Eating Animals, Factory Farming and the Pandemic
How many of us think about where the meat on our tables comes from? Well, we all should! That’s the message of Eating Animals (2017), produced and narrated by Natalie Portman and based on the best-selling book on factory farming by Jonathan Safran Froer.
The film shines a light on corporate farming. Besides being inherently cruel to animals, it has destroyed entire ways of life and is devastating our environment. Now factory farming is threatening to kill us all by fostering a pandemic. However, those who blow the whistle face the wrath of this trillion-dollar industry.
In this episode we are joined by Phil Brooke, Research and Education Manager at Compassion in World Farming, who discusses how his organisation is fighting to change the way we think about raising livestock. Along the way, Phil and host Matthew Sherwood talk about what is being done to stop factory farming.
And as the current pandemic shows us, at the very least we need to change the way we view our food and how we source it.
“The more animals we keep, the worse we keep them, the more at risk we are of more of these diseases.” - Phil Brooke
Time Stamps:
00:59 - Introducing today’s topic – factory farming.
01:18 - Introducing our guest, Phil Brooke.
01:34 - Who Compassion in World Farming (CIWF) are.
02:13 - What The Global Health Film Festival is about.
03:54 - What Eating Animals is about.
05:12 - What factory farming is.
06:29 - Introducing the first clip from the film.
09:08 - The global reach of factory farming.
10:38 - Why factory farming is uniquely inhumane.
11:43 - The steps that are being taken to stop it.
17:28 - Our second clip – whistleblowers and their impact.
23:33 - The role that CIWF played in raising the alarm about poultry farming.
33:01 - The USDA, inhumane testing and the immorality behind it.
35:30 - The third clip – a global pandemic.
41:56 - The massive levels of antibiotics needed to make factory farming viable.
47:38 - What are the solutions to feeding a growing population in a humane way.
50:14 - How to change people’s perspective on what they should eat.
54:10 - The importance of your daily eating habits.
Resources:
Compassion in World Farming
Eating Animals Official Website
Eating Animals on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram
The Global Health Film Festival
Dartmouth Films
Dartmouth Films on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram
Alamo Pictures
Connect with Phil Brooke:
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Transcript for Factual America Episode 10 - Eating Animals, Factory Farming and the Pandemic
Matthew 0:01
You're listening to factual America. This podcast is produced by Alamo pictures, a production company specializing in documentaries, television and shorts about the USA for international audiences. Subscribe to our mailing list or follow us on instagram and twitter at Alamo pictures to be the first to hear about new productions, festivals were attending and how to connect with our team. Our homepage is almopictures.co.uk. And now, enjoy factual America with our host, Matthew Sherwood.
Welcome to factual America, podcast that explores the themes that make America unique through the lens of documentary filmmaking. I'm your host Matthew Sherwood and every two weeks it is my pleasure to interview documentary filmmakers and subject matter experts. And we're coming to you from Spiritand Studios here in Kings Cross London, England, and today's topic is factory farming. Now, this is not the first time we've discussed this, but we're going to sort of narrow in on an aspect of factory farming, and looking at the growing global appetite for meat, and what this means for the humane treatment of animals, and what it also means for environment and health. And our guest today is Phil Brook. Phil is a Research and Education Manager at Compassion In World Farming. So welcome to Factual America.
Phil 1:24
Good to be here.
Matthew 1:25
Yeah. Why don't you tell us a little bit about yourself and more specifically, what does Compassion in World Farming do?
Phil 1:31
So Compassion in World Farming, we're an animal welfare environment group. Our main purpose is to try and get rid of factory farming, to have if we could keep animals to make sure they're kept in better conditions, to encourage people to eat less, but better meat so that we don't need so much land to produce food for people, so there's more land left for nature.
Matthew 1:53
Very good. Now, what we usually do is, we ask our guests to choose a film, but that was done for you and me both. We didn't, we didn't really have a choice, and I'm glad we didn't, because where Phil and I met previously is the Global Health Film Festival. Now the Global Health, it was a great film festival that we attended back in December. We've already had at least one podcast that from that, interview with the director and producer of Soyalism, which is a film that, I would say, dovetails really nicely with this one. I don't know if you've had a chance to see it yet, Phil. But while we were there, we saw this film Eating Animals. It's 2018, the director is Christopher Quinn, you might know him mainly for his film God Grew Tired of Us, which came out in 2006, has a Grand Jury Prize and Audience Award at Sundance, Best Documentary at Deauville. It's narrated by Natalie Portman, and based on the best selling book by Jonathan Safran Foer from 2009. Now, I want to give it a shoutout at this point, and then we'll quickly get to Phil, let him do the talking. A shoutout to Chris Quinn and Simone Friedman of the EGF Philanthropies, Chris, obviously the director, and Simone who works for her family's philanthropic organization in supporting, they're supporting the impact campaign for Eating Animals, and generally they promote sustainable food causes. Now, I just wanted to say thank you so much, they were so generous with their time at the film festival, chatting with with me and our producer Emmett Glynn, and also big shoutout to Jerry McHugh at the Global Health Film Festival, who very nicely made them accessible to us, and so we are forever indebted to you as well. So, Eating Animals. Phil, what's Eating Animals about?
