Will future generations see this as our gravest offence?

What will future generations see as our gravest offence? What practice of ours will most appal them? It’s not hard to come up with ideas: is it justifiable to spend billions on luxury items, when 45 million children under five worldwide are suffering from acute malnutrition? Is it defensible that we’re doing so little to mitigate existential threats like pandemics and climate change, thus jeopardising the future of humankind? Is it possible that in the future we may look upon punishing criminals very differently, and consider retribution barbaric? Is it OK to read storybooks to your children about farm animals frolicking free, when the average Westerner eats half their own weight each year in animals raised on factory farms?

That last one – the way we treat animals – is perhaps the best example of a practice where all the alarm bells are going off. The first warning sign is that the arguments against exploiting animals have been heard for centuries – and resistance to modern factory farming has also been around for years. The animal rights movement got its start in the 1970s, when factory farms and battery cages for laying hens became prevalent.

The sheer scale of animal exploitation has grown ever since. Today, more than 200 million land animals worldwide are slaughtered every day, according to the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation. That’s 80 billion animals a year. To give you an idea, the number of people who have ever lived is estimated at 117 billion.

Of course, there are farmers who keep animals in a traditional manner, with pigs in the mud and calves in the pasture. But they’re the exception. The modern farm is an animal factory, designed to produce enormous quantities of cheap meat. Billions of cows, pigs, and chickens are bred to grow as fast as possible. They’re confined to small stalls and continually fed antibiotics to keep them alive just long enough. Yet industrial-scale livestock production is invariably defended with the three Ns. It’s seen as “normal” as most people eat meat, “natural” because people are said to have always been omnivores, and “necessary” because we’re thought to need the protein we get from meat.

Most consumers are not aware of even the most basic facts about how their meat and dairy is produced. In a recent study, test subjects were shown a photograph of a typical industrial-scale chicken coop and asked, “Would you be happy to buy chicken from here?” More than 75 per cent said no. A UK study showed that the vast majority of the population was unaware that all male chicks are gassed or macerated. A Dutch study found only 18 per cent of people asked knew that calves are taken away from their mothers shortly after birth.

It’s not enough to keep shouting ‘Go vegan!’ Animal activists have been doing that for 50-plus years. To spark a revolution, we must reframe the issue to find fresh arguments.

Our tendency to stick our heads in the sand in the face of such facts may also explain some results in other studies. A 2018 study, for instance, showed that nearly half the people in the US want to ban slaughterhouses. Other scientists added a follow-up question: “Were you aware that slaughterhouses are where livestock are killed and processed into meat, such that, without them, you would not be able to consume meat?” Three-quarters of respondents stood by their answer.

In my country, the Netherlands, you can see the same ambivalence. A recent survey showed that more than 60 per cent of the people support a ban on factory farming, while 95 per cent eat meat. Most people don’t seem to realise – or don’t want to realise – that nearly all their meat, even meat sold by upscale butchers and grocers, comes from factory farms.

Many children believe their diet is vegetarian. They often don’t realise the meat on their plate comes from a slaughtered animal. A recent study showed that many four- to seven-year-olds think hotdogs and bacon are made from plants. Four out of five “older children” (ages six and seven) indicated it’s not OK to eat cows or pigs. Why do parents find it tough to honestly tell children how we get meat? Studies indicate that many adults will give vague answers if pressed by children to explain where meat comes from. And once it sinks in that that slice of ham on their plate is cut from a slaughtered pig – not unlike that cheery Peppa Pig on their tablet – then children are often shocked.

People who allow the truth to sink in about modern-day livestock practices will find it difficult to remain pragmatic. Those who expand their moral circle to include animals, stopping to consider the immense suffering they’re subjected to, will find it tricky to work with the “perpetrators” of factory farming.

It’s not enough to keep shouting “Go vegan!” Animal activists have been doing that for 50-plus years, while the number of vegetarians and vegans in the past few decades has only marginally gone up. To spark a revolution, we must reframe the issue to find fresh arguments against the meat industry and for a protein transition. For example: factory farms are not only horrendous for animals, they’re also one of the top producers of greenhouse gases. Or: recent developments in cultivated meat present huge commercial opportunities. In addition to reframing, we’ll need to build coalitions with avid meat eaters – and even meat producers.

