Last week, I mentioned that U.S. consumers have some misconceptions about the chicken they eat, believing it to be full of additives of one form or another. Among those people who have raised those questions to me, there also seems to be the impression that family farms are good and “factory farms” are bad.
I really dislike the term “factory farm” – I believe it to be completely misleading, and I don’t like using it. It’s a term that the animal rights movement has succeeded in getting into the mainstream media, unfortunately.
The image of the family farm is one where a farmer has a small number of animals, all if which he knows by name, and he treats them like they are members of the family. Therefore, those animals must be healthier and much more humanely treated than they are on large commercial farms.
The popular image of the “factory farm,” on the other hand, is one where animals are just shoved through the system as quickly as possible, pumped full of chemicals, having no humane living conditions or treatment at all.
After all, wasn’t it a commercial pig farm in Mexico that started the H1N1 flu pandemic last year? Actually no, that farm had nothing to do with the outbreak. But we all watched U.S. reporters stand outside the gates of that operation and tell us how evil a place it was and how it had caused the flu pandemic.
The popular images of family and commercial farms have it wrong. ...Read the full blog on www.animalagnet.com.
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