Phil 3:54
So, it's about factory farming. It's about history of factory farming, how it came about. It's about the impact it has on the welfare of animals, the livelihoods of farmers who get stuck into debt. It's about the pollution caused by going into the rivers and killing all the fish. It's about its effect on the spread of disease, the requirement for antibiotics which are used and then therefore for the antibiotic resistance, that means our drugs won't work. So it's all the impacts of factory farming.
Matthew 4:25
Now, and before we get more into the discussion of factory farming, I'd just say it's a lovely film. I think it's a very powerful film, it's had a certainly an impact on my life and my family's life already. And I also want to thank Phil because, when we're discussing what clips to show, my predilection is to go for the really beautiful shots that Chris has done of the prairies of the United States and everything, and Phil's narrowing in on the, well, the footage that shows us the horrific conditions and talks a lot about the reality and what's going on with factory farming. But before looking at a clip, I mean, maybe just the basics, because believe it or not, I think that probably some of our listeners may not even really know what factory farming is.
Phil 5:12
So factory farming, it's a paradigm, makes it rather difficult to describe in a few words, but you know what it is when you see it. So it tends to be very large scale, so lots of animals that kept. It tends to be confinement agriculture, so the animals are commonly in cages or overcrowded in sheds, or have been bred to grow incredibly fast and productive, like they're cogs in the machine, rather than sentient animals that matter to themselves. And so, perhaps you remember Charlie Chaplin's film from the 30s, where he showed workers on a production line, and they were, their interests were subordinated to the needs of the factory and the same happened starting about the same time to animals, that they became simply objects of production, rather than creatures that mattered in themselves, and that's the paradigm,
Matthew 6:05
And so many of the characters, there's just an amazing cast of characters in this film, and that's what all great documentaries have, is good characters. And in some ways, you know, factory farming almost becomes the backdrop, but the number of times the term widget is used, you know, and I think this is a good point to get to that clip, the first clip we have, in which we've got Natalie Portman, along with Chris Quinn's imagery, talking about basically how we got here. So let's have a look at that clip now.
Speaker 1 6:44
You come across these masterpieces, steel, plastic, rotating wheels, mechanical arms repeating the same motion, all brought together in the most ingenious ways to produce more and more. Is this efficiency? You once farmed independently with sweat and labor, love and tedium, and it was satisfying. Now you go into debt, turn on the machines, take orders from Central Command. But you are efficient. That's why you do it. You and your machines are feeding the world. You are giving people what they want. You want this world, you want efficiency. You don't want to put anyone out of business.
Speaker 3 7:46
Nobody ever got the idea "wouldn't it be really cool if we raised millions of animals under really hideous conditions, and gave them short, miserable and painful lives? By the way, we would also pollute our waterways and deplete our top soils. Wouldn't that really be a great way of doing business?" There was never sort of some evil genius, whose idea was to create a world that was like that. It's a place that we got to step by step. And we're going - "how did we get here?" The United Nations released a report, it's over 400 pages, it's called Livestock Long Shadow. And in this report, they said whatever environmental issue you're looking at, water pollution, air pollution, climate change, raising animals for food, are one of the top two or three contributors. It causes somewhere between 14% and more than half of all climate change.
Speaker 2 8:41
And so now we're at this point where it's a question of, how do we go somewhere else?
Matthew 8:48
So Phil, I think that's one of I mean, it was really hard to settle on two or three clips to show because I think the whole film, I think, scene after scene, is all very powerful, but I think that's a very good clip to show us, it's been sort of looking back how we got here. And I have some questions. I mean, is this a uniquely American phenomenon?
Phil 9:10
No, I mean, factory farming has spread across the world. I mean, in Britain, it took off immediately after the Second World War, when the object was to feed people as much animal protein as possible at the time when they thought that's what was good for people. And hens got put into cages, chickens got bred to grow a bit faster and faster still, and so forth. Sows, female pigs got put into sow stores and farrowing crates, and it was a gradual process. So when I was growing up in the 60s and 70s, most of our eggs by then were produced in battery cages. Globally, if you look at chickens, the fast growing chicken strains are used throughout the world. So you'll have that kind of intensive farming everywhere.
Matthew 9:54
Oh, my goodness. And so as you say, it's not just the US it's not just the UK, Europe, it's made inroads everywhere.
Phil 10:00
Yeah. Especially with pigs and chickens. Yeah.
Matthew 10:03
You know, we see, I think even in that clip or there are other clips, we will see examples of how this form of farming is inherently cruel and inhumane to animals. I mean, but weren't, maybe I can play a little devil's advocate, weren't, not all farmers were just humane with their animals before factory farming kicked in. I mean, is this part of the net nature of farming animals? Or is this something, are we seeing something different with factory farming that you didn't see before?
