Vancouver Humane Society
An ‘ag-gag’ bill that targets animal advocates and whistleblowers will soon go to a vote. Tell your Member of Parliament to say NO to Bill C-275.
Article originally published in The Daily Hive.
Today, the Excelsior 4 (now 3) begin their trial by jury for exposing animal cruelty at a hog farm in Abbotsford; but there is no justice in this case.
The story of the Excelsior 4 began in 2019, when dozens of animal activists documented the suffering of pigs at Excelsior Hog Farm, advocating for media cameras to be allowed on the farm. Their aim was simple: to show the public how much suffering goes into the meat products they can find neatly packaged on grocery store shelves.
Footage recorded on the farm reveals a dire situation. In it, pigs can be seen crammed in crates barely larger than their bodies, unable to turn around. Some have bloody lacerations on their ears; some sport large growths around their eyes or abdomens; some struggle to stand on badly broken legs. Nursing mother pigs are separated by restrictive bars from their babies who languish, helpless and dying, on filthy floors. Anonymous staff shock the animals with what appears to be electric prods as they shy away, squealing, or cart dead piglets out of the barn in wheelbarrows.
In other videos, activists can be seen breaking down in tears as they document the bruised and bloodied bodies and broken spirits of animals widely understood to be as capable of learning and social behaviour as beloved family dogs.
Despite the overwhelming evidence of unimaginable suffering, Excelsior Hog Farm has still faced no legal repercussions in the three years since the footage was taken. The so-called justice system has instead targeted a small group of individuals who exposed this cruelty, known as the Excelsior 4.
One of the Excelsior 4, Geoff Regier, had charges stayed in pre-trial. The remaining three, Roy Sasano, Amy Soranno, and Nick Schafer, face a combined total of fourteen serious charges. If convicted, they could be looking at years in prison.
The fact that this case has proceeded to the trial stage while the perpetrators of egregious cruelty carry on free of consequences is a tragic testament to the priorities of the justice system. It is not on the side of the hundreds of millions of blameless animals who languish in illness and injury behind closed doors only to be slaughtered by gas, knife, or electrocution. It is certainly not on the side of the people expressing compassion for these defenseless animals. No; it is on the side of the corporate interests that perpetuate such inhumane treatment for the sake of the bottom line.
If the measure of a society truly is how we treat our most vulnerable members, where does this leave us?
The system has failed spectacularly in protecting any semblance of empathy for farmed animals and the humans who have tried to help them thus far. If we are to have any sense of justice in our society, the perpetrators of cruelty must be held accountable; and those who expose it must be celebrated, not punished.
The National Farm Animal Care Council’s (NFACC) “Codes of Practice” serve as guidelines for the care and handling of animals in Canada’s animal agriculture industry. The “Dairy Cattle Code of Practice” was last updated in 2009 and since that time cruelty cases, as recently as late last year at a B.C.-based dairy farm, have demonstrated serious systemic non-compliance in the dairy industry.
NFACC is considering changes to the Code of Practice and is asking for public feedback. Your input is needed prior to the January 27th deadline to help advocate for stronger protections for cows on dairy farms.
We’ve compiled a summary of 13 key points below – please be sure to submit constructive comments in your own words. Do not copy and paste the key points below, as duplicate comments will not be considered.
Note: If you don’t have time to comment on the specific sections, you can choose to leave general comments by clicking on the “general comments on the code” section, at the end of the survey.
Note: clicking the button below will open the link in a new tab. You can still return to this tab to review the key points.
Recent news coverage shares disturbing footage from an Abbotsford-based dairy, Cedar Valley Farms, showing dairy cows being violently beaten, kicked and dragged. This case is a recent example of long-standing issues within Canada’s animal agriculture system. In the last few years, there have been several high-profile undercover investigations in B.C. alone that have documented egregious animal cruelty.
Concerningly, rather than addressing the cruelty issues taking place within the industry, governments have begun introducing anti-whistleblower legislation (commonly referred to as ‘ag-gag’ laws) which effectively deters undercover investigations from taking place.
