If you only read one article today, 2^nd October 2024, World Farm Animals Day, please make it this one.

What is ‘quality of life’?  What is a life worth living?  And who decides? 

‘Quality of Life’ is a term often used by veterinary surgeons when trying to determine the need, and the right time, to relieve our pets’ suffering.  

I feel sure many of you have experienced the unbearable pain of making what has become known as the ‘kindest decision’.  That time to say a gentle, final goodbye to your animal best friend.

That solemn decision one makes when there is little hope.  That moment of sheer dread and loss. 

Yet whilst society recognises ‘quality of life’ for our pets, factory farmed animals raised for so called ‘cheap’ meat  are given scant regard.  Never has it been so important to understand the animal welfare issues that are hidden behind the sanitised, well designed packaging of ‘cheap’ meat, milk and eggs. 

Living Conditions on a Factory Farm

Not everyone gets to visit an intensive animal farm. Throughout my career at Compassion in World Farming, I’ve made it a priority to see as many different types of these farms as possible. So that I can better share the reality with others. 

It starts with the smell that burns your nostrils and makes you want to be sick. Then the sight of hundreds, thousands, sometimes tens of thousands of sentient creatures cruelly crowded together in dark barns, with many suffering in hideous barren cages. Cages too small to turn around or flap their wings. These captive animals exhibit repetitive behaviour. Pointlessly doing things over and over to relieve the boredom and frustration. You can hear them chewing on cage bars or squealing as they are bitten or pecked by their caged companions.

I have looked into the soulful eyes of pigs in stalls in filthy sheds, devoid of sunlight and where they are made to face the wall.  Chickens with bare skin and broken spirits in cages no bigger than a standard sheet of typing paper.  Calves taken from their mothers with no time to bond.  Cattle in grassless feed lots, deep in their own dung trying to hide from blistering heat and swarms of flies.  And migratory salmon infested with lice and sores, in a sea cage with 50,000 others, swimming in incessant circles like crazed zoo animals.

These are sights, smells, and sounds that you never forget. For me, they are the images of animal suffering that haunt me and motivate me at the same time.  To make it stop. Enough is enough.

Animal Machines

Nowhere is our tendency to treat farmed animals as machines more clearly seen than in our use of genetic selection to fine-tune animals for ever-faster growth rates and higher yields. This leads to painful problems, including lameness and mastitis in dairy cows, increased piglet mortality, leg disorders and heart failure in broilers, chronic hunger in broiler breeders, and bone fractures in hens.

To all intents and purposes, these factory farmed animals are not living, they are ‘existing’ from the moment they are born. 

Their ‘quality of life’ isn’t even a conversation.  

It doesn’t have to be this way.

The Reality and the Waste

Animal welfare science increasingly recognises that good welfare for farmed animals means they have an opportunity to enjoy their lives. A ‘good life’ means that all their behavioural, physical, environmental and mental needs must be met.  

But on factory farms that is simply not possible.

All this suffering, and then so much is wasted. Every year, the meat equivalent of 15 billion animals is wasted. Thrown away. Left to rot. It’s a scandal and a tragedy beyond words. 

Ten Reasons to End Factory Farming

Take a deep breath before you read the facts and figures below:-

1. A staggering 92 billion farm animals are reared worldwide every year for food.  For each one billion people on this planet, over 10 billion animals are produced per year for meat, milk and eggs.
2. Two out of every three farm animals in the world (50 billion/year) are now factory farmed. It is the biggest cause of animal cruelty on the planet.
3. Meat produced on factory farms often has more saturated fat and less protein than higher-welfare meat.
4. About 40% of the world’s crop harvest, enough calories to sustain 4 billion people, is used for animal feed.  
5. Factory farms waste food – for every 100 calories fed to industrially reared animals, we get back 30 calories as meat. That’s a net waste of 70% of the food value. 
6. About a fifth of the world’s fish catch by weight but around half by numbers, never reaches a human mouth – instead, it is ground down and fed to farmed fish, pigs and poultry.
7. Globally, an area of forest about half the size of the UK is cleared yearly, mainly for animal feed and ranching.
8. Factory farming is a leading cause of wildlife decline worldwide, resulting in the demise of farmland birds, bees, and butterflies as well as impacting iconic species like jaguars and elephants.
9. Animal agriculture produces more greenhouse gas emissions than the exhausts of all the world’s planes, trains and cars put together.
10. Factory farms are a breeding ground for diseases like avian flu, due to stress and over-crowding.  Around two-thirds of the world’s antibiotics are used on farm animals, mainly to ward off diseases inherent in factory farming.

Please Take Action

In our modern world, there has never been a more urgent need for the healing power of compassion and kindness. 

If you have been moved by this article, I urge you to help Compassion in World Farming end factory farming. 

Please take a minute to sign our petition to END.IT.

Your signature will enable us to campaign, raise awareness, and create meaningful change for millions of animals across the world.  

Thank you.

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Main Image: Row of intensively farmed pigs | Credit: Compassion in World Farming