000909 McDonald's Action Throws Spotlight on Farm Practices

Chicago, IL - The recent “Be Kind to Hens” campaign by hamburger giant McDonald's could put pressure on other food companies and on farmers to change rearing practices that critics say are cruel to animals.

Many Americans think of farm animals as being raised outdoors in wide open spaces. But more typical are huge corporate farms where pigs and chickens are confined indoors and cattle live in outside lots.

There are no U.S. federal laws regulating living conditions, or daily handling practices of farm animals, government and industry leaders said. And this situation has led to practices such as those highlighted last month by McDonald's Corp. as being inhumane: small cage sizes for laying hens and the withholding of food and water to force moulting, which increases egg production, critics have said.

People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals said Wednesday it would suspend for a year a campaign against McDonald's because it acted to improve conditions for hens on farms supplying the fast-food restaurant chain with eggs.

But the animal welfare group said it was considering targeting several other major restaurant and grocery chains, including Kroger Co., Albertson's Inc., Safeway Inc., Diageo Plc's Burger King, Wendy's International Inc. and KFC chicken, a unit of Tricon Global Restaurants Inc.

In the U.S. poultry industry, which is dominated by a few large producers, most chickens are housed in cages in buildings where the environment is controlled by computer.

The pork industry is rapidly moving in the same direction as poultry, with most pigs raised in large buildings where computers control temperature, humidity and air quality. As they grow, they are moved as a group from one building to the next, from birth to slaughter. Animal rights advocates said confinement leads to some cruel practices such as lopping off pigs' tails to discourage them from biting each other out of boredom and placing sows in narrow crates during gestation that limit their movement.

Some stages of the U.S. cattle industry are less dominated by confinement. Most calves begin their lives in open pastures then are moved to lots with hundreds or thousands of others to be fed intensively for slaughter. One of the practices spotlighted by animal rights groups in handling cattle is using electric prods to move them from one pen to another.

While rearing practices are not regulated, the U.S. government does have the power to intervene in cases of cruel slaughtering practices under a 1958 law. And the Food and Drug Administration could step in if a practice was deemed to harm public health, said Alice Thaler, a member of a U.S. Agriculture Department's task force on animal well being.

“You're dealing with something that is subjective: What is humane?” Thaler said.

One issue is whether advances in genetics have been so dramatic they have led to cruel outcomes. For example, critics say some chickens and turkeys bred for meat are so heavy their legs cannot support them. And breeding has produced some animals that are naturally nervous.

“Yes, we've got to have high-producing animals,” said Temple Grandin, assistant professor of Animal Science at Colorado State University. “But we don't need to have animals with lameness problems because they're too large for their own bone structure or they're hard to handle and transport because they are so excitable.”

Animal rights advocates said agriculture, in the pursuit of tasty meat and eggs at cheap prices, has crossed the line of decency.

“Factory farming would not be possible without the routine use of antibiotics and other drugs,” said Bradley Miller, national director of the San Rafael, CA-based Humane Farming Association. “Only with drugs can animals survive the overcrowding, stress and severe deprivation.”

But Grandin, who has worked in the beef industry for 25 years and in the pork industry for 20 years, said current livestock rearing practices also protect animals from cold and heat, and from parasites, vicious fighting and cannibalism.

In a recent study, Grandin estimated that 75% of all livestock producers, transporters and slaughter plant operators did a good job of preventing abuses such as rough handling, beating an animal, starving an animal, failing to provide shelter, or shackling and hoisting an animal prior to slaughter.

“However, 10% allow these abuses to occur frequently and another 10% occasionally have problems with animal abuse,” she said. “This is an area where the industry needs to clean up its house and take action against the bad operators.”

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