Animal suffering in the "free range" and organic industries

The amount of suffering in the standard food industry is enormous, with, in the US alone, about 10 billion land-based animals being confined and killed every year. But many people assume that there is little or no suffering involved in the Organic or "Free-Range" food industries. This is definitely far from the truth. Animals from these industries still get stuck in very crowded buildings for large portions of time and they also have to deal with extremely stressful and miserable transportation and slaughter. Even though there is tremendous suffering involved in the food industry, it is also worth considering the ethical problems with killing when little or no suffering is involved (like if someone manages to shoot a big bullet directly into the brain of a wild animal). To read about ethical issues involved with killing, you may want to check out the page titled Looking Beyond Suffering.

The labels "free-range" and "free-run" are pretty useless since "free-range" "farms"(*) or a "free-run" farms do not undergo any inspections by organizations that are independent from the farms, to make sure they are conforming with any kind of regulations.

Certified organic farms do get inspected to see that they stick with regulations but the regulations are usually very vague which allows for very cramped and miserable conditions for the animals confined in the organic industry. And even when there are precise regulations, these regulations often still allow for very crowded conditions, as we will see below. The same is also true for labels that are created by animal welfare organizations like the BC-SPCA (which uses the label "SPCA-certified"). To get an idea of how bad this situation is, let’s take a look at a few large certification organizations which actually bother to write out their standards (or a summary of their standards) on their websites. Here are five such organizations: Certified Organic Association of BC (COABC), Standards Council of Canada, Quality Assurance International (QAI), Organic Crop Improvement Association (OCIA) and the BC-SPCA. There are many more certification organizations that exist, but looking at these five big organizations should give us a fairly good idea at what certification organizations are like in general (you can verify this by simply checking out some other standards).

The websites for each one of the five certification organizations listed above are displayed at www.ARoutreach.org/certOrgs.html (in case you want to see the standards yourself). Here are just a few of the problems with the standards set out by these organizations:

· Only COABC and the BC-SPCA give any numeric requirements in their standards for how much space various animals should receive. The other organizations use vague wording like saying that animals should be given enough room to "facilitate free movement in accordance with the needs of the animal". With these vague requirements, it is possible to keep animals in very crowded conditions since nobody is bothering to define "the needs of an animal" or similar vague terms. · COABC and the BC-SPCA provide specific space requirements but these still allow for very cramped conditions. For instance, the COABC standards allow for 7 pound birds (about the size of a small cat) to be given 2.5 square feet per bird (0.36 square feet per pound) which is really not much space. And the BC-SPCA standards only require that chickens in the meat industry be given 1.6 square feet per bird. From the information on the BC-SPCA website, it looks like the BC-SPCA does not have any space requirements for cows or pigs but there are some pathetic space requirements for cows and pigs given by COABC (like having to give 25 square feet per animal to male pigs). · Only OCIA and the BC-SPCA provide some concrete regulations regarding transportation and slaughter but the regulations don’t address a lot of the problems in this area. The BC-SPCA only requires some reduced transportation times and OCIA has mostly vague or insignificant requirements except it does require that no electric prods be used during transport and that animals be slaughtered on the same day that they arrive (but this may not happen if regulation enforcers are not around). · Animals confined according to organic standards or standards from animal welfare groups are commonly restricted to living inside crowded buildings during the evening, night and early mornings which results a lot of animal suffering.

* Note: It may be better to use a more accurate term like "confinement center" instead of "farm"