The VHS and other animal protection groups are calling for transparency and accountability within the animal agriculture industry. Specifically, change is needed to have government-mandated and proactively-enforced compliance with the National Farm Animal Care Council Codes of Practice, as well as third party auditing and video surveillance systems on farms across B.C.
In addition, the recent floods, along with the 2021 heat dome and wildfires, reiterate the importance of protections for farmed animals during disasters and emergencies. More than 651,000 farmed animals perished in the heat dome and more than 640,000 more are reported to have died in the recent floods. Emergency planning must include a feasible strategy for urgent animal evacuations to prevent the kind of mass suffering we have seen.
2. You can raise awareness of this issue by sharing this recent op-ed featured in the Daily Hive.
Content warning: the op-ed contains photos and descriptions of animal cruelty in the dairy industry.
3. You can make personal changes to take a stand against dairy cruelty. The blog linked below highlights a few staff favourite dairy-free tips and products!
4. This t-shirt, which features a half cow and half dog face, reminds us to be kind to every kind. All proceeds go toward creating a kinder world for animals.
With your help, we can see a change for the better for dairy cows and other farmed animals.
Farmed animals are among the most directly impacted by human activity, with more than 800 million land animals raised and killed for food every year in Canada. Transportation is one of the most stressful activities for farmed animals. Every year in Canada, approximately 14 million animals suffer injuries and 1.6 million die during transport journeys that are often long-distance and in extreme weather conditions.
In February 2019, the federal government announced updates to the farmed animal transport regulations, set to come into force a year later in February 2020. Unfortunately, the new regulations were hardly an improvement on the previous ones that had been in place since 1977. For example, only minor amendments were made to the food, water and rest (FWR) intervals for animals during transport.
Also concerning was the announcement that there would be a two-year delay (until February 2022) for full enforcement of the updated FWR intervals, including issuing large-scale fines, which is known to be the most effective form of enforcement when it comes to changing the actions of companies. This decision was intended to give the industry more time to adjust the shorter FWR intervals and to implement changes to infrastructure and marketing practices needed to meet the requirements. During this time, the Canadian Food Inspection Agency (CFIA) took a soft approach, focusing on educating people about the new requirements.
As the deadline for this two-year delay in full enforcement approaches, it is possible that further delays are being considered. Please join the VHS and other animal protection organizations and advocates in calling on the federal government to prioritize full enforcement of the farmed animal transport rules.
Please tell the Minister of Agriculture; the Minister of Health; and the President of the Canadian Food Inspection Agency to fully enforce the Transport of Animals regulations, including issuing appropriately sized fines.
Today marks the 48th annual Earth Day celebration and around the world events and efforts will be taking place to draw attention to the need for stronger environmental protections.
As the global community reflects today on the increasingly sensitive state of the planet and what role we as individuals can play in tackling what can sometimes feel like an overwhelming issue, it’s important to remember that every time we sit down to eat, we have an opportunity to stand up for a better world.
Animal agriculture has been identified as a leading contributor not only to climate change, but to air and water pollution, water use, land degradation, deforestation and biodiversity decline.
In fact, animal agriculture is responsible for more greenhouse gas emissions than the entire global transportation sector. This is because animal-based foods are incredibly inefficient to produce and are very resource-intensive. The processes involved when it comes to raising, transporting and slaughtering animals for food are responsible for potent greenhouse gas emissions including carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide. To put this in perspective, beef production requires 20 times more land and emits 20 times more greenhouse gas emissions per unit of edible protein than common plant-based protein sources such as beans, peas and lentils.[1]
The production of animal-based foods also requires and pollutes large amounts of water. Agriculture accounts for 92% of our global freshwater footprint; approximately one third relates to animal products.[2] The water footprint per gram of protein for milk, eggs and chicken is approximately 1.5 times larger than for pulses (beans, lentils, peas). For beef, it is six times larger than for pulses.[3] The sheer volume of animal waste, along with fertilizers and pesticides used for feed crops, as well as hormones and antibiotics used on livestock create major water pollution issues. These pollutants seep into waterways, threatening water quality, ecosystems and animal and human health.[4]
Meanwhile, animal agriculture is a key contributor to land degradation and deforestation, with one-quarter of the earth’s land surface (excluding Antarctica) being used as pastureland. [5] The conversion of natural habitat to accommodate livestock and feed crops puts immense pressure on wildlife that struggle to survive in increasingly fragmented and degraded environments. Ineffective and ill-informed cull programs put additional pressure on predator populations, due to the perceived threat they pose to livestock profits.
