“Your resolution must never falter. No argument must lead you astray. Never listen when they tell you that Man and the animals have a common interest….we must not come to resemble him…No animal must ever live in a house or sleep in a bed, or wear clothes, or drink alcohol, or smoke tobacco, or touch money, or engage in trade.”
– Old Major, Animal Farm by George Orwell.
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One day in the not too distant future, the small children in Central Park will ask their mother where all the horses have gone. Then they went to the circus and asked where all the elephants have gone. The children at the Farmer’s Market’s asked where all the ponies and chickens and goats had gone. They went to the old barns and asked where all the cows and farm dogs had gone. They looked in the backyards and asked where all of the dogs and cats had gone. There are no more animals living with people, said their mother, growing impatient. They were all taken to the wild. Can we see them, ask the children? No, she said, there is no wild any longer. The horses and the elephants and ponies are all dead, there was no place for them to go. There was no more work for them to do. The farm animals have all gone to the new corporate farms out in the heartland, she said, where they will never see the light of day or be seen by people. Why?, asked the children. So that they could be slaughtered and saved from us, she said.
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The federal government estimates that there are nine billion land animals in corporate farms in America at any given time. Most live under the most brutal conditions imaginable. Joshua Rockwood has 100 pigs, two had gray spots on their ears in February, a sign of frostbite that may have occurred during one of the worst cold waves in the history of the Northeast this February. His water bowls and streams froze over. Two of his ponies had overgrown hooves. He was charged with 13 counts of animal cruelty and neglect.
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It seems sometimes that Old Major, the protagonist in Animal Farm, is the chief ideologist of the animal rights movement, he seems to mirror it. But it is probably Peter Singer, the famous vegan and professor. In his best-selling book Animal Liberation, Singer, one of the architects of the movement that says it speaks for animals, wrote that “I hope anyone who has read this far will recognize the moral necessity of refusing to buy or eat the flesh or other products of animals who have been reared in modern factory farm conditions. This is the clearest case of all, the absolute minimum that anyone with the capacity to look beyond considerations of narrow self-interest should be able to accept.”
Singer, a professor at Princeton, wrote his book in 1975. It was a powerful, even brilliant work. He detailed the horrific conditions of the new corporate farms under which a growing number of animals were living and dying. Americans were moving to the cities, they were beginning to lose touch with the natural world and the world of animals, and knew nothing about them. They no longer had any idea where they food came from or how the animals that produced it were being treated.
Animal Liberation came at a pivotal time for animals in America. Food was no longer something that came from a nearby farm and Mom put on the table each night. Fast food franchises began to grow and spread – they had an insatiable new appetite for animal flesh. The small family farmers who had fed America for generations could not complete with this new, government-supported system of global and mechanized agriculture. They had already begun to fail and struggle. Just as we began to be separated from animals, and from nature, we were also separated from our food. It was now something to buy at the market, it could just as easily come from South America as the farm outside of town.
Animals on corporate farms had began to suffer greatly, just as farmers began to fade into the background of our culture.
Singer argued that animals needed to be liberated from the human beings that were doing this. Animal rights became an enduring new social movement. After all, who is for cruelty to animals?
Singer went much further than detailing abuse, or the absolute minimum of individual morality. He paired the future of animals to the future of people. He argued that animals were just the same as people and entitled to the same rights. In fact, he wrote, animals must be liberated from enslavement by people. He shared Old Major’s vision. Animals should never be owned or eaten or made to work for people, never forced to entertain them.
More than a generation later, this is another critical time for animals in America. They are at a crossroads, they are disappearing from our everyday lives in frightening numbers, and for the first time in human history. Farmers who are in desperate need of support report instead report a wave of persecution, arrest and intimidation, much of it focusing on animal care. I very much thought of Peter Singer and his ideals and of Old Major when I went a few weeks ago to see the farm of Joshua Rockwood, a young Glenville, N.Y. farmer.