Phil 10:38
What's become clear with factory farming is that it isn't possible to keep the animals well. So however conscientious the workmen, however efficient they are, the animals don't get a good life. In fact, if they look after them better, they end up being able to keep them more crowded, which isn't in the animal's interest at all. Whereas if you've got a more traditional farm or modern free range farm, there is the opportunity for the animals to have a good life. They still have to be managed well by stock people who care about them, for the potential for good welfare in those systems to happen. But this is one of our key ideas, is welfare potential. We need systems that have the opportunity to be good. But we mustn't kid ourselves, yes, you can always run a good farm badly.
Matthew 11:26
Yeah, yeah. And so I think this gets to a point, what is the Compassion in World Farming and others, what are you trying to do about, as you said, your stated aim is to end factory farming. So, what are the appropriate methods of raising awareness and bringing about this change?
Phil 11:44
So obviously, we go to the public, we provide educational materials, we go to journalists, we go undercover, we show the results of what's happening in factory farming. And we use that also to talk to politicians, to run campaigns, to get forms of factory farming bans. So, if you take the British example, back in the 80s we got the veal crate banned, that a cage in which small cows, dairy cows are kept, in which they couldn't turn around, and they were in the dark, and they were kept on a low iron diet to keep them anemic so their flesh was white. Appalling system which was banned in Britain from 1990. We then got the sow stall bans in the States. I think you call that the gestation crate where the pregnant sow is kept permanently in a cage, she can't turn around in until she gives birth, when she goes into another one called a farrowing crate. Well, we have farrowing crates, but we got rid of the sow stalls in Britain in 1999. Then the campaigns went more European, and in 99 we got a ban announced on the battery cage throughout the EU, which came into from 2012, we got the sow stall restricted, we got the veal crate banned throughout Europe. So there's a range of results we had through legislation. Other ways we try and work, and this has been very successfully shown in the States by animal protection groups over there, which is to go to the supermarkets, to go to the food businesses, and persuade them they can do things quicker. They don't have to wait for legislation, and they care about what their public thinks about their record. And very commonly, if they have better treatment of animals, it doesn't make a huge difference to the cost of the food they're producing. So you've got in the States, the top 25 retailers who are now going to go cage-free by 2025. In the UK, the top 10 again, go cage-free by 2025, and you find the same and similar in many supermarkets across Europe, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa. But these are changes made by food businesses. In the Netherlands their supermarkets don't only sell slow green chickens now, which means they use a third of the antibiotics they used to use. So these are the kinds of way that we and other animal welfare groups have managed to get change and continue to try to move for chain, to get animals treated better and more environmentally friendly form of farming.
Matthew 14:25
I think that's a very good point. As someone who now I've lived in the UK for a while now, I remember, I forget exactly what the year was, but all of a sudden, the whole thing about caged hens and eggs, hit the press quite big. And you can't even go into the most discount, I mean, it's hard to find cage, you know, eggs laid by caged hens. Almost all of them now are free range.
Phil 14:51
In British supermarkets that's true. You had to look at the bottom shelf for some of them to find the cheap caged eggs in some of the supermarkets, and they're phasing them out. Yeah. That's right. Across Europe a lot of barn eggs, but again, half the eggs in Europe are getting towards half, are now cage free. And in the UK, two thirds of our hens would by now be cage free.
Matthew 15:17
And I think, as you said, because we talked previously at the festival, and before going on to this recording, is that, and I've now been keeping an eye out for, now this is very UK specific, but when I go to the supermarket, places I didn't think I'd be able to find stuff where it was free range or outdoor bread pork, or think in the States what we call grass fed beef, but you know, sometimes you have to read the fine print, depending, but even your discount retail supermarkets, all the way to your more higher end, are offering alternatives. And here in the UK, you've got the RSPCA, putting a stamp of approval on things. So I've noticed the eggs we're getting now are all have an RSPCA stamp on them, and a lot of the meats that my family are consuming have that stamp as well. So I think we're going to talk a little bit more about this later in the podcast as we talk about how quickly this is changing, is it changing fast enough, and what are the solutions for the for the issues. Because as we discussed in another podcast, actually with the directors of this other film that we looked at, called Soyalism is that, and they had some similar statistics, you know, the world population is going to be by the 2050s is going to be about 9 billion, I think.
Phil 16:47
That's a projection.
Matthew 16:48
Yeah. And I think when I was a boy, roughly the world was consuming about 7 billion animals a year, it's now up to 50 billion and they're projecting at current rates, it's going to get up to 100 billion animals a year are going to be consumed in on the globe.
Phil 17:02
It's about 75 billion, and probably 83 if you count hens and calves ate for food each year, and that doesn't include probably hundred billion fish, farmed fish and about 1000 billion wild fish. So that's a lot of animals.
Matthew 17:18
So I think that would be a good time to look at this next clip. It's one that well, it's hard to say near and dear, but I think it's speaks a lot to Phil in the terms of Compassion in World Farming's involvement with this farmer named Craig Watts in North Carolina. He was a poultry farmer. And it says a lot, I don't need to say, I don't think we need to be shy about this, but you know, a lot of the images that you see if those who are watching and not listening, you know, there's some shocking stuff you're going to see in this film, but you helped, we'll talk about this, there's a clip and then we'll go to a break, and then after the break, Phil and I can talk more about it. But this poultry farmer who was a whistle blower and sort of he effects that had both in terms of public awareness and also in terms of Craig's own life. So let's watch that clip now.