While our diet can be a major part of the problem when it comes to protecting the planet, that also means it is a crucial part of the solution. A 2016 Oxford Martin School study found that the adoption of global dietary guidelines would cut food-related emissions by 29%, vegetarian diets by 63%, and vegan diets by 70%.[6] By reducing and eliminating resource-intensive animal products from our diet and supporting efforts to make more sustainable plant-based foods widely accessible, we can drastically decrease our individual and societal environmental footprints.
This Earth Day, join the growing number of people around the world who are recognizing the power behind what we put on our plate. Take our Meatless Monday pledge for recipe ideas and download our Live Well booklet to learn more about a plant-based diet. You can also support VHS’s efforts to introduce more healthy, humane and sustainable plant-based menu options in schools and other institutions.
[1] http://www.wri.org/blog/2016/04/sustainable-diets-what-you-need-know-12-charts
[2] http://waterfootprint.org/media/downloads/Gerbens-et-al-2013-waterfootprint-poultry-pork-beef_1.pdf
[3] http://waterfootprint.org/en/water-footprint/product-water-footprint/water-footprint-crop-and-animal-products/
[4] http://www.fao.org/3/a-i7754e.pdf
[5] http://www.wri.org/blog/2016/04/sustainable-diets-what-you-need-know-12-charts
[6] https://www.oxfordmartin.ox.ac.uk/news/201603_Plant_based_diets
Two recent news stories underscore why factory farming must end and how some powerful interests are working to make that happen.
Last week, A new study found compelling and disturbing evidence that a novel form of the dangerous superbug Methicillin-Resistant Staphylococcus Aureus (MRSA) can spread to humans through consumption or handling of contaminated poultry.
“We’ve known for several years that people working directly with livestock are at increased risk for MRSA infections, but this is one of the first studies providing compelling evidence that everyday consumers are also potentially at risk,” said one of the authors of the study.
Intensive farming practices, which often involve giving food animals low doses of antibiotics to encourage fast growth and compensate for overcrowding and unsanitary living conditions, has led to the spread of superbugs like MRSA. Those same conditions, which billions of animals around the world must endure, are the reason animal advocates have called for an end to factory farming on animal welfare grounds.
Animal suffering and dangerous superbugs are, of course, not the only unwanted consequences of industrialized animal agriculture. Intensive farming also degrades our environment, including contributing 14.5 per cent of all greenhouse gases to global climate change. It uses up huge amounts of land, water and energy. And, not least, its end product is meat – the overconsumption of which can be damaging to human health.
The other related news story acknowledges these problems and offers solutions. This week, a group of 40 investors managing $1.25 trillion in assets launched a campaign to encourage 16 global food companies to shift from selling meat to selling plant protein. “The world’s over reliance on factory farmed livestock to feed the growing global demand for protein is a recipe for a financial, social and environmental crisis,” said the investor leading the initiative.
The meat and livestock sector is no longer just the target of grassroots activists and animal advocates. The world, including the world of finance, is waking up to just how unsustainable this industry is.
Will food science provide an escape from our unsustainable and inhumane dependency on meat consumption and animal agriculture?
Trying to stay positive about the future of farmed animals is not easy for the animal activists, ethical vegetarians and environmentalists who care about the animal cruelty and ecological damage caused by factory farms.
While some might be cheered by the decline in meat consumption in North America and Europe (which only applies to red meat, not poultry), the projections for consumption elsewhere, especially in China, are dispiriting.