We have lost our way when it comes to understanding animals, their real abuse, the life of the farm, the source of our food, the health of the land, and the lives of the animals themselves. Our partners for thousands of years, they are strangers to us now. We have forgotten them, broken faith with them and the people who live with them and love them. That is the message of the carriage horses in New York.
The movement that insists it speaks for their rights has failed them, and failed us. That is the real meaning of Joshua Rockwood’s story.
And the only question that really matters, the cry parents of the future will have to endure, it will echo through time: Where have all of the animals gone? They used to be everywhere, living in the midst of human existence, sharing our world with us.
When Water Bowls Freeze: It Could Have Been Us
Rockwood, a young farmer in Glenville, N.Y., is part of the new local foods movement, considered a great hope for the future of food, the environment and for animals. Cheaper, healthier food, grass and pasture and feed only, and locally produced, a restoration and renewal of the farming environment. Rockwood sells CSA shares and delivers meat to people’s homes. His farm business was growing. His animals ate only grass and special feed. He is completely transparent about what his animals eat.
His life is on hold. He is awaiting a court hearing and possible trial on 13 charges of animal cruelty and neglect.
The problem was this, among other things: streams and water bowls froze on his leased 90-acre farm during the cold wave of February, one of the worst in American history.
A secret informer accused him of providing inadequate shelter for his pigs, of having no potable water available to his animals, of having an unheated barn. His horses, overdue for trimming, were taken from him, so was one of his dogs.
Hundreds of farmers came to his first court hearing to support him. They all said more or less the same thing:
It could just as easily have been us, they said. We all had frozen winter this winter. We all had some animals with frostbitten ears. We were all hanging on to survive. If the charges against Rockwood stand, it probably will be them, and they all knew it.
I went to Joshua’s farm, I spent an afternoon there, he showed me every acre, all of his pigs and sheep and cattle and dogs. I saw nothing that came close to animal cruelty, nothing that I might not see on almost every real farm in America at the end of a brutal winter. He does not abuse his animals any more than the New York Carriage Drivers abuse their horses.
Real Abuse: The Worst Cruelty Imaginable
The great irony in Singer’s vision for animals is that the world has changed beyond his imagination since 1975. That is the problem with rigid ideologies, the very point of Animal Farm. The people who believe in dogma never change, but the world does, and fanatics are sooner or later left behind or cast out, it is one of the enduring stories of history.
Since Singer wrote his book, the natural habitats of animals – the “wild,” as so many people like to call it – have vanished from our country and the world. Corporate farms, now supplying rapacious and powerful food franchises have become enormous. They dominate the food market in America and many other countries. They are wealthier and bigger and far more brutal to animals than he could have imagined, or then anyone did imagine.
Cows spend their entire lives on concrete and in stalls hooked up to machines. They are not named or known, they are killed the second their milk production drops. They never see grass or sunlight in their lives. Pigs, chickens and sheep are raised on horrid, crowded, hot or freezing conditions where many never once get to stand up or turn around or see light or breathe fresh air or interact with other animals.
The people who keep animals in every day life – the carriage drivers, circuses, pony ride operators, sled dog competitors, Hollywood animal trainers, breeders, people with pets, small farmers, say they are under siege, forced again and again to give up the animals they have lived and work with, sometimes in family traditions that go back centuries. Everywhere, It is more difficult, expensive and complicated for people to adopt animals, as the standards for getting and keeping them rises beyond the reach of many, often the most vulnerable.
It seems the people who know nothing about animals and have never lived with them are suddenly in charge of their fate and futures. They have made the removal of animals a holy war, drawing politicians, the government and the police into the once sacrosanct and private space between humans and animals. Against farmers, scientists, agricultural students, people without tall fences, who work long hours, who are poor or elderly, people who drive carriage horses or work in circuses, all are routinely denied access to the millions of dogs and cats languishing in animal shelters.