Someone who understands the importance of pragmatism and collaboration better than most is activist Leah Garcés. As a teenager in Florida, Garcés was looking for a mission. She got a degree in zoology and, in the decades that followed, travelled the world. By 30, she’d witnessed all kinds of animal abuses, but one stood out as the worst: industrial-scale livestock production. So, back in the US, what did Garcés do next? She became friends with large-scale livestock holders.

Loading

Garcés had come to the critical realisation that many US farmers also can’t stand the meat and dairy industry. She’d got to know a North Carolina chicken farmer who had 25,000 birds in three giant, dark sheds. Craig Watts had gone in with Perdue, one of the biggest chicken companies in the US, when he was just 26. He’d taken out a huge loan to build chicken sheds on land his family had farmed for more than 100 years. On paper, it seemed like a good idea.

But the reality was grim. At regular intervals, he’d get a new shipment of day-old chicks to fatten up, and Perdue would pick them up again later and take them to slaughter. But Watts soon saw that something was wrong with the birds. The chickens grew so quickly their bones would break and organs burst. It turns out that this is not unusual for industry broilers (chickens raised for meat). Scientists calculated, in 2013 for the journal Poultry Science, that if humans grew at a similar rate, a three-kilogram newborn baby would weigh 300 kilograms after two months.

Her camera rolled as he walked through the long, windowless building, past dead and crippled chickens.

Each morning, Watts removed dead chickens from the excrement-strewn floors of the big sheds amid penetrating ammonia fumes. Meanwhile, his finances took a hit. Watts realised he couldn’t get out of his contract with Perdue. Like many other farmers, he’d become a modern-day serf, compelled to keep working the land for someone else’s profit. Garcés had viewed farmers like Watts as the enemy her entire life. But when she met Watts for the first time in the summer of 2014, she felt ashamed. Only now did she understand his side of the story. “I had never thought, ‘He feels as trapped as the chickens.’ ” So she decided to change tack and to stand up for chicken farmers.

Watts had never met an animal activist before, but he got along well with Garcés, and like her he, too, was outraged when he saw a promotional video for Perdue showing happy, healthy chickens, clean barns and a director proclaiming the birds were raised “humanely”.

Watts let Garcés film inside his barns. Her camera rolled as he walked through the long, windowless buildings, past dead and crippled chickens and birds gasping for air. Then she sent the footage to The New York Times. For the next few weeks, both Watts and Garcés were super nervous. He knew he could lose everything: his home, his land, his friends. The video went viral. Within 24 hours, they had a million views. “Torture one chicken, and you risk arrest,” wrote a NYT journalist. “But scald hundreds of thousands of chickens alive each year? That’s a business model.” Perdue was exposed.

Garcés, meanwhile, had learnt a crucial lesson. If she wanted to make a difference, she’d have to embrace her own discomfort. She’d soon get another chance to do so when she was contacted in February 2016 by Jim Perdue – the villain of her video with Watts. It now seemed Perdue was prepared to remake his company and was asking Garcés for help. “It was an unbelievable arc for me,” she’d later write. This was a company she’d exposed for being misleading and that same company had now decided to improve conditions on their farms. Perdue even wanted to invest in developing plant-based alternatives to chicken.

Loading

These days, Garcés is helping dozens of chicken farmers find new ways to earn a living. Those dark barns are also suitable for growing mushrooms, for instance. But Garcés doesn’t believe the animal rights movement should make peace with as many farmers as possible. It’s about the combination of tactics, she thinks. It’s about building coalitions and about what works. She also knows there’s a long way to go before factory farming is outlawed. She realises she’s part of a much bigger story and that someday she’ll pass the torch to a new generation of moral pioneers.

Edited extract from Moral Ambition: Stop Wasting Your Talent and Start Making a Difference (Bloomsbury, $35), by Rutger Bregman.

To read more from Good Weekend magazine, visit our page at The Sydney Morning Herald, The Age and Brisbane Times.