One recent study found that per capita meat consumption in China has increased by 400 per cent since 1971 and is still growing. (But the Chinese still only eat 55 kg of meat per person each year, compared to 107 kg for Americans.) According to the United Nations, total demand for animal products in developing countries is expected to more than double by 2030. This demand will almost inevitably be met by increasing numbers of large factory farms, with all their inherent cruelty and damage to the environment.
One proposed way of avoiding this dark future is to replace meat with sustainable plant-based products. New processes, market trends and technical innovations in some developed countries suggest we might yet escape a massive increase in animal suffering and environmental degradation caused by the growth in intensive animal agriculture. The “fake meat” industry is not without its critics and some vegetarians and vegans warn against heavily processed food, arguing that traditional, natural sources of protein (e.g. beans, lentils,) are the best alternatives to meat. Others contend that creating highly palatable, convenient meat substitutes is the only way to draw modern meat eaters away from their ingrained attraction to sausages, bacon, burgers, hot dogs, chicken wings and steaks.
Europe appears to be leading the way in the development of meat alternatives, with the Netherlands most recently announcing the creation of a “steak” made from vegetable protein. Scientists at Wageningen University produced the steak using Shear cell technology, an energy-efficient process that researchers claim reproduces the fibrous texture of steak. A Dutch firm, The Vegetarian Butcher (which helped fund the research) is already a highly successful purveyor of meat substitutes, with more than 1000 dealers and distributors across the Netherlands.
In famously meat-loving Germany, sales of new meat substitutes are increasingly popular, showing double-digit growth. Even meat companies see the potential. “Surprisingly, German companies that are traditionally associated with manufacturing meat products are now entering this market for meat substitutes, going so far as to launch meat imitations using the same brands as their meat-filled counterparts,” says one recent report. The director of a German meat company recently referred to sausages as “the cigarette of the future” and said that he wanted at least 30 per cent of the company’s sales to come from its vegetarian range by 2019.
In North America, companies like Beyond Meat, Hampton Creek and Gardein have already tapped into the growing consumer interest in alternatives to animal-based products. Market analysts predict that alternative protein sources could claim up to a third of the protein market by 2054.
All these companies have had to overcome technical hurdles as well as consumer and media scepticism. Yet, science appears to be succeeding when product development hits a wall. For example, pea protein has presented a problem to companies seeking to use it in plant-based products because of its bitter taste. But recently, food researchers found a way to reduce the bitterness, making the taste neutral – a small development but one that opens the door to using this non-animal protein in a range of new food products. If the meat alternative industry continues to resolve such issues, they could yet end up with products that will appeal to the most diehard carnivores.
It is difficult to know whether the new plant-based food industry is the answer to curtailing the horrors of factory farming, but with global meat consumption and production still rampant, it may be the best chance we have.
Our friends at the Canadian Coalition for Farm Animals (CCFA) are running a great campaign to help chickens in Canada – and they need your help.
CCFA has launched a new website about chicken farming, transport and slaughter. It includes an important take action page that enables compassionate Canadians to contact chicken farmers and grocers to raise concerns about the deplorable conditions and treatment that chickens in Canada endure. It’s a quick and easy way to make a difference in the lives of chickens, often described as the most abused animals on the planet.
Both egg-laying hens and chickens raised for meat suffer on factory farms. VHS recently called attention to the suffering of meat chickens in op-eds in the Vancouver Sun and the Toronto Star.
We support any action that will alleviate the suffering of farmed animals. Through our ChickenOUT! project, we urge consumers who buy eggs to ensure they are certified organic, which are cage-free and have the highest welfare standards. Better still, consumers can reduce or eliminate egg consumption by taking advantage of egg replacement products. VHS also encourages switching to a plant-based diet. Reducing or eliminating meat consumption reduces the need for cruel factory farming. Our Meatless Monday initiative is a great way to start.
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Guest post by David Steele
There is a promising trend in food these days. Meat substitutes are on the rise. More and more plant-based meats that look and taste like their cognate animal products are coming to market. They have been in the news big time lately. The New York Times, The Guardian, Time Magazine and Slate are just a few of the publications that have run feature stories in recent months.