For almost all of human history, driving a horse carriage was considered honest and necessary work, often a family tradition. Today, it is the most controversial and frightening work in all of New York City. If it were not so awful for the carriage drivers, it would be funny. Stop and think for a moment of what has been lost. For all of human history, no farmer was ever arrested for having his water sources freeze in a brutal winter, people and neighbors rushed to help, they did not call the police. Joshua Rockwood does not think that is funny either.
We ignore the animals who are being abused, we banish the animals who are well cared for. We are losing our ability to think clearly about animals, and they are paying for it with their very existence.
There is no doubt now that the carriage horses in New York are not being abused or mistreated or overworked, are not unhappy and pining for rescue farms. If the carriage horses in New York are banned, there will be no domesticated animals besides pets living and working in daily sight of the people of the our largest city for the first time in it’s history. Cars, condos, limos, pedicabs and bicycles swarm freely and unchecked over the streets. They can pollute the air, deafen city residents, crowd sidewalks and streets, injure, often kill, pedestrians.
But there is no room left in the city for the beautiful and powerful draft horses for whom the park was, in so many ways, built. They must be banned.
The wheel spins and spins, perhaps spinning too late for people who love animals to wake up from their displaced moral fevers. The elephants in the circus will not be returning to their despoiled and desecrated wild once they are banished, they will be killed and vanish because no one will pay to keep them alive for many years with no return. Are these the rights of animals?
At the same time that animals who are safe, well cared for and loved by many, and who have work, decrease or are banned, the numbers of the animals who are truly living in horror – the animals on corporate farms, – has increased dramatically since Singer wrote his book. There is not a one of those animals on those new animal farms who would not happily trade places with any carriage horse in New York or any elephant in the Ringling Bros. Circus.
Nine Billion Animals On Corporate Farms: No Raids Yet
The U.S. Department of Agriculture estimates that more than seven billion chickens are killed each year on factory farms, and more than 305 million hens are used for their eggs. Nine-nine percent of them spend their lives in total confinement. In the last 30 years, the decline of family farms and the consolidation of food production has concentrated agricultural power in the hands of fewer and fewer corporations. Many of today’s farms are really industrial factories, not 40 acres of pasture, barns and rows of corn and vegetable crops that Americans associate with farming. These operations produce food in high volume, but consumers have no idea where it comes from, what processed chemicals are in it, and how the animals they are eating were treated.
Government study after study and journalist after journalist has found that many of these agri-businesses trade off the health of consumers and the well-being of rural communities, as well as the nutritional quality of their products. Like most corporations, they seek to maximize profits by economy of scale. Federal officials say that approximately 9 billion land animals are raised for food in the U.S. each year, the overwhelming majority now on factory farms.
The United States has no federal laws protecting farm animals while they are on the farms where they are raised. Joshua Rockwood’s animals are subject to countless local and state regulations covering water, shelter, feed, hooves and health care. Two veterinarians said they were healthy and well cared for. Not one died or suffered serious injuries during this awful winter. Many of these charges – he has an unheated barn – are simply mindless.
For all the abuse heaped on farmers, carriage drivers, pony ride operators, researchers and ag students, country fairs and farmer’s markets, poor people with pets, Hollywood studios and circuses, homeless people and lonely elderly pet lovers by the animal rights movement, family farms have always given their animals the best possible lives. Cows were generally milked twice daily in the milking barns, then let out to pasture to exercise, graze, socialize, ponder the world. Cows were given names and known by them. For many of the farmers I have met, living with animals was one of their primary reasons for taking on the hard life of the farm.
People lived among the animals. Chickens roamed freely in barnyards and pastures and in large coops. The farmer and members of his or her family often got powerfully attached to them. Sick cows got treated by vets, not euthanized, and old cows could stay on most farms even when their milk production got low. It was – is – not a perfect or idyllic life – neither is the farmer’s. But it was a good and safe life most of the time. No cow or chicken on a corporate farm has ever had as good a life as the worst and poorest farmer could offer.
