(kg) of meat, roughly 500 grams of fecal matter result – no shit. Where is it stored? Whence the pollution and how is it spread? What of the offal? How hazardous and noxious is this material? What of the lagoons of shit and offal that result from the billions of animals (chickens and their meat-protein comrades – cattle, pigs and turkeys) throughout the world? Industry – and regulators – have been slow in response, and the dangerous, bubbling liquid masses – or the dried, odiferous “cake” that is treated by industry as manageable – have spread across the landscape.
Chicken CAFOs, beef CAFOs, pork CAFOs and other such factory farm operations are dreadful ways to mass-produce animal meat as if it was like any other commodity that can be mass-produced. They are a worrisome example of how the capitalist impulse to profit while meeting consumer demand has a very dark side: animal cruelty, worker exploitation, pollution and so on. Similar systems exist for other kinds of animals and animal products that indicate the universal nature of the meat commodity machine. One example is the tiger and bear farms of East Asia that enable rife animal brutality, where many consumers do not care about that suffering, and where powerful states that could regulate or prohibit the industry do nothing. They tolerate abusive practices, and even promote or ignore them in the name of money-making.
The persistent and long-lived trade in bear gall bladders and bear bile, for example, threatens the Asian bear species.15 While this trade is legal within some countries, cross-border trade of bear bile products is prohibited by the Convention on the International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES). But it continues and has changed from being purely for traditional medicinal to providing a commodity, with bile now being found in such products as cough drops, shampoo and soft drinks. A great number of countries buy and sell bear bile products originating in other countries in violation of CITES: Myanmar, Hong Kong, Laos, the Republic of Korea – the latter often with products from wild bears in Russia where hunting and trade of them are legal.16 The bears (and other animals in this trade for parts) are kept in miserable, caged, claustrophobic conditions – roughly 20,000 bears alone, across East Asia.
There has been progress in raising consumer and producer awareness of the cruelty and immorality of farms in some places – for example, Vietnam and Korea, which have promised to close them by 2020. Yet China remains wedded to them and is unwilling to entertain closing them at the highest levels of government, among consumers and, of course, the producers.17 Bear farming in Laos has begun to shrink, but the growth of facilities in the northern part of the country under private, mostly Chinese, ownership counters that trend.18 A European Parliament resolution of 2006 calling to end bear bile farming in China fell on deaf ears as China rejected this interference in a domestic issue,19 while tiger farming in Laos also supports primarily Chinese interests, tastes and consumers in the sale of parts, teeth, claws, paws, and meat.20 But our focus is the broiler factory farm. Suffice it to say that broiler meat, too, is traded internationally, with birds kept in miserable conditions, although not in violation of CITES – because, with billions of the fowl, they are hardly an endangered species.
Conveyor-Belt Chickens
This book draws on a number of fields and approaches to write a history of the rise of the broiler in an international context in the twentieth century, although it is largely political history, environmental history and history of technology. In their explorations of the relationship between technology, humans and nature, several scholars and journalists have focused on the economic, political and technological factors that have a significant role in the transformation of farming – generally, and in specific animal husbandry sectors – into an industrial project. They write about animals and domestication, farming and industrialization, animals and research, animals and globalization, and so on, each with a unique and important perspective in such genres as women’s history, labor history, business history, history of science, anthropology, history of technology and environmental history. They ask: what role do natural objects play in society and when do natural objects become technologies?
William Boyd argues that the “subordination of the meat broiler to the dictates of industrial production” indicates how technological change in agriculture further blurs the distinction between nature and technology.21 Focusing on broilers, he considers how they were incorporated in the technology and political-economic system. Boyd writes, “tethered to innovations in environmental control, genetics, nutrition, and disease management, the industrial broiler emerged as a vehicle for transforming feed grains into higher-value meat products.” Like other such products, the broiler not only transformed food production – and diet – but “facilitated a profound restructuring of the relationship between nature and technology.”22
Deborah Fitzgerald has demonstrated how biological organisms have been remade into agricultural commodities, with the production of scientific knowledge and the transformation of that knowledge into commercial practice. In this process, practice has become increasingly industrial, large-scale, profit-oriented and intensive in production. In Every Farm a Factory, she describes how businessmen, government officials, rural lenders, farm management specialists, engineers and extension agents imparted an “industrial logic or ideal” to agriculture after World War I to tie farmers into an increasingly integrated national system of production and consumption. They were pushed by market forces and by the industrial logic of rationalization and standardization. If farmers did not embrace the ideal of industrial logic, then their use of industrial methods made them part of the system. They bought into tractors, then worked with bankers who encouraged them to buy more machines, and then found themselves pushing the land to pay for the machines, and turned to specialization to produce cash crops. Factory farming continued and has expanded to this day, and broilers enable us to follow its continuing transformation.23
In another work, Fitzgerald argues that factory farms received impetus from science at land grant universities, and from companies that sold science – in the form of seeds – to the farmers.24 Ultimately, it appears that government-sponsored agricultural research and its dissemination from extension services, both of which were paid for by taxpayers, helped not so much individual farmers, but large companies that came to dominate agriculture in a variety of fields – soy, corn and now animals.
Several studies – and there are many, many more than I mention here, including outstanding investigations of CAFOs – pointed the way for this book, and to my understanding of the chicken. In the readable and informative The Chicken Book (1975), Page Smith and Charles Daniel offered a biological, zoological and cultural history of the domestic chicken from domestication. They criticized chicken factory farming – in particular, the battery-cage system of egg production.25 In a book about several different meat industries in historical perspective, Roger Horowitz discusses how manufacturers in the twentieth century managed to standardize animals from the field to the consumer in the mechanization of meat production; he includes a superb chapter on the chicken. Horowitz urges us not to succumb to the belief that the victory over nature has been complete, but to recognize a series of problems of race, gender, safety and public health that persist to this day.26 In Big Chicken, Maryn McKenna discusses how the modern chicken industry is both founded on antibiotics to accelerate weight gain and reduce losses from infectious diseases, and needs them to deal with the conditions it created, which enabled the spread of such foodborne illnesses as Salmonella, and superbugs such as E. coli with the MCR-1 gene, that are difficult, if not impossible, to treat.27
Ruth Harrison’s Animal Machines (1964) criticized nascent factory farming, revealing the suffering of animals at the hands of handlers and their machines – for example, calves in veal crates and birds in battery cages. Harrison helped shape public opinion about factory farming and the need for animal welfare, triggering a series of legal reforms. Harrison’s book is no less important in the twenty-first century, since these farms have spread all over the globe. In some ways, Animal Machines is to animal welfare what Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1962), written at roughly the same time, has become for the environment, and continues to be important in urging humans to consider the lives of now billions of factory-farmed meat animals.28 Karen Davis, of United Poultry Concerns,