see cheap food as their 'right'. Governments win votes by keeping prices down, and certainly fear to put them up. Supermarkets compete in many ways, but price is a priority.
So the circle is complete. We - the consumers and voters - want cheap food, and

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