In June 2007, Advocacy for Animals reported on animal welfare in large-scale dairy farming (“The Big Business of Dairy Farming: Big Trouble for Cows”). This week we publish an article on the other cattle-farming enterprises—veal and beef production—provided through the courtesy of Farm Sanctuary, a farm-animal protection organization established in 1986. Farm Sanctuary works to stop cruel practices in animal agriculture. To this end, the organization conducts research and investigations, encourages legal reforms, educates the public, and rescues and shelters farm animals. At its shelters in Watkins Glen, N.Y., and Orland, Calif., Farm Sanctuary provides lifelong care to hundreds of rescued animals.



Within moments of birth, male calves born on dairies are taken away from their mothers and loaded onto trucks. Many are sold through auction rings, where they are subjected to transportation and handling stresses. The fragile animals are shocked and kicked, and when they can no longer walk, they are dragged by their legs or even their ears.

Every year, approximately one million calves are confined in crates measuring just two feet wide. They are chained by the neck to restrict all movement, which makes it impossible for them to turn around, stretch, or even lie down comfortably. This severe confinement makes the calves’ meat “tender” because their muscles cannot develop.

Published scientific research indicates that calves confined in crates experience chronic stress and require approximately five times more medication than calves living in more spacious conditions. It is not surprising then that veal is among the most likely meats to contain illegal drug residues that pose a threat to human health.


In addition to restricting the animals’ movement, veal producers severely limit what their animals eat. The calves are fed an all-liquid milk substitute that is purposely deficient in iron and fiber. It is intended to produce borderline anemia and the pale-colored flesh fancied by “gourmets.” At approximately 16 weeks of age, these weak animals are slaughtered and marketed as “white” veal (also known as “fancy,” “milk-fed,” “special-fed,” and “formula-fed” veal). Besides the expensive veal that comes from calves who are kept in small wooden crates, “bob” veal is the flesh of calves who may be slaughtered at just a few hours or days old. While these calves are spared intensive confinement, they are still subjected to inhumane transport, handling, and slaughter, and many die before reaching the slaughterhouse.


Since the 1980s a series of mergers and acquisitions have resulted in concentrating over 80% of the 35 million beef cattle slaughtered annually in the U.S. into the hands of four huge corporations.


Accustomed to roaming unimpeded and unconstrained, range cattle are frightened and confused when humans come to round them up. Terrified animals are often injured, some so severely that they become “downed” (unable to walk or even stand). These downed animals commonly suffer for days without receiving food, water, or veterinary care, and many die of neglect. Others are dragged, beaten, and pushed with tractors on their way to slaughter.

Many cattle will experience additional transportation and handling stress at stockyards and auctions, where they are goaded through a series of walkways and holding pens and sold to the highest bidder. From the auction, older cattle may be taken directly to slaughter, or they may be taken to a feedlot. Younger animals and breeding-age cows may go back to the range.

Ranchers still identify cattle the same way they have since pioneer days—with hot-iron brands. This practice is extremely traumatic and painful, and the animals bellow loudly as ranchers’ brands are burned into their skin. Beef cattle are also subjected to “wattling,” another type of identification marking. This painful procedure entails cutting chunks out of the hide that hangs under the animals’ necks. Wattling marks are supposed to be large enough that ranchers can identify their cattle from a distance.

Most beef cattle spend the last few months of their lives at feedlots, crowded by the thousands into dusty, manure-laden holding pens. The air is thick with harmful bacteria and particulate matter, and the animals are at a constant risk for respiratory disease. Feedlot cattle are routinely implanted with growth-promoting hormones, and they are fed unnaturally rich diets designed to fatten them quickly and profitably. Because cattle are biologically suited to eat a grass-based high-fiber diet, their concentrated feedlot rations contribute to metabolic disorders.