Speaker 4 18:31
It just builds over 20 some years. I mean, you just get to a point where, everybody's got that point. And I just hit mine, watching that Purdue commercial.
Speaker 5 18:47
My dad always taught us one line, that's do the right thing. And we're doing the right thing. And we're transparent.
Speaker 4 18:58
He wants to public to believe that that's a normal farm. I might be a lot of things but I'm not a liar. My granddaddy drilled that into me. Very good. He always said, you know, tell the truth no matter how bad it hurts. I've seen birds with four legs and no eyes, bacteria laden intestines, you'll smell that walking in the door. That can be horrendous. And you'll see heart attacks. They call them flip overs. We call it water belly. This will get purple and it's just full of fluids. It's the absolute breakdown of the heart, the lungs and whatnot. I'm not a vet, but that's not normal. Rubber, legs folded completely in half, I really don't know what happened, it's just so soft, it doesn't snap. You run into a lot of these, it can't get up. You can hear respiratory, and this one's really bad. These are your premium primetime, no antibiotic ever cage free, humanely raised, whatever else is on that label.
Unknown Speaker 20:39
I mean, I took pictures, I cut birds open, told them what it was. Seen it. Nobody came.
Speaker 8 20:52
Craig did come to me first and said, I want to be a whistleblower. I want to tell the truth about what's happening on these farms. I would not have said 'get a camera and start videotaping,' because the risk would have been too high. We've been around for 37 years and represented very high profile whistleblowers and we know what happens. You're probably just going to get your ass handed to you by the Corporation. It's not just like you can come up to these giants and throw stones, and say bad things about them and expect not to have some sort of retaliation. There's a brand that's at stake and they definitely want to fight for that.
Speaker 5 21:28
We wanted to go through the government route, and what we found out was if you stepped in that congressman's office, by time you leave, the chicken counselor knows that you were just there, that's the way it is. And I found out about the hot buttons video.
I'm Craig Watts, contract poultry producer with three farms.
Leah released a video in the New York Times, picked it up and then they got it on the Reddit board. Just like...
Speaker 9 22:02
Forbes and Washington Post, the front page of Reddit, New York Times, Wired, It really upset people.
Speaker 5 22:10
And the next thing you knew, there's half a million views in 24 hours. I didn't expect that. They dispatched a team of welfare experts to my farm, company people, six visits in 10 days if I remember right. They were telling me my welfare standards on my farm were up to their standards. How can I be so bad to finish first in the tournament system? The whole thing was to get me to the breaking point.
Matthew 22:48
You're listening to factual America. Subscribe to our mailing list or follow us on Instagram and Twitter @Alamo Pictures to keep up to date with new releases and upcoming shows, Check out the show notes to learn more about the program, our guests and the team behind the production. And now back to Factual America.
Welcome back to Factual America. So we've just, you've just had a break, listeners. But before that we saw a clip about this video that Compassion in World Farming posted, that went viral. So can you tell us a little something about what your colleagues in the States were doing, and now this all happened, and sort of the impact that had.
Phil 23:33
So I don't get to have the full story, but I know Leyah Garces, who was CEO at the time, met Craig Watts, and to cut a long story short, gave him a video camera to film what was going on in his sheds. I remember at the time, because in the research department, we were given the clips to look at and to work out what was going on and what the problems were. And the classic problems are of chickens who have grown too fast for their bodies to keep up the circulatory and respiratory systems not keeping up. So they become completely exhausted, shattered, full of liquid, all of the problems of degenerative heart disease, chronic heart failure and so forth. And problems have been getting worse and worse, as they bred chickens to grow faster, and as we heard earlier, this wasn't intentional. But if you grow an animal to grow faster and faster, other things give, their joints don't keep up so they end up lame. Their hearts don't keep up, so they end up with heart failure. They end up exhausted, they end up less able to cope with disease. All of these are side effects of trying to produce a cheaper chicken, and the chickens are suffering as a result, the farmers are suffering because they're actually very much more difficult to manage as you saw. And we looked at this, we checked it with the US team produced the script, we tracked it. And it went out and it went viral. And suddenly, people started caring about these things. And it's helped to drive a move by the chicken producers to perhaps come closer to us, and our Better Chicken Initiative, to suggest we should be producing slow growing chickens that can keep healthy. We should be giving a bit more space, we should be allowing them to have a life.
Matthew 25:26
I mean, I think for those of you who couldn't see, who listened to the clip and it's damning enough in terms of the audio that you've heard. But, you know, Craig, at one point, bending a leg, it's like rubber, you know, it's chicken. I mean, these are probably now my new favorite character in a documentary of all time. It's right up there with Paul Brennan and Salesmen, but is Frank Reese, the turkey whisperer that we have and we'll have another clip with him in it. But I think, doesn't he say he's basically a student of sort of the history of poultry, and what used to happen and what happens now and what's been lost, but doesn't give us you know, if a human baby or maybe it's in one of the the narration pieces, if a human baby grew at the same rate as one of these chickens, there'd be like two months old, they'd be 600 pounds or something like that, isn't it?
