Probably when you think of farmed animals, you think of some picturesque country scene where cows roam rolling pastures and a few hens peck the ground around a quaint family farmhouse. Unfortunately, for most farmed animals the reality is much different. The vast majority of farmed animals exist on “factory farms”. “Factory farming” is large-scale, intensive farming geared toward highest output at the lowest cost. This competition to produce inexpensive meat, milk, and eggs has created a situation on our farms where the welfare of the animals are tertiary to profit and convenience. In many cases the animals are rigorously confined, denied basic veterinary care, grow so quickly that their limbs cannot support their added weight due to selective breeding and growth-promoting drugs, have surgical procedures performed without anesthesia or pain medication, and are finally inhumanely transported to be inhumanely slaughtered.

Professor of Philosophy, Physiology and Biophysics at Colorado State University, Bernard Rollin, PhD, explains in his book Farm Animal Welfare that it is “more economically efficient to put a greater number of birds into each cage, accepting lower productivity per bird but greater productivity per cage…individual animals may ‘produce,’ for example gain weight, in part because they are immobile, yet suffer because of the inability to move…Chickens are cheap, cages are expensive.”

According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) National Agricultural Statistics Service, each year about 10 percent, or 900 million, of the animals raised for food never reach the slaughterhouse. They die on the farm due to stress, injury, and disease.

There are virtually no federal laws that protect farm animals from even the most harsh and brutal treatment as long as it takes place in the name of production and profit. The federal Animal Welfare Act, which regulates the treatment of animals for commercial purposes, does not apply to farm animals unless they are being used in research or for exhibition. Moreover, a majority of states have specifically exempted some aspect of the treatment of animals in agriculture from their cruelty laws. It is left entirely to the preference of the individual company how many egg-laying hens are stuffed into each little wire cage, or whether an artificially inseminated sow must spend her entire pregnancy chained to the floor of a cement-bottomed cage.