The Animals We Love, The Animals We Eat

I believe that cats have a specific cat-to-human dialect. Nearly every cat I know appears to talk to humans, using sounds and a register that they don’t use to communicate among themselves. One study I still like to cite, even though it was done in the 1940s, concluded that felines have a vocabulary that includes expressions of acknowledgement (“mhrng”), bewilderment (“ma ou:?”), and anger (“wa:ou:”). (The colons indicate vowel prolongation.) The cat-word I hear most often around my house is “mhng-a:ou,” a complaint applied to the children, the weather, a lack of attention, and most of the time, each other.

I never fail to notice when writers and celebrities admit their attachment to pets. Doris Lessing and Colette have loved their cats in print. Marley and Me, the story of a relationship with a dog, has occupied bestseller lists for more than a year, and Roy MacGregor has followed up with The Dog and I. Interspecies friendships seem to be on the rise.

The manner in which people make pets part of the family is touching; it sometimes distracts me from my disappointment over the conventional brutality of human conflict, our inability to maintain sensible momentum toward social and economic justice, and our muddle-headedness about environmental distress. It’s been a long road to canine and feline integration, but we now seem to have arrived at a place of mutual good feeling. Humans and their cats and dogs have bonded.

This is the success story of our relationship with animals. Now for the depressing part. When it comes to cows, pigs, chickens, and, more and more in Canada, sheep, it seems as though we would prefer it if these animals were efficient machines or fast-growing plants. In North America, during roughly the same period in which our attachment to dogs and cats has become so intense, we have increasingly segregated these other domesticated animals from everyday life and kept ourselves in the dark about the unpleasant specifics of industrial farming and slaughterhouse conditions.

If only eggs would grow in petri dishes instead of inside hens, locked up in tiny cubicles in windowless warehouses, then this most perfect food wouldn’t be spoiled by our knowledge that something about the process seems terribly wrong. The senses we share with animals tell us it is wrong, but because most of us are physically removed from the realities of industrial farms, these instincts and sensations stay buried, and we are soothed instead by the arguments of advertising and accounting.

On several occasions, I have tried to overcome these instincts through repeated exposure, but this turned out to have the opposite effect. I remain shaken by the scale and structure of industrial farming — by feedlots in Saskatchewan and Alberta that host fifteen thousand head of cattle, by mégaporcheries hidden at the ends of rural roads throughout Quebec (credibly exposed in Hugo Latulippe’s 2001 documentary, Bacon, le film), and especially by our versions of industrial American dairies, which are remarkably inefficient.

On industrial dairy farms, many cows become lame or infertile, or are culled for ground beef at an early age because of the stresses associated with intensive milking. Before a farm can profit from a cow, she must be raised to maturity (which takes fifteen months, during which time she receives vaccinations, other medical care, and specialized feed), successfully impregnated (nine months), and milked through her first lactation cycle (ten months). Not until the second lactation cycle, following another gestation period, does a cow’s milk production pay off the initial investment. Thanks to superior genetics, milk production averages an impressive 9,242 kilograms per cow per year, but individual cows are not valued. Only the sheer scale of the industry and the demand for cheap hamburger seem to prevent the system from collapse.

Cutting-edge poultry and egg operations are even less humane. And when these manufacturers boast of having achieved a source of cheap protein that is safe and nutritious, they fail to mention that the meat and eggs are also tasteless and that the truly affordable wings and thighs contain too much grease, water, and gristle. My kids refuse to eat bland white mass-produced breast meat even when it’s fried in crispy batter and served with honey sauce. They’ve tasted better chicken closer to home, and they’re holding out till it comes around again.

In veterinary school, I learned about chicken anatomy and physiology, and about virulent and contagious diseases?—?serious threats to chickens kept in overcrowded, stressful conditions. Once, we visited a chicken abattoir, following which my roommate was ill for ten days with a confirmed case of campylobacter diarrhea even though she had not come close to a carcass. We also studied the problems of heart failure and ruptured leg tendons, and observed scientists penetrating the chicken genome in pursuit of new ways to maximize production.

Now that I live on a small farm with chickens, I have seen first-hand how they enjoy foraging for grass and scrounging and pecking for earthworms. But in veterinary schools, there is little or no discussion of the value of foraging. Also barely mentioned are the human-animal bond and gerontology, both of which have become serious issues in dog and cat medicine. No wonder there are only about fifty poultry vets in Canada; students don’t want to be chicken doctors.