Fact Tories

     Okay, another twisting of words, unless your in the UK where the conservatives (the Tories), have ruled over Parliament for 14 years (and yes, played both ends when it came to Brexit, hurrah when it passed and now, how-did-the-liberals-let-this-happen?).  Sound familiar?  The conservative Tories have railed against the spending habits of the liberals, and yet, virtually each leader of the their party has been a billionaire and has worked to cut services such as health care (the NHS), police, schools, and help for the increasing numbers of homeless.  So how have they won year after year?  By focusing on "those" illegals, the refugees they accuse of flooding their country and taking away their jobs, all while getting government handouts (the recent French elections show that the strategy still works...).   Never mind that the cost of everything from vegetables to meats have skyrocketed because few "legal" workers are left to do the "dirty" jobs of harvesting strawberries or butchering cattle and chickens for grocery shelves.   Ah, but blame all that on Brexit.  Wait, wasn't Brexit the Tories' idea? (too many refugees was their winning motto)   Hmm, we seem to share a lot with our ancestral monarchs.  But hold on, this post has nothing to do with any of that (but if you ARE interested, here are excellent pieces from the London Review, the New York Review, and The New Yorker to give you a bit more accurate timetable of events of their populism's about face).

      Actually, this post is truly about factories, those giant complexes where things are mass produced or assembled.  Remember when the word "factory" was one which people used regularly?  Grandma and grandad used to work in a factory, you were told.  Didn't matter what sort of factory, but it was a factory; and back then factory work meant a good-paying, steady job.  Now days however, you don't hear much about factory work, or if you do it's with a bit of a negative tone as in work that is repetitive or boring, stuff a monkey could do.  Or a robot.  And of course, that phrase "be careful what you wish for" has come true in more and more places.  "Factories," thanks to the help of robots, can often now run with fewer than 10 people (one example are certain factory pig farms which, despite having thousands of pigs, can often "operate" with just 6 humans).* 

      For me, I was simply heading out to the landfill, that place  which defines the "away" when we throw something "away."  Trash, er sanitation, trucks dutifully swing by each week and take away not only our trash but our guilt as well, as if removing the evidence of all that we've consumed.   Week after week the trucks fill up and take their loads to the landfill.   But the thing is that even after 35 years of living here, I had never been to the landfill (there are actually 3 operating landfills --at least that I know of-- in the Salt Lake area).  Contractors, remodelers, landscapers, and neighbors would pile tree limbs, shattered drywall, torn-up decks, used carpet, and more in their flatbeds then head to "the dump."  But where the heck was the "dump?"  As it happened, I had a bunch of old paint which I needed to discard, a long-overdue job of sorting through full or partially-full gallons of paint that decorated our walls a decade ago (surely, my hoarding self thought, those beiges and taupes and light greens would return once the trendy "neptune" blues and grays and whites began to look dated).  So I called up the local hazardous waste line and was quickly and politely told, "it's at the landfill."

2021 data, UN Food/Agricultural Org./Graph OWD

     It would seem that I am far from alone in not visiting landfills, or even factories, two places where high walls, whether made of earth or concrete, are designed to "block" our view of what's going on inside those walls.  For many factories, those walls are often meant to guard trade secrets, say for a new car design or a special mix of flavors & spices (or a few hundred sweaty workers).  But factories are still everywhere, as seen in shows such as How It's Made and the British version, Inside the Factory.  The latter show gave an idea of our massive demand for products, from tea cups to pork pies (this is a British show after all), as pallets and pallets of finished products fill several dozen semitrucks daily.  And as I drove out to the landfill, there were indeed such factories, from snack chip companies to giant distribution centers.  This was, in a visual sense, a peek at the "engine" that drove our consumer economy, warehouses and consolidation centers that sorted and shipped products and produce to fill our grocery store shelves or other send packages to our doors.  But sometimes those walls are meant to hide something horrifying and not just the volumes of trash we produce, but places such as slaughterhouses or "factory" farms.  I won't go into the ongoing methods of such places (although just to give you an idea, we currently kill and process 202 million chickens per day, or put another way, 140,000 chickens each minute, according to the tracking site, Our World in Data), but if you want to dig further and wonder why a cattle slaughterhouse would need 29 different stations, and why workers would be separated into "dirty" and "clean" sections (each with their own cafeteria), take a peek at the 2011 book by political scientist, Timothy Pachirat, Every Twelve Seconds.  