Phil 26:18
It's absolutely massive rate of growth. And that's right. And there are lots of great stories in this film. One of the nice things about it is they show positive sides as well. So we have Frank with his turkeys flying up into the trees, and his free range chickens. And we have the Diamond Ranch people with their free range pigs and cows, showing that there are examples based on looking after animals properly, where you can produce stuff for market, that for the people wanting to eat less but better meat, that which is sustainable, is one of the answers. Again, it makes the film shows, one thing I like most about the film is that it doesn't tell you what to believe.
Matthew 27:05
And it's interesting you raised that point, because I've raised that point with the director when you were, you know, not to name drop, but Christopher Quinn after the screening, and he said the exact same thing, he didn't see a need to, he thought that the just letting the cameras roll. They just said enough.
Phil 27:22
It's really effective. So he has Bruce Friedrich, vegan campaigner on it. He has the people who are producing Beyond Meat, and the Just Eggs Alternatives, and he has the High Welfare Farmers. And you can choose at the end of that, are you going to better welfare meat route, or are you going to eat less or even go vegetarian or vegan. Yeah, but he doesn't tell you what to do. He leaves you to experience the stories to see what it's like, to see what the effect is on the environment, and to make your own choices about what you do better.
Matthew 27:57
I think that's a good point because another clip, and I just highly recommend seeing this film, but one clip that actually comes right after this one, for those who go and now watch it. They're still in Eastern North Carolina and one of the campaigners who's been looking at it from the environmental standpoint, and this guy got into the game, because he's used to go fishing, and he's finding his fish were starting to have scales on them. And he was, and his family was starting to develop these scales. And he said, the thing is,
Phil 28:29
I think you're thinking sores.
Matthew 28:31
Yeah. Well, sores with scales on them or something. I don't mean fish scales. Yes. Good point. But I think as he keeps saying, we can see everything, and there's, you know, all these pink lagoons, which is where all the excrement goes all over eastern North Carolina. And I lived in North Carolina when all this was starting to take off. But he said the one thing we can't see is what's going on at the inside. And I think what this film does as best as it can, and probably what your campaigns are about as well, is trying to get footage from the inside, so people can, you don't even have to say anything. This is the conditions. And so make your own decision about the choices you make. I mean that gets back to Craig. I have some affinity for Craig, I think he might even be a distant relative, he only lives a few miles from where the Sherwoods hail from, on the other side of the North Carolina-South Carolina border. I've been to Fairmont and that area. This is guy who's winning I mean, we could go into a discussion about the whole tournament system that you have in poultry farming in the United States, but they show his hats, and ones of Perdue farms, Dillon, South Carolina, so that's where my Sherwoods branches from. And I remember when that Purdue factory went in, but this guy was winning tournaments. I mean, he was, at least in a few years there, one of their best producers. And he is still racking up I mean, he says what, he's got 500,000 dollars in debt or something like that. So he said it's not indentured servitude, because indentured servants don't have $500,000 in debt hanging around their neck. You know. So it's definitely much, if the poultry and the meat is our widgets, these farmers are widgets.
Phil 30:19
The farmers aren't getting a good deal out of this at all. And one of the effects of factory farming, when you produce cheap meat, less money is going to rural communities. We had the opposite thing happening in Britain where some of the big integrated poultry producers, the egg producers told me well, we're moving towards free range eggs, we closed down a battery farm with quarter of a million hens in it. We signed contracts with 20 small farmers to keep 12,000 free range hens. And the value of the egg market has gone up hugely. It's been a benefit to industry, strangely a benefit for the retailers as well, because they take a margin of a higher value product, it means that people are paying the proper price of producing their food, instead of rock bottom. And the rock bottom means there's a price for the farmer, there's a price for the environment, there's a price for the animals that's not factored in. But this cheap food is very expensive for everybody else. And the thought that you get into all of this debt, and you have to go on working harder and harder for less and less money, and you're never going to get out of that. That's again, I'm sure nobody planned it that way. But it's very rough on the farmers as well as the animals. Yeah.
Matthew 31:42
So does Compassion in World Farming, do you do anything to support Craig? Because he's now, as we find out, he's out of farming, well, at least out of poultry farming. Do you know if there's anything that's done to help support some of these farmers that are whistle blowers like this?
Phil 31:57
I mean, the answer to that question is I don't know, I know he's looking into growing legumes and stuff like that. But I would have to ask my colleagues whether that relationship continues.
Matthew 32:12
Because what I was gonna get to, because right together, the clip before that one is another whistleblower. So we got veterinarian scientist named Jim Keane, Professor of veterinary epidemiology, and he used to work for the USDA, that's the United States Department of Agriculture. And he works at the Meat Animal Research Center or did, and he was a whistleblower. Now, we're not going to show the clip, and it's not because of exactly what it shows, it's just we don't have the time to be honest. But I highly recommend looking at this. But that's, when we saw you at the Global Health Film Festival, you said that was like, because I think you've seen all kinds of stuff, farmers' footage and things like that. But that was one that really hit you.
