Effort to improve farm-animal treatment expands globally

Europe led the United States in the move to adopt more humane practices. Now a small movement is stirring even in food-giant China.

 To envision where the farm-animal welfare movement might go next in the United States, experts look to Europe

Many reforms hitting the US today were rolled out there roughly 10 years ago. Wire battery cages for chickens, for example, disappeared from the European Union in 2012, after a 13-year phaseout. 

“In Europe today, farrowing crates are the discussion,” says Thomas Parsons, a University of Pennsylvania animal science expert, referring to crates that immobilize sows as they are nursing newborn piglets. Just before giving birth, sows are moved from gestation crates into farrowing crates to protect piglets from getting pinned or crushed when their hulking mothers flop down to nurse.

Farrowing crates confine sows only for the brief few weeks that they are nursing, but the Pew Commission on Industrial Farm Animal Treatment deemed them to be as inhumane as gestation crates.

EU consumers have also demanded an end to the unanesthetized castration of male piglets, and EU swine-industry representatives have now agreed to end all surgical castrations by 2018.

Europe may be moving more aggressively on these issues in part because of treaties that define animals, including “food animals,” as more than just commodities. Europe’s 2009 Treaty of Lisbon requires that when signatory countries write new laws, they acknowledge animals as “sentient beings.”

But while both Europeans and Americans are pushing back against the most extreme forms of animal confinement, US food producers are preparing to expand as the demand for meat surges in emerging economies. China already farms more than half the world’s food animals, and the Chinese meat giant Shuanghui International bought Smithfield Foods this year to help feed the country’s rapidly growing middle class.

Yet that same Chinese middle class is also pressing for more humane treatment of animals. Grass-roots animal-protection groups are cropping up across China, and this spring the country’s Ministry of Education announced China’s first university animal welfare curriculum. In June, the country stopped requiring animal testing for Chinese cosmetic products.

Meanwhile, Humane Society International is poised for an aggressive expansion into several Latin American and Asian countries in response to a globalizing food economy. One question is what US meat, dairy, and egg producers – facing new animal welfare reforms at home – will do with their domestic operations as they expand to sell far more meat overseas. 

You've read  of  free articles. Subscribe to continue.
Real news can be honest, hopeful, credible, constructive.
What is the Monitor difference? Tackling the tough headlines – with humanity. Listening to sources – with respect. Seeing the story that others are missing by reporting what so often gets overlooked: the values that connect us. That’s Monitor reporting – news that changes how you see the world.

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

QR Code to Effort to improve farm-animal treatment expands globally
Read this article in
https://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Society/2014/1207/Effort-to-improve-farm-animal-treatment-expands-globally
QR Code to Subscription page
Start your subscription today
https://www.csmonitor.com/subscribe