Animal Agriculture is Very Sick

Despite the unconfirmed Wuhan lab leak theories, most scientists believe that COVID-19 came to humans from animals. Whatever the final prognosis is on COVID-19, many other diseases in recent memory, like H1N1, SARS, and Ebola, have spread to humans through animals, and it’s clear the risk is growing of even more severe future pandemics.

Text and Art by Meg Morrigan

The pandemic has broadened the public debate around how to prevent such zoonotic diseases, shedding new light on the profound public health and ecological costs of modern industrialized animal agriculture. Capitalist globalization has brought a dramatic expansion and intensification of industrial animal farming methods that is already incompatible with a sustainable future, and it’s getting worse fast. Any serious vision of an eco-socialist future needs to include a fundamental overhaul of industrial animal farming methods and a massive scaling back of the industry.

A Globalized, Capitalist Mode of Farming

Though humans have eaten animals for thousands of years, it is only very recently in our collective history that capitalism brought about the scale of industrialized domination over animals and habitable lands that characterizes our current food system. Over the last 200 years most of the planet has moved from subsistence or small-scale farming and hunting to a globalized capitalist mode of farming. Animals are now bred to be meatier, more docile, and dependent on human intervention to survive. Animals are raised in increasingly intense factory farms where they have little to no room to move freely, living in cramped and dirty conditions that breed illnesses; and to combat those illnesses Big Pharma develops increasingly strong antibiotics, which in turn make any new diseases that develop even more treatment resistant and dangerous.

Then either by being in close proximity to infected animals or by eating them, humans become infected by the new virulent diseases which wreak havoc on our immune system and are difficult to treat and cure. It is incredibly important to point out that this is in no way a “foreign” problem that only happens in populations who eat animals not considered traditional in the US, like bats or chimpanzees, but is just as much a problem in the “West” with chickens, pigs, and cows and our animal agriculture industry.

Finally, as climate change continues, the range of diseases that thrive in warm climates grows, posing a growing deadly threat.

From an ecological point of view, animal agriculture is a disaster. Precious ecosystems and natural habitats are destroyed to make room for either animal farms directly or for the massive amounts of soy and corn that are grown primarily to feed farmed animals. The deforestation of the Amazon rainforest–the world’s most important carbon-sink outside the oceans–remains the prime example. In the last eighteen years alone more than 8% of remaining rainforest and Indigenous land have been slashed and burned, largely to make room for cattle ranches and soy fields for cow feed.In fact, animal agriculture is the largest industry in the world by land use: half of the world’s habitable land is used for agriculture, of which 77% is used for animal agriculture, including pastureland and land used to grow animal feed. This is all the more damning when you see that animal agriculture only provides about 18% of global caloric needs. Additionally, animal agriculture directly contributes to greenhouse gas production and thus directly to global warming. The food industry as a whole makes up about a quarter of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions, with animal agriculture making up the lion’s share of that. Animal agriculture also drives desertification, air pollution, water pollution, soil erosion, and oceanic dead zones.

A Tragedy for Labor

Animal agriculture is also a tragedy for labor. On the one hand, increased industrialization has by and large decimated agricultural employment, while the jobs that do exist are increasingly dangerous and exploitative. While research into the mental and physical health of slaughterhouse workers is still limited, the research that does exist shows workers in slaughterhouses report higher rates of PTSD, PISD (perpetration-induced stress disorder), and SPD (serious psychological distress) than the population at large. Anecdotal reports and bold investigative reporting shed light on the high levels of workplace injury, depression, anxiety, and suicidal ideation.

So, under this capitalistic enterprise of exploitation of animals for human taste and private profit, public health, workers rights, and our climate future are sold out at every turn.

We need a food system that is not beholden to private profits, but rather recognizes healthy food and environmental sustainability as a right for all people. Such a system can only be realized through taking big agribusiness corporations into public ownership to democratically plan global food production. Workers and communities need to be in control of every aspect of the food industry directly, so that decisions can be made that properly prioritize the health and well-being of all people, not the profit margins of a few.

However, even a fully socialized animal agriculture industry, if it maintained the same scale and methods, would still be devastating for the environment and human health. In order to avoid the +1.5 degrees Celsius of warming that would signal climate catastrophe and slow the spread of zoonotic diseases, we need to redefine our relationship with the natural world to be one of regeneration, not exploitation and extraction.

A regenerative food system is one that absorbs as much or more carbon as it releases, feeds the soil as much as it extracts from the soil, does not poison our water ways, yet still provides sufficient food to meet the needs of the global population. Developing a global food system like that will necessarily involve a massive divestment from animal agriculture, which in turn necessitates a massive public debate and education campaign to create a new voluntary consensus on (not) eating animals. Such a campaign cannot succeed under capitalism, while a small group of owners of big agribusiness have a vested interest in maintaining their profits and control over government policies. Only by
taking all aspects of the food system into democratic public ownership and control can we begin to create a food culture that is healthy and productive for people and the planet alike.