Phil 32:59
It came through, the Chair at that time said I noticed you blanched at this point. And the answer is a cruelty I hadn't come across, but basically they had, at the testing facility they wanted to know which was the most, they were testing the libido of their bulls, the most feral, to find out how's the libido of a bull, as they were tying up a heifer, a young cow, and seeing how many times he mentored her. And by this stage, they had half a dozen bulls in with her, and she simply collapsed onto the weight, her Achilles tendons were pulled. And that moment, I thought, the excruciating agony that that heifer went through. But it's not just the immense cruelty of it. It's the lack of respect for the animal and how can it be right to treat an animal like that?
Matthew 33:56
So essentially, this heifer got raped to death. And here's Jim and he's just seen too much. And he whistle blows. And so this film, as much as it is about factory farming, it's also about whistleblowers and people trying to do the right thing and then the resistance they face. I mean, I think it even came out, with the clip we just saw with Craig, someone who would advise people what to do and not do when you whistle blow, but this has changed his life. I mean, he didn't lose his job, but he had to move away, his marriage has failed, which says a lot about the power of this entrenched lobby, that is the producers, owners of this factory farm system.
Phil 34:45
Yes. And I mean, whistleblowers have to be brave, and they have to know they're taking risks. There are people who support them and they're shown in the film, advise them legally and so forth. It takes a great deal of courage to do that. And people have to do that with knowing what the situation is. And we, as a society, need to respect whistleblowers because we need them.
Matthew 35:11
I think this takes us to, I mean, we've been talking a lot about animal welfare, and rightfully so. And that's certainly what your focus is. But I think even if that isn't enough, we know that there are threats in failing to act, in terms of where this could all be headed. And I think that takes us in this winter of coronavirus. And as someone who lives where they had the first couple of confirmed cases in the UK, I think this is a good clip now to look at, if you don't mind, Phil, where we had to do it, I wanted to get Frank Reese in one of the clips, so we start off with some Frank Reese discusses this, but he also talks about what's happened with the kind of chickens they're breeding, and the antibiotics, and then we look at how this could create a global pandemic. So let's watch that clip now.
Speaker 2 36:29
I have done everything to bring those birds into existence, I have their parents their grandparents, I gather the eggs, I set the eggs I washed the eggs. I spent hours and days taking care of them as babies, and months being with them in the pasture. Some of the lines I have here, this truly is the last of them on earth. I find my faith in doing what I do in the connection with the earth and with these animals a very religious experience. Holiness doesn't mean you do great things, it means you do small things with great love. When I was a kid, there was a true love of the aesthetics. I would go and I would visit the farmers that I knew, and then you would look out over the field, and you will see a flock of barred rocks, you would see a flock of bourbon red turkeys. They would truly love the beauty of what they saw, of what they were doing. That is gone today in farming. There's no way you can love an animal that has been genetically engineered to die in six weeks.
Speaker 1 37:59
They've come to learn why annually, billions of birds are fed antibiotics. It's not that they're initially sick. It's so they can stand the filthy, overcrowded conditions they're raised in. It's because their bodies have been modified to grow four times more quickly than they would naturally, leading to diseases that make drugs essential. Nearly 80% of all antibiotics produced by the pharmaceutical industry are used for factory farm animals. This constant flow of antibiotics is a vital artery of industrial farming, as essential as air or water to the factory farm system. And it has led to the birth of so called superbugs. These bugs are already mutating to bypass the antibiotics designed to kill them. 10s of thousands of Americans now die annually from ailments once easily treated.
Speaker 9 38:53
The CAFO system, it's like a petri dish for resistant bacteria and flu viruses as well. It's a system that is just ripe for creating disease.
Speaker 10 39:05
Birds are a melting pot for all these viruses, they come together, they mix and match, you can get H5 and 1, H1 and 7. What's changing things now is that the industrialized poultry industry is spreading across the world. So now we routinely raise birds in flocks of several million on a single site in close proximity. It's very easy to get a build up with the pathogens that will go through the entire house in a matter of hours. The risk then comes that these viruses jump onto humans. And that's when you get human pandemic. And that's when we get worried about the likes of Spanish Flu back in 1918.
Speaker 1 39:48
The 1918 pandemic was unlike most influenzas that attack the weak. This one preyed on the young and healthy. The virus spread around the world traveling on boats and moved across the oceans. Estimates suggest that one third of the world fell ill. 25 million died in a 25 week period. By now the deadly strain of influenza have not disappeared from the planet, even though it had largely disappeared from our minds. Where is the virus now? Is it on route on the wings of a bird?
Unknown Speaker 40:32
Imagine 2500 cesspools like that, cooking in the hot summer sun in eastern North Carolina. And if you don't expect something bad to come out of that, well I got a bridge to show you.
Speaker 8 40:44
This is now some of the filthiest flood water ever seen in this country, in the mix millions of gallons of concentrated... Worried about disease, state officials are shipping in portable incinerators.
Speaker 10 40:57
Sooner or later, it might be swine flu, it might be Asian flu, something bad's gonna happen in America. Now, I'm not a scientist, but it takes an idiot not to realize that that's going to happen.