Most recently, the New York Times’ Nicholas Kristof wrote effusively about the latest products. High in protein and other nutrients, these plant-based meats, Kristof tells us, are nearly indistinguishable from cooked animal flesh. What a wonderful development! As The Guardian bluntly states, modern animal agriculture is one of the worst crimes in history. Soon, just maybe, we’ll be able to consign that crime to the past.
The vast majority of animals raised for meat, eggs and dairy today are raised on factory farms. Debeaking, tail docking, castration, even tooth cutting – all without anesthetics – are standard practice. Dairy cows have their calves taken from them within hours of giving birth. Egg laying hens live six or eight to a cage; each has less than a standard 8½ x 11” sheet of paper’s ‘floor’ space to her. Pregnant and mother pigs live individually in cages so tiny that they can’t even turn around. As the Guardian article points out, “The fate of animals in such industrial installations has become one of the most pressing ethical issues of our time.”
And the severe problems don’t end with the animals’ hellish lives. Raising livestock and the grain and soybeans to feed them is easily the biggest contributor to rainforest destruction; credible analyses indicate that animal agriculture is responsible for roughly 15 to 25% of global warming. And animal agriculture is grossly inefficient.
As Cornell University’s David Pimentel calculates it, the way we raise meat, it takes some 28 calories of fossil fuel to generate one calorie of food value. This is enormously wasteful. And worse, because so much grain and soy is fed to animals instead of humans, the price of basic staples is raised, pricing out hundreds of millions of the world’s poor (see, e.g., this book review). In effect, we’re throwing away the majority of the protein and calories that humans could have taken in. Clearly, we can’t allow this to go on. Not for long, anyway.
In step the meat substitutes
That is why the appearance of ever more meat substitutes is such a very good thing. As Kristof says, “If the alternatives to meat are tasty, healthier, cheaper, better for the environment and pose fewer ethical challenges, the result may be a revolution in the human diet.” And he may very well be right. Tech giant Google wanted to bet big time on it this summer. They made a $200,000,000+ offer for one of the new startups – Stanford biochemist Patrick Brown’s Impossible Foods. Brown’s product won’t even be out until next year! Google, by the way, was turned down; Impossible Foods has raised $108,000,000 on its own instead.
Dr. Brown’s big innovation? He’s adding plant-derived heme to his new veggie burgers. Heme, he argues, is responsible for much of the flavour of meat. If Google’s interest in it is any indicator, he’s probably right. His products will join those of Beyond Meat and the older Tofurky, Yves, Gardein, Field Roast, etc., etc., etc., on store shelves soon.
All of these substitutes for animal products save animals from horrific lives and reduce the environmental footprint of our meals. There are other products on the horizon, though, that are nowhere near as beneficial. They are not even benign.
“Lab Meat”
Mark Post and colleagues at the Maastricht University in the Netherlands and New York City’s Modern Meadow are attempting to make meat outside of animals’ bodies. Beef seems to be their main goal for now. This is not artificial meat, per se, but rather meat made by growing cells taken from animals. On the surface, it sounds like a great thing. But, when you dig deeper, you see that it is nothing of the sort.
The first lab meat burger was made, cooked and eaten a couple of years ago. Constructed from 20,000 tiny strips of muscle cells, the thing was reportedly on the flavourless side and cooked up well only with the liberal use of butter. It was lauded by Peter Singer, author of Animal Liberation, as the world’s first cruelty-free burger.
Unfortunately, in this case Dr. Singer was wrong. Immense cruelty went into it – and goes into the continued work on it and its competitors.
Lab meat is made by taking cells from the bodies of living animals and growing them in a liquid medium. The end result is short strands of muscle-like tissue that are then stuck together. Post, at least so far, manually assembles them; Modern Meadow is trying 3D printing.