      Much of this disturbing subject matter started when reading a portion of Peter Singer's updated version of his classic book, Animal Liberation (his recent book adds "Now" to the title).  And while his original version did start me on the road to not eating beef, poultry, or pork (I stopped knowingly doing so in May 1978), a review of Singer's newer book in The New Yorker also mentioned a book by Martha C. Nussbaum, Justice for Animals.  Nussbaum is both a law and philosophy professor (and author of 22 other books); from such a background, she wrote down her views on how animals are and have been treated throughout history, from factory farms and zoos, to research facilities, poachers, and even to our pets.  She began her book this way: Law is built by humans using the theories they have.  When those theories were racist, laws were racist.  When theories of sex and gender excluded women, so too did law.  And there is no denying that most political thought by humans the world over has been human-centered, excluding animals.  Even the theories that purport to offer help in the struggle against abuse are deeply defective, built on an inadequate picture of animal lives and animal striving.  As a philosopher and political theorist who is also deeply immersed in law and law teaching, I hope to change things...Farm animals lack protection under federal laws such as the AWA [Animal Welfare Act], the ESA [Emotional Support Animal laws], and the MBTA [Migratory Bird Treaty Act].  They are also exempted from protection under the state anti-cruelty laws of thirty-seven states.  And things are still worse: so successful has the effort of the factory farm industry been to insulate itself from criticism that many states have passed so-called "ag-gag" laws that criminalize whistleblower activity intended to bring these abuses to public attention...Not only are all farm animals exempted from the AWA, but even the Humane Methods of Slaughter Act and the Twenty-Eight Hour Law, which regulates how animals must be treated in transport, exempts poultry, even though 95 percent of the animals raised for food in the US are poultry.  Which is where robots entered the picture...

     Wrote a piece in Bloomberg: Meat processors are putting more capital into tech projects.  In 2021, Tyson said it would invest $1.3 billion in automation over three years, including building a highly automated chicken nugget factory in Danville, Virginia.  Chief Executive Officer Donnie King says the plant can produce as much as 30% more product with a third less staffing than a sister plant without the same level of automation....in the messy business of disassembling livestock, leaving even a fraction of an ounce of meat on the bone can erode margins over time.  Landfills show us that we toss away an embarrassing amount of "trash" but unfortunately, that may also include how we feel about animals.  Another piece in Bloomberg helped give a glimpse into this view: the capturing of wild macaques used for lab testing: Inside Cambodia's forests and parks, poachers are regularly spotted sneaking through the underbrush with fresh coconut meat to lure monkeys, nets to capture them and weapons to kill any monkey deemed a threat.  The poachers approach on foot as they stalk the long-tailed macaque, which is particularly valuable on the black market.  A convenient time to capture macaques is at dusk, when troops of 20 to 60 congregate in what's known as their sleeping tree.  Poachers use chainsaws to fell adjacent trees, quickly isolating the monkeys, then encircle the trunk of the sleeping tree with a net half the size of a basketball court.  Then the poachers start felling the sleeping tree, sending the monkeys into a frenzy.  Dominant males are the first to descend and defend.  Often they're blasted with buckshot.  The next round of defenders consist of younger males, which are also shot or maimed with a swift machete swipe.  The poachers cut through the trunk, and as the branches and monkeys crash down, the survivors are captured in the net.  Breeding-age females and infants are particularly valuable, so the trapping operation focuses on them.  Often a mother is trapped with a baby linging to her belly.  Given the brutal realities of the monkey business, they will soon be separated...In 2019, Cambodia exported 14,931 monkeys, according to the United Nations Comtrade database.  Three years later the number had shot up to 38,000...This supply chain converted monkeys into international commodities sold to end users in the US for as much as $54,000 apiece in late 2023.  Who can afford that kind of investment?  Big pharma, which uses monkeys by the thousands to develop vaccines and new drugs and to conduct Alzheimer's disease research.  Vaccines are particularly monkey-intensive.  In the 1940s and 50s, researchers developing the polio vaccine sacrificed at least 1 million monkeys and possibly as many as 5 million.

     But research and meat are not the only demands made of animals today.  There's also the burgeoning field of xenotransplants.   What???  Explained Scientific American, xenotransplanting is the process of: ...transplanting organs from other species --specifically genetically modified pigs-- into humans...The term has its roots in the Greek word for xenos, for "alien" or "foreign."  Scientist have figured out genetic tweaks to these organs that make them more compatible with people, reducing the risk of bad reactions or outright rejection by a person's immune system.  So why animals and not humans?  With over 100,000 people waiting each year for a organ transplant, and only an average of 40,000 donor organs, there are not enough human organs to go around (although both Biden and Congress have made progress in breaking the monopoly of the company that controls all organ donations in the U.S. and is partially blamed for the shortfall).  One place where human organ donors are plentiful are those coming from those who have died from drug overdoses; such deaths have increase to the point where they now account for 13% of all organ donations.