Speaker 2 41:09
That may be a rendering truck.
Speaker 5 41:13
We are creating a perfect storm. I mean, it's not if, it's when there's going to be another really dangerous flu virus.
Matthew 41:26
Okay, I think that's a yet another very powerful clip, qnd there's a lot there. But I think maybe first of all, start with, you know, there's talking about a global pandemic, but even before we get that, what could cause that, there's this whole issue about the need for massive amounts of antibiotics to even make this whole factory farming system viable. So Phil, I think you wanted to say something about that.
Phil 41:56
Yes. It's a key issue, that the use of antibiotics has been at a very high level. There have been major efforts more recently to reduce them with great difficulty. Because these very fast grown chickens are very given to diarrhea, and other bacterial diseases which make them ill. And simple experiments has been carried out in the Netherlands. They have this big campaign, Plofkip campaign, resulted in all the supermarkets going for slow grown chickens. So the 40% of the chickens that the Dutch now grow for their own market are slow growing, some of them have more space as well. The 60% that they're exporting to countries like mine Britain, are fast growing. And they've reduced antibiotic use in all of them, but one in three of the fast grown chickens eats antibiotics. One in 10 of the slow growing ones need antibiotics, and there's tantalizing evidence that those that have grown to with extra space and growing more slowly, it's down to one in 20. So, a really key effect of moving towards a slow growing chicken is less need to use antibiotics to keep them well. And it's one of those clear signs that they're less prone to get foodborne diseases like Campylobacter, again because they're more resistant, because they're more robust, because they're healthier. So that's one of the health aspects of factory farming, as it is depended on antibiotics. Now the impact of the way we treat our animals is also leading to a lot of these pandemics. Now they're not all caused by factory farming, but they tend to be caused by bad practice. So if we think of the coronavirus or SARS, which have recently come from China, these are the results of wild animal markets where they've got very, very stressed animals caught in the wild being sold live for food. And next to them, they have chickens and people in close proximity. And it looks like both of these highly deadly viruses have slipped from the wild animals into birds and so. There was also a big bad case of Spanish Flu at the end of the first world war, the film also goes on to talk about, where 50 million people I believe died, more than were killed in the First World War, at the end of the First World War, which was q result of a virus that has spread between chickens and pigs and people. And the numbers of animals that we keep, and increasingly, the more you have in one big farm, the more you've got the opportunity for new viruses to mutate, and occasionally one of them may prove to be a deadly one. So the more animals we keep, the worst we keep them, the more at risk we are, of more of these diseases. And if you ever want to go up, why should we keep fewer animals for meat, and try and eat a more plant based diet, it's not just because we're primates and that's what primates eat. It's not just because we want to look after the animals better. It's not just because we want to use less land for agriculture, so we have some more for nature. But it's also that we can want to reduce the risk of new viruses mutating, spreading, causing the kinds of problems that we're seeing at the moment.
Matthew 45:28
I think this gets to a very good point where we can maybe discuss about what are the realistic solutions, because it's easy enough for you and I, I mean, we're on the same page, I think on this one. I mean, I know I'm still a meat eater, you've chosen not to be but that's, you know, I think we're, we're in agreement about this sort of thing. But what are the realistic solutions? Because we've got this global demographic, so we've already discussed it, the population is going to get to by 2050 will be about 9 billion people in the world. We've got this booming global demand for food, and therefore an increasingly, it's increasing more rapidly even for me, because of changing lifestyles and tastes in places like China and India. We have the entrenched interests that are going to fight this as best they can, in terms of, I think, as someone in this film referred to it, it's very big, but big things can fall apart, sometimes more easily than small things. And, you know, this could be eventually a threat to the future of factory farming. And then, you know, I was talking about it last night, we were out to eat. So I'm being a lot more, I must say, astute about the things I buy. And I'm finding, you know, my grocery bill has definitely gone up. Now you could argue, none of us were ever meant to spend only three pound 50 or $5 for a chicken, but the reality is, if you want to stick to that sort of more humane diet of animals, it is more expensive, and a lot of people don't have, an extra 50 bucks or pounds a week is a decent amount in terms of family budget. So what do you think, what are the steps that need to be taken, keeping in mind what the demographics are showing, and the reality is we need to feed these 9 billion people in 2025?
Phil 47:38
Firstly, if we want to feed 9 billion people, we need to be able to feed them on less land each. And the quickest way to do that is to eat more plants, because every time you give plants to an animal, the animal loses three quarters of the protein, and possibly more than that of the energy, in that conversion. So this helps with your financial state as well. Because if you're buying a more expensive chicken, if somebody wants it, what if the chicken costs twice as much, we'll eat half as much. So in other words, if if we're eating good plant foods in place of those, and increasing those, which is better for our health anyway, that's going to deal with the cost, it's going to deal with how we can feed more people per acre. Ideally, you do that with a really good, healthy mixture of fruit, vegetables and nuts. I think all the nutritionists would agree, if you can increase those, and by definition, if you do that, you'll be eating less meat unless you're overeating, then you're going to be healthier. Some people are going to want to choose to go down the route of these really clever plant based meats. And I'm waiting for this to become commercial, before I say this is definitely going to happen. But the cell-based agriculture has also got great potential. It's enabling us to feed more people per acre without being cruel to an animal, and without having to use antibiotics and all of those things. So those are the kinds of routes, so you're persuading people to eat less but better. So, not every day, not every meal has to have meat in it, or animal products. And then when you do have it, you make more of it, and you buy your chicken, you make sure you eat the whole chicken, and don't leave bits of it, so you can make several meals out of it. So we need to go down that kind of route. And it's a healthier route, but it's a choice. Some people will choose not to do that. And that's the nature of free society.
