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Responded Humane Farming Association founder Brad Miller, “It is simply delusional to think that getting humane organizations into the business of promoting meat from heritage breed chickens will result in even the slightest reduction of animal suffering. The ASPCA decision to fund the commercial production of chickens for meat raises a number of troubling issues,” Miller continued. “Beyond the obvious ethical issues from the animals’ standpoint, there is also the matter of using charitable dollars to further the commercial interests of a privately owned, profit-driven poultry company. This is just the latest,” Miller charged, “in a growing trend on the part of several major animal organizations to, in effect, merge with the livestock industry.” Miller noted that Farm Forward has previously promoted a variety of federal and state legislation that HFA regarded as more likely to entrench the status quo in animal agriculture than to bring about meaningful change.

“A commercial animal production operation is not an alternative to factory farming, but an extension of it. In this instance, chickens and turkeys are being mass-produced in mechanical hatchery incubators, raised motherless for human consumption by the thousands, and slaughtered, i.e., factory farmed.

“In addition to cruelty and commodification of animals being falsely represented as ‘humane,’ ‘compassionate,’ ‘anti-factory farming,’ etcetera,” Davis added, “is that these relatively smaller farms seek to grow and expand. Regardless of what size they are, they do not reduce the amount of resources needed to raise and slaughter animals

“It is unethical for an ‘animal welfare’ organization,” Davis concluded, “to suggest to the public that millions and billions of people can continue to eat the same number of animals, as long as these animals are raised ‘humanely’ on non-factory farms. Humans will never set aside hundreds of millions or billions of acres of land to accommodate billions of animals living ‘free range,’ yet this is the false prospect being offered to a public that wants to believe that incompatible desires and realities can be reconciled.”

If you think it is wrong for the ASPCA to use charitable donations to fund and promote poultry slaughter, expand poultry breeding and hatchery facilities and pretend that a factory farm is Not a factory farm, while doing NOTHING to promote genuine compassion and respect for these birds,

that pigs in confined animal feedlot operations, and the workers who tend them, routinely carry MRSA strains (her paper can be found here).

The big concern is not that humans will acquire drug-resistant bacteria from their properly cooked bacon or sausage, but rather that the bacteria will be transferred to humans from the common pests that live with pigs and then move in with us.

Meanwhile, evidence is mounting that factory-scale animal farms exact a high toll from the people who live around them in other ways, too. A study by University of North Carolina professor Steve Wing and others shows that people with the bad luck to live near giant hog farms suffer demonstrably worse health when the factories are getting up to malodorous stuff like spraying untreated (and thus antibiotic-resistant-bacteria-laden) manure on fields. Among the many hidden costs of cheap pork is that people who live near factory farms are doomed either to be sick or shut in at certain times of the year. (McKenna has an excellent discussion of the Wing study on her Wired blog.)

law banning the non-therapeutic use of antibiotics on farms