Inhumane Treatment of Livestock

After being born, some calves are taken into pens and chained up by the necks until they are old enough to be slaughtered and sold as veal. In the meantime they are given no kind of exercise and are force fed a feed that is unlike any other food that a free cow would endure. If the calf is not used for veal, it is stuffed into a pen by itself or put into a confined area with hundreds or even thousands of other cows and force fed the same feed that is unnatural to its digestive system. Towards the end of their miserable lives, they are shipped off to slaughterhouses to face a gruesome and excruciating death. Would you want to be treated this way? Humane meat has gained a lot of notoriety over the past years as Americans start to learn more about factory farms (Lin, 2011)(NA, 2007). Factory farmers treat their livestock inhumanely by giving the animals a less quality mix of food because it is cheaper and by running them through the slaughterhouses without fully knowing they are dead because it is quicker for processing and selling; Instead, farmers need to spend a little more money on a more natural feed and the workers at slaughterhouses need to practice more humane ways of killing their livestock.

First of all, factory farmers treat their livestock inhumanely by giving them a cheap feed that is not natural to their diets and causes environmental and health issues. This cheap feed that is given to these cows consists of ingredients ranging from rendered animal parts and animal waste to antibiotics and poisons (Maryland Institute for Applied Environmental Health). This feed also contains corn and soy which is not natural to a cow’s diet and are kept at low prices because of governmental subsidies (Robinson, 2010). Because of these feed ingredients, cows can have a various amount of health issues; one of the most common is sub-acute acidosis. This sickness causes the cow to wean itself off of the feed and start eating dirt. They also develop liver abscesses and sudden death syndrome (Sustainable Table, 2003). With the feed cows are given and the stress that they incur, the quality of meat takes a tremendous drop. The meat contains less vitamin E, beta-carotene, vitamin C, and healthy fats, including omega-3 fatty acids and conjugated linoleic acid (Robinson, 2010). All in all, this feed is robbing us of essential nutrients for good health and substituting bad things, like fats, which could kill us.

Other issues that come from feeding cows a low quality food is poisoning by diseases. Livestock can transmit diseases, which they catch from the feed they eat, to humans. “Based on the assumptions that food-production animals are the source of 95% of human non-typhoidal Salmonella cases and that 10% of food-production animals are infected by Salmonella spp. through the ingestion of contaminated animal feed, it has been estimated that approximately 134,000 cases of human non-typhoidal salmonellosis (including 55 deaths and 1,560 hospitalizations)