Introduction

I want to ask you a question. Do you think animals can feel things like pain or fear, or know what it means to be too hot or too cold? Unless you’re a complete drongo who’s just arrived from Mars, the answer’s got to be yes, hasn’t it?

Well, actually, you’re wrong! According to the European Union, the organisation that makes up a lot of the rules about how animals in Britain should be treated, farm animals are exactly the same as a CD player or a Frisbee. In their view, animals are nothing more than products – and nobody worries too much if you ill treat a Frisbee. The reasons go back a long way.

During the Second World War there was a shortage of food in Britain and Europe, so to make sure people got enough to survive, food was rationed. When the war ended in 1945, farmers in Britain and elsewhere were asked to grow as much as they could so there would never again be such shortages and hardships. There were almost no rules or regulations, farmers just got on and did it. In an effort to grow as many crops as possible, they used masses of fertiliser on the land and loads of pesticides to kill weeds and insects. To produce as much meat as possible, they also started cramming animals together in sheds. There were so many that there wasn’t enough land to graze them all on.

Even with pesticides and fertilisers, farmers couldn’t grow enough grass and hay to feed all their animals with so they started to introduce new foods such as wheat, corn and barley, most of it imported from other countries. They also added chemicals to the feed to control diseases because so many animals in one place provided a perfect breeding ground for bugs.

Once animals were kept in sheds rather than roaming free, it was easy for farmers to pick out the ones that grew fastest or had the most meat on them and breed only for them. This is called selective breeding and it was repeated year after year. The animals were also given food ‘concentrates’ that made them grow even faster – often dried, ground-up fish and bits of other animals. Sometimes it was