Growing those cells requires serum. Serum is the liquid left over when all of the cells are removed from blood. The serum used to make these burgers comes from fetal calves and, in later stages of the cells’ growth, from horses. Fetal calf serum is ‘harvested’ by killing a pregnant cow, cutting her still living calf from her belly and then puncturing the calf’s still beating heart. About 1 litre of serum is obtained from each calf. Producing those 20,000 strips in the first ‘lab meat’ burger probably required hundreds of liters of the stuff. That’s hundreds of fetal calves taken from slaughtered cows … all for one 4 oz. burger.
Modern Meadow says that it gets more meat from a liter of serum but their claim (as stated in The Guardian) of getting 22 lbs of meat per litre is outrageously high. I doubt very much that anyone with any experience in tissue culture believes that they’re really getting even a tenth of that. My guess would be more like a fiftieth. In any case, if one wants to grow ‘meat’ in the lab, one needs the serum.
And, sadly, the prospects for doing away with that serum in the process are bleak. Serum contains enormous numbers of growth factors, hormones and proteins necessary for cell growth. Expert scientists have been trying for decades to come up with an alternative but so far none matches serum in promoting cell growth and all are wildly more expensive (in dollar terms, at least) as well.
Still, you might say, it’s not nice to animals but it must be better for the environment. You might cite the paper that says so. It loudly claims that ‘lab meat’ would require 99% less land, 82-96% less water, even 7-45% less energy than meat produced from animals raised in Europe.
True, that paper is out there. It got a lot of publicity. Unfortunately, it also is just about the worst example of a failure of peer review that I have ever seen. The study is deeply flawed. Its assumptions are highly questionable, to put it mildly: i.e., that the meat would be raised as free cells in unheated vats, that 80% of the water used to grow the cells would be recycled without treatment, and that the cells would be fed entirely with cyanobacteria. None of these assumptions are even close to realistic.
There is not the slightest chance that meat can be grown like that. Instead, the complex mix of nutrients, growth factors and hormones found in fetal calf serum will be required. The media will have to be heated to a constant 98 or 100 degrees Fahrenheit (37-38 degrees Celsius) for the cells to grow; oxygen will have to be delivered and waste products constantly removed. Reusing even 1% of the water without treatment is extremely unlikely.
And, because there is no immune system in cell culture, large amounts of antibiotics and antifungal drugs will be needed to keep the growing meat from being over run with germs. The possibility of viral infections will be high.
Beyond those problems, growing something that approximates the beef or pork or chicken that people expect will be a daunting task. The meat that Mark Post is producing is only 100-200 micrometres (1/250th to 1/125th of an inch) thick and roughly an inch long. It is nothing like what most people would call meat.
To grow a steak or a piece of chicken will require some sort of degradable scaffold with a complex vascular system capable of bringing food and oxygen to the growing cells and taking waste and carbon dioxide away. 3D printing may help, but it’s hard to imagine a meat anything like what people think of as meat emerging from this process. (I suppose that it might be pulled off by putting the animal cells into one of the excellent plant-based meats, but what would be the point of that?!).
All in all, this seems insane. It is true that animal agriculture needs to go. But it does not make sense to attempt to replace it with an enormously expensive high tech system that, if it does work, is highly likely to require major inputs of blood serum. There is little chance, even, that a venture like this will ever be economically viable.
And there’s no need. If one feels the need for something that tastes like meat, there are already plenty of plant-based alternatives available. Field Roast, Gardein, Tofurky, Yves, etc. As noted above, ever more flavourful alternatives are on the horizon.
By the way, there is a new cheese alternative on the horizon, too. This one will even have plant (actually, yeast)-based casein in it. The cows’ milk protein has been engineered into the yeast. It’s not as scary as it sounds.
And, if you must eat meat, do the responsible thing. Eat the plant-based stuff.
David Steele is a molecular biologist retired in 2013 from the Faculty of Medicine at the University of British Columbia. He has also held faculty positions at Cornell and Queen’s Universities. Dr. Steele has been Earthsave Canada‘s President since 2009. He is also a regular contributing writer to the Earthsave Canada newsletter and an occasional contributor to various other publications.