Matthew 49:37
Well, indeed, and thank goodness for the free society, but at the same time I think humans are notorious. I've once had a professor in a totally unrelated subject, but just basically said it was a marketing class actually who said, you know, humans we like to eat things that aren't good for us. I know I should be eating more, higher plant-based diet, a lot of people know that, but you know, how do we, and I'm not talking about food taxes or anything like that, but how do you persuade people to change?
Phil 50:14
I think you do so of over a period of time. It helps if people know about the cruelties, but most people actually respond to feeling better about themselves. They're doing something better. And these things take time. I mean, I go back to the progress we've made with free range eggs in Britain in the 70s, w,hen I wanted to buy free range eggs, I had to go to a health food shop. The supermarket sold white eggs and brown eggs, and the brown eggs were more expensive, but they came from the same kind of battery cage. And then one of the supermarkets, Sainsbury's started to sell free range eggs, and gradually 3% per year of the market switched. So now the majority of shell eggs sold in supermarkets and all in some supermarkets are cage free, at least, if not free range. And that's the kind of approach I think we need with more people. We need to stop the idea that we need to sell more and more meat because that's good for business. We need to start spreading the idea from governments and elsewhere, and through school food, and all of those things, that we need a healthier diet. We need one that has moderate amounts of meat, that has good plant based alternatives. And we need to keep developing these increasingly better meat. I tried one of those Beyond Meat sausages the other day, and it brought back memories of my meat eating days as a small child. I didn't particularly like sausages, but you know how nostalgia works to make you feel good about things you use not to like. It was a nice feeling, it was there, and people are getting cleverer and cleverer. As I said earlier, it'd be better to eat lentils, and you can actually do great things with lentils, and people are really good in cooking, we need to train more people to cook, we need to teach nutrition, we need to do all of these things. But it's gradual. It's stage by stage, but it's everybody acting together and saying, actually, we need to change the direction we're going, not to tell people what to do. Let them work out. But this is a better way.
Matthew 52:25
And I think that's a that's a very good point. And I think maybe the proof that we're seeing, it comes up at the end of that film, and you do a little research as well, is that some of these big corporate producers, these poultry companies and others are buying steaks, or are making investments in some of these alternatives, and I don't think it's an effort to then shut them up or shut them down. I think it's about diversification, it's good business actually. If this is potentially where things are going, then you need to start diversifying, and they'll probably want to get it on the action as well. Because if they're driven by nothing else, it's certainly a bottom line.
Phil 53:09
Yes, they see themselves as protein producers and there's no longer this magic thing it has to be animal protein. Protein is protein.
Matthew 53:16
I mean, I think this also gets to, I've mentioned this before, I just think my own father, hello, dad, he's 90 years old, and he tells me when he was growing up, they had a chicken on a Sunday and every other meal of the week was, it wasn't that they thought of themselves as vegetarians, this is long before any hippies or any of the alternative lifestyles, it;s just, it was a lot of rice and beans and that sort of thing. So I guess it's probably from the 60s, 70s onwards, we've got to the state where we almost got into this mindset that every meal had to have some sort of meat based protein to it. And I think maybe we let Craig Watts, our poultry farmer in eastern North Carolina, have the last word, I think I'll paraphrase him, when he says that every day we vote three times a day with what we choose to eat. And I think that is something that we should all remember, not just in terms of animal welfare, but the sort of the planet we're leaving for our descendants, and also our own health. So unfortunately, that's the end of our time, Phil, and I've got someone telling me that we've got to wrap up. So I want to thank you for coming onto the show. How best can people follow Compassion in World Farming? We will have some links in the show notes, but what's the best way?
Phil 54:47
You can get onto our websites, you can ask to join our email lists, and browse or look or call, if you don't like the internet, ring in.
Matthew 55:01
Just to remind you that the film that we've been more than just served as a backdrop but which we've been discussing is Eating Animals came out in 2018. Another shoutout to Chris Quinn, the director and Simone Friedman, and also Matt Hird at Dartmouth Pictures here in the UK has the distribution rights, thank you for providing us with the high-rez film footage, and then again, the great hospitality here at Spiritland Studios. So, please remember to like us, and share us with your friends and family, wherever you happen to listen or watch podcasts. If you have any feedback, we'd love to hear from you. If you have ideas for topics, guests to have on the show, or just want to put questions forward that you'd like to have asked and answered, do get in touch. And this is Factual America signing off.
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