Cattle may be transported several times during their lifetime, and they may travel hundreds or even thousands of miles during a single trip. Long journeys are very stressful and contribute to disease and even death. Drover’s Journal [now Drovers] reported, “Shipping fever costs livestock producers as much as $1 billion a year.”

Young cattle are commonly taken to areas with cheap grazing land to take advantage of this inexpensive feed source. Upon reaching maturity, they are trucked to a feedlot to be fattened and readied for slaughter. Eventually, all of them will end up at the slaughterhouse.

A standard beef slaughterhouse kills 250 cattle every hour. The high speed of the assembly line makes it increasingly difficult to treat animals with any semblance of humaneness. A Meat & Poultry article stated, “Good handling is extremely difficult if equipment is ‘maxed out’ all the time. It is impossible to have a good attitude toward cattle if employees have to constantly overexert themselves, and thus transfer all that stress right down to the animals, just to keep up with the line.”

Prior to being hung up by their back legs and bled to death, cattle are supposed to be rendered unconscious, as stipulated by the federal Humane Slaughter Act. This “stunning” is usually done by a mechanical blow to the head. However, the procedure is terribly imprecise, and inadequate stunning is inevitable. As a result, conscious animals are often hung upside down, kicking and struggling, while a slaughterhouse worker makes another attempt to render them unconscious. Eventually, the animals will be stuck in the throat with a knife whether or not they are unconscious, and blood will gush from their bodies.

This is detailed in an April 2001 Washington Post article, which describes typical slaughterplant conditions:


They blink. They make noises, he said softly. The head moves, the eyes are wide and looking around. Still Moreno would cut. On bad days, he says, dozens of animals reached his station clearly alive and conscious. Some would survive as far as the tail cutter, the belly ripper, the hide puller. They die, said Moreno, piece by piece….



Reaction to the Washington Post investigative piece and others like it precipitated a congressional resolution reiterating the importance of the Humane Slaughter Act, but to date, there is little if any indication that the situation for animals in slaughterhouses has appreciably improved.

Images: Veal calf looks back from inside his tiny crate; veal calves stand and lie in filth; veal calf chained into his crate; “downed” cow with broken neck at Texas stockyard; terrified animal waits for slaughter.—all photos, © Farm Sanctuary

To Learn More

How Can I Help?

Books We Like

The Way We Eat: Why Our Food Choices Matter

The Way We Eat: Why Our Food Choices Matter
Peter Singer and Jim Mason (2006)

The authors of The Way We Eat, Peter Singer and Jim Mason—respectively, a utilitarian philosopher and an animal rights advocate—take a concrete approach to the ethics of eating habits. They examine the food choices of three different families and the motivations behind their purchasing habits. In the process they illuminate the paths by which food gets to our tables and the rights and wrongs involved for animals, humans, and the environment.

Singer has explained, “To be a utilitarian means that you judge actions as right or wrong in accordance with whether they have good consequences. So you try to do what will have the best consequences for all of those affected.” In The Way We Eat, this process includes looking at the oft-cited ideal of buying locally produced food: is it the really best ethical choice, for example, to “support the local economy,” which may be prosperous enough already, while farmers in Bangladesh may have a greater need for economic support? It also entails a careful consideration of such subjects as the practice of factory farming, terminology including “organic,” “free-range,” and “fair trade,” and the practical effects of various dietary habits including those of vegans, vegetarians, and those who might be called “conscious omnivores.”

The Way We Eat: Why Our Food Choices Matter was published a matter of weeks before Michael Pollan’s 2006 best-seller, The Omnivore’s Dilemma, and unfortunately was greatly overshadowed by it. The Way We Eat is quite a different book from Pollan’s, which one reviewer has said “makes some ill-informed arguments in favor of including animal products in the diet.” Singer and Mason, however, do not insist on strict veganism as the only ethical dietary practice, which may come as a surprise to some; rather, they provide much information that will benefit anyone—whether omnivore, herbivore, or something in between—who wishes make informed choices about the food they buy and eat.

—L. Murray