But while we have factory farms, we’re still far away from recognizing animals for the sentient beings they are.  Mark Bittman barely touched on the subject in his great article about the wasteful aspects of eating meat in his great New york Times article last year called, “Rethinking the Meat Guzzler:”

“Animal welfare may not yet be a major concern, but as the horrors of raising meat in confinement become known, more animal lovers may start to react. And would the world not be a better place were some of the grain we use to grow meat directed instead to feed our fellow human beings?”

Factory farms are killing machines that contribute to so much animal cruelty, besides higher CO2 emissions than SUVS, food borne pathogens leading to pandemics, high water demands, and other hurtful things to our planet.

The most animated way to learn about why it’s important to boycott factory farms is The Meatrix, produced by Free Range Studios with Sustainable Table – a project to support family farms that does include an animal rights angle. I’ve been lucky to work with both groups from my experience with Meatless Monday campaign, which emphasizes that even reducing one’s meat intake can make tremendous impacts on both one’s health and the environment.

Of course, one can choose to go veg and boycott the eating and killing of animals and their products entirely, like my friends Cindie and Ted, who no longer buy eggs or even milk products – those are taken away from calves to feed humans. I don’t think any other diet makes as strong of a statement against industrial agriculture and animal cruelty as veganism. But that’s not easy for most of us. Even Mark Bittman admits it in a follow up to his article. Yet reducing one’s animal protein intake, getting meat that’s free-range and killed as painlessly as possible from a local farmer is a shift towards a more humane diet.

For starters, if you haven’t read this Rolling Stone article on the Smithfield Foods hog operation, you should. I did and it made me so angry. Apparently in the late 90s, pig farms grew to become humongous operations,  with tons of waste poorly managed.

So it’s no surprise to learn that the strain was linked back a U.S. factory farm in 1998 after all. Wired ran a great article on how the virus evolved:

“Inside them (factory farms), pigs are packed so tightly that they cannot turn, and literally stand in their own waste. Diseases travel rapidly through such immunologically stressed populations, and travel with the animals as they are shuttled throughout the United States between birth and slaughter. That provides ample opportunity for strains to mingle and recombine. An ever-escalating array of industry-developed vaccines confer short-term protection, but at the expense of provoking flu to evolve in unpredictable ways.”

So now what? Will people really think twice about where their meat is coming from in a year or two? Can we get CAFOs to one day pay fines for their public health and environmental damage? Do we stand a chance in putting an end to all this factory farming within my lifetime? We all want safe food, we want clean air, and water. CAFOs use up so many resources, they’ll only cause more disasters.

Tom Laskawy of Grist sums it up well here:

“We know more than enough to assert that it’s time for the public to learn what those of us in the sustainable world have understood for a long time—CAFOs are public health hazards of the highest order. And it’s also time that the public started to openly question why CAFOs and their owners are able to so brazenly flout environmental law—even laws written specifically to regulate their operations.”

In the meantime, I just hope there are no more pig massacres in countries where no one’s even infected.