     In Tim Flannery's book, Europe A Natural History, he wrote:  Without doubt, the most hated and feared of all Europe's carnivores was the wolf.  As human populations grew, and with them the numbers of domestic sheep, goats and cattle, the wolf was persecuted with the utmost determination, and in its history can be read the fate of Europe's carnivores as a whole.  Charlemagne was a great wolf hater.  Between 800 and 813 CE he established a special corps of wolf hunters known as la louveterie, whose only task was to persecute wolves with hunting, traps or poison.  La louveterie was organized as a military corps, and its salaries paid by the state.  It worked pretty much continuously for more than 1000 years --except for a brief break during the French Revolution-- which is almost as long as any institution, bar the Catholic Church, has operated in Europe.  And it was highly efficient, in 1883 alone accounting for the deaths of at least 1386 wolves.  After 1000 years of effort, the louvetiers finally put themselves out of business when they killed the last French wolf, in the Alps, at the end of the nineteenth century...By the middle ages wolf persecution had become systemic in Europe.  Organized hunts and drives accounted for the extinction of many populations, while overhunting of wolf prey by humans, along with the removal of vegetation, made life hard for the survivors.  The English got rid of the wolf in the fifteenth century by cutting down most of their forests.  Scotland followed with complete eradication through hunting in 1743, as did Ireland in 1770.  Persecution continued into the twentieth century.  Yugoslavia set up a wolf extermination committee in 1923 that nearly succeeded in its goal -- with only a few individuals surviving in the Dinaric Alps.  Sweden's last wolves were pursued by snowmobile and systematically shot until the last perished in 1966.  In Norway, the last wolf died --again at human hands-- in 1973.  Had it not been for their long border with Russia, which wolves disrespected, those expert hunters the Finns also might have succeeded in eliminating their wolves.  

      In her concluding thoughts, author Nussbaum added: Ours is a time of great awakening: to our kinship with a world of remarkable intelligent creatures, and to our real accountability for our treatment of them...The task seems daunting.  There are so many bad things going on, so much suffering, so much frustration of animals striving toward free movement, health, and social life.  And the frustration and suffering make so much money for so many people.  Animals are so terribly weak in this world, and the allies of animals often seem to be terribly weak as well -- against the power of the meat industry, the guile of poachers, the unending steam of plastic trash, the noise pollution from the undersea "air bombs" of the oil industry.  However, I believe that our time is a time of great hope for the future of animals...We must all be people of hope, if we think that our efforts are important and, indeed, are our collective responsibility...I hope that the readers of this will be moved, in their own many different ways, to make a choice for justice and become lovers of animal life: with wonder, with compassion, with outrage -- and with hope.  And while such thoughts may sound overly optimistic, given all that has happened, author Flannery added this some 20 pages later in his book: By the 1960s the wolf was on the brink of extinction in Europe.  Only in Romania was it present in any numbers.  But by 1978 wolves were once more in Sweden, the result of a pair that travelled from Finland.  The Swedish population really took off when another migrant arrived with a batch of fresh genes.  As of 2017, there are more than 430 wolves in Sweden and Norway.  Norway aims to maintain a national population target of four to six litters per year and is trying to restrict wolves to a small area along the border with Sweden.  South of Scandinavia, wolves are growing in number almost everywhere.  Some of the increasing populations, such as that in France, face intense opposition from farmers.  But on the whole, the expansion is, so far at least, uncontroversial.  In Germany in 2000 there was just one wolf pack.  Now there are more than 50, and nobody seems to mind.  The same attitude prevails in Denmark, where the first wolf litter for several centuries was born in 2017.  In early 2018 a wolf was seen in the Flanders region of Belgium, the first in more than a century.

     My trip to the landfill, to see up close just how much we discard, also revealed a small group of people trying to salvage what they could while there: old propane tanks for scrap (or perhaps to exchange for new tanks), a shed filled with cans of paint and stain which were still usable, even refrigerators and freezers lined up by the dozens, perhaps unusable but there for the taking if so desired.  Compost produced from all the cuttings was also available at no cost.  And my drive back from that distant landfill took me through a part of town which I rarely visit, one with a menagerie of cultures and their small shops and restaurants, also seemingly hidden away: Peruvian, Bhutanese, Vietnamese, Indonesian, Somali, Afghani, and more.  Out here, I felt, were the workers, the ones who probably lived with less of a luxury to simply toss things away, or to gobble down food without care, the "xenos" populations.  Whether true or not, it was the feeling I picked up just by driving through this "other" part of town, another gear in the economic engine helping to make our world happen.  Still, I couldn't shake the thought of what my vaccine may have actually cost in the capturing and separating of those macaques, or the cattle and pigs, or the chickens, the adrenaline and fear that would penetrate any of us if we felt we were the ones being led to slaughter, and how it would likely remain in our bloodstream when that time came (as alluded to by Singer's book).  But a small consolation came when the Bloomberg piece detailed a bit more about macaques: Long-tailed macaques are agile and clever.  Fully grown, they're about the size of a 3-year old human and weigh 30 pounds.  They're known for figuring out how to open a lock and escape a cage.  With 2-inch long canines, they can inflict deep puncture bites.  Almost all adult wild macaques --estimates range to 90%-- host a strain of a herpes B virus that has killed at least 23 lab employees and 5 monkey workers.  In her book, The Monkey Wars, journalist Deborah Blum describes how the virus, known as monkey B, is mild in monkeys but severe when contacted by humans, in whom it destroys spinal and brain tissue.  In 1997 a lab worker at a primate research center was infected when a drop of monkey urine got in her eye.  She died soon after.   Monkey B is so lethal that it's classified by the Department of Justice as a "potential tactical agent of terrorism."