A Tale Of Two Animal Farms
So here is a tale of two kinds of animal farms. Joshua Rockwood, a microscopic dot in the realm of animal mistreatment, an ethical and responsible farmer trying to establish himself, finds himself the target and victim of his local government and of the new animal rights notion of animal abuse. Traditionally – and legally – abuse and cruelty mean the neglect of animals to the point of grievous injury, extreme suffering, or death. Nobody who has ever met Rockwood, seen his animals, or been to his farm – including me – believes these definitions apply to him.
His animals are all free-range, living on a 90-acre farm with large pastures – they are fed entirely on grass and pasture. They have room to exercise, socialize and fresh air every day. The cattle drink from fresh streams, they have hundreds of acres to walk on, tall trees for shade. Joshua is transparent about his meats – he sells chickens, lamb, beef, poultry – and his mission is to serve healthy, locally-produced food to the people in his area. He is part of the buy local food movement. Farmers like Rockwood do what we want people with animals to do, those of us who truly believe in the rights of animals.
He lives with them, keeps them in nature, treats them well, feeds them well, calls the vet when they are sick. .
I could find no evidence of a single police raid on a corporate farm in America, no instance where the many thousands, even millions, of chickens or pigs are seized from a corporate farm, re-homed to rescue farms or better places. If the convoy of police and animal rights officers, humane society society officials and small animal vets that descended on Rockwood’s farm in February, had driven 200 miles in any direction, they could have seized more truly abused animals than they would ever have room for in Glenville, N.Y.
For the people who say they are for the rights of animals, there is a Catch-22 in all of this, and it is a big one: For all the controversy and anger and hurt over animal welfare, for all of the many victims of our distorted notions of abuse, the animals of our country are enslaved as never before, treated more cruelly than ever before, and abused in the most classic and legal sense of the term. But no one is liberating them. The people who get picked on are the ones who can’t afford lawyers, who work all the time, can’t afford fences, don’t have million dollar buried water systems for the winter, can’t afford snazzy fund-raising blogs, marketers or lobbyists, can’t stay home all day and build big fences in order to adopt dogs and cats. They can rarely afford to stand trial or fight to get their animals back when they are seized.
And curiously, it is ordinary people who are the best and last hope for animals surviving in a healthy way among people in our time. Singer’s powerful vision has failed and been utterly corrupted, just as the arrogant pigs in Orwell’s Animal Farm. Dogma never changes, life is fluid and evolving. Dogma becomes a trap, Orwell shows us, a kind of moral quicksand for the well-intentioned.
One of the charges against Joshua Rockwood is that he failed to provide adequate shelter for his pigs. Since all but two of his more than 100 pigs are healthy and sound, even through the awful winter, it is a puzzling accusation.
Gimme Shelter
I think of shelter as a great metaphor for the struggle of animals to survive in our world, and the struggle of the people who own and live and work with animals to be free once again of harassment, persecution, secret informers and disconnected and ignorant authorities. It is Joshua Rockwood who needs the shelter of human beings and the empathy of fellow humans. His pigs are doing fine. He could have used a bit of help in February, he does not need to be in jail or lose his farm and work.
I keep going back to the Seven Commandments of Animalism in Animal Farm, they were supposed to keep order by uniting the animals together against the humans and preventing them from following the evil habits of human beings. Orwell had the pigs fiddle with their commandments, softening them and changing them to meet the political winds of the moment. That’s the thing about dogma, sooner or later it is overcome by new realities.
That was the point of Orwell’s book, really, to show how easy it is for unyielding and opportunistic political dogma to be turned into powerful propaganda. That is a lesson the animal rights movement and the new animal police have not learned. They obsess on the helpless and the innocent, and permit the powerful and the guilty to hide, pretending they do not really exist.
Every day, the animals are being taken away. It is a mistake that can never be undone.
And that, not the well-being of animals, is the sad legacy of Peter Singer’s movement today.
