Tara Vander Dussen Loves to Lie About Factory Farms

How do you tell that a defender of factory farming is lying? Their lips are moving.

Tara Vander Dussen has a piece, as short as it is dishonest, about factory farms not existing. It was written in the service of defending the existing farming industry and is rather typical of factory-farming apologia—insanely misleading, with nearly every sentence being either flatly false or in some way misleading, and filled with confident yet baseless assertions, and all done in an attempt to get people not to think too hard about the tortured animals that adorn their plates. Dussen initially claims “In fact, factory farms really aren’t a thing in real life. Of all the farms in the United States, 98% are family-owned and operated just like ours.”

The first claim is totally false. I’ve documented the horrifying mistreatment of most animals in the U.S. here. For example, most chickens are genetically engineered to grow very quickly, resulting in their constant agony. As the number of animals killed annually has increased, the amount of farmland has decreased, for animals are crammed in ever tighter spaces, and most animals now come from particularly enormous factory farms. As for the cruel conditions, it isn’t hard to find data on this. Rachels, for instance, notes “in America, nine out of ten pregnant sows live in “Gestation crates.” These pens are so small that the pigs can hardly move.”

These conditions have been extensively documented and aren’t seriously challenged by those who are being intellectually honest, rather than firing off a few hundred words for their gullible audience. Rachels reports, of chickens, for instance, that the vast majority are raised in dark windowless sheds that reek of shit and ammonia. Singer and Mason, in their book, The Way We Eat: Why Our Food Choices Matter, similarly note:

Virtually all the chicken sold in America-more than 99 percent, according to Bill Roenigk, vice-president of the National Chicken Council-comes from factory-farm production similar to that used by Tyson Foods.

They later note:

Chickens have been bred over many generations to produce the maximum amount of meat in the least amount of time. They now grow three times as fast as chickens raised in the 1950s while consuming one-third as much feed.

Was this claim fabricated, as perhaps Van Dussen would claim? No, it came from a study by Havenstein and Qureshi that analyzed the effect of their diet on growth. Another study by Kestin et al found that 90% of broiler chickens had leg problems, on account of their inability to move around, standing on metal mesh all the time, and their immense weight. Singer and Mason add:

Enter a typical chicken shed and you will experience a burning feeling in your eyes and your lungs. That's the ammonia-it comes from the birds' droppings, which are simply allowed to pile up on the floor without being cleaned out, not merely during the growing period of each flock, but typically for an entire year, and sometimes for several years. High ammonia levels give the birds chronic respiratory disease, sores on their feet and hocks, and breast blisters. It makes their eyes water, and when it is really bad, many birds go blind.

This all seems like the work of factory farms, multiply attested by report after report. In the book Dominion, Matthew Scully notes:

Giant livestock operations become unavoidable as human population grows and economic competition accelerates. Four companies now produce 81 percent of cows brought to market, 73 percent of sheep, half our chickens, and some 60 percent of hogs.

So on the one hand, we have extensive documentation from study after study, spanning many decades. On the other, we have Dussen asserting, with no evidence, that it’s all false, not even bothering to engage with the contrary evidence.

Dussen’s article was written with the confidence of one who didn’t expect to be fact-checked. Take her second claim, for instance, that “Of all the farms in the United States, 98% are family-owned and operated just like ours.” It’s true that most farms are small, but most animals are in the bigger farms. That’s because the bigger farms are, by definition, bigger—they have more animals. This is thus a bit like claiming that Nazi death camps weren’t a real problem because the vast majority of camps in Germany at the time were summer camps—it’s true that the total number of Nazi death camps was low, but they each killed so many people that their death toll was in the millions. Dussen’s claim is thus an almost comical example of lying with statistics, thinking no one would think through her claims for more than 5 seconds, or look into the fact that about 99% of animals in the U.S. are factory farmed.

And size, big or small, doesn’t determine cow care or environmental impacts. Just because a farming operation is larger does not mean the level of respect for the animals or land changes. Dairies of all sizes strive for the best cow care practices and are working toward our industry-wide goal of being carbon neutral or better by 2050!

It’s true that it’s theoretically possible for animals to be treated well in big farms. However, if one looks at what actually goes on in the big farms, almost all of them involve utterly torturous conditions, as I’ve documented earlier. Dussen claims that dairy farms “strive for the best cow care practices.” Apparently striving for best practices involves repeatedly artificially inseminating cows, physically abusing them, branding them, constantly milking them to the point their utters become severely swollen, taking away their babies and selling them for meat, forcing them to endure cruel outside conditions, and packing them “into a tractor-trailer so tightly they can’t lie down to rest,” so that “cows in every condition—sick, pregnant, lame, newborn—can go the entire journey without fresh water.” These are not aberations, but standard industry practices. Separation, for instance, is practiced by nearly every farm, despite the fact that it “has long-term effects on social behavior.”

Van Dussen’s article is just one particularly annoying example of farmers acting like those opposed to modern farming practices are ignorant of the basic practices. These articles tend to brazenly assert, totally without evidence, that animals are treated well, and ignore the mountain of well-documented contrary evidence. This only flies because the industry has nothing to say to justify its hideously revolting practices and desperately hopes you won’t check their claims. It would be almost amusing the sheer absurdity of their claims were it not for the fact that they help prop up a ghastly, torturous industry, that brings about the death, every year, of around ten times as many animals as there ever have been people on earth.