     We may seem to buy and buy to fill our "needs," and to eat and eat to fill our cravings.  Each of us has our own views of how much or how little we care or want to do.  But right or wrong, or whatever your perception of what is right or wrong, the bottom line is that there are a lot of us humans now on earth, and each of us want to feel comfortable and safe, and not hunted or hungry.  Wars and urges to dominate can change our attitudes and outlooks, but the key word here would be just that one word: change.   Perhaps we've left the world of Charlemagne, and perhaps we'll return to it; but there will always be those who will defend and fight for what they believe in, even if it means continuing to build walls to keep "them" out (or in) and away from our eyes: refugees, animals, trash.  But as the New Yorker piece added: ...these advocates also, in different ways, remind us that important causes have a way of redrawing ideological lines, turning some of our opponents into allies, and some allies into opponents.  It is not easy to think carefully and consistently about what we do to animals.  If the people who try often end up endorsing proposals that make us recoil, this may say as much about us as about them.

     So in ending, a mention an author who talks about "the end."  Alua Arthur is a death doula and author of the book, Briefly, Perfectly Human.  She said this in an interview with NPR: People are most human when they are dying.  They are at their fullest.  That means their best and their worst.  I think as people are approaching the end, they are grieving as well.  They are grieving their own death.  They are grieving all the things that they're going to leave.  I think we often forget that when somebody in our lives is dying, we are losing them, but they are losing everything and everyone and leaving the only place that they've known consciously...death phobia has caused a real crisis, I think, in this country and in the West overall, where we are living out of relationship with nature and with our mortality, which is ultimately a detriment to us as a culture, but also to us as individuals....Getting to witness the doorway to existence is a gift, a privilege, and a huge honor.

*Noted Wikipedia on massive pig farms: Intensive pig farming, also known as pig factory farming, is the primary method of pig production, in which grower pigs are housed indoors in group-housing or straw-lined sheds, whilst pregnant sows are housed in gestation crates or pens and give birth in farrowing crates...Many of the world's largest producers of pigs (US, China, and Mexico) use gestation crates.  The European Union has banned the use of gestation crates after the fourth week of pregnancy.  Intensive pig farmers often cut off tails, testes or teeth of pigs without anaesthetic.  Although combined use of an anesthetic and analgesic appears to be the most effective method for controlling pain associated with surgical castration, regulatory requirements and cost remain obstacles to practical application...[CAUTION, the article continues but could prove to be difficult reading and prove disturbing for some readers:]  When confirmed pregnant, sows are moved to farrowing crates, with their litter, and will spend their time in gestation crates from before farrowing until weaning.  Injections with a high availability iron solution often are given, as sow's milk is low in iron.  Vitamin D supplements are also given to compensate for the lack of sunlight.  As the sows' bodies become less capable of handling the large litter sizes encouraged by the industry, the frequency of stillborn piglets generally increases with each litter.  These high litter sizes have doubled the death rates of sows, and as many as 25%-50% of sow deaths have been caused by prolapse, the collapse of the sow's rectum, vagina, or uterus.  Pig breeders repeat the cycle of impregnation and confinement for about 3 to 5 years or until the sow succumbs to her injuries, at which point she is then slaughtered for low-grade meat such as pies, pasties and sausage meat.  Of the piglets born alive, 10% to 18% will not make it to weaning age, succumbing to disease, starvation, dehydration, or being accidentally crushed by their trapped mothers.  This death toll includes the runts, unusually small piglets who are considered economically unviable and killed by staff, typically by blunt trauma to the head.   All that said, production has only increased; The Guardian wrote about one of several new pig farms already in use in China, only this "farm" is a building 26-stories tall and...with a capacity to slaughter 1.2 million pigs a year.

Sows in gestation crates, unable to move or turn.  Photo: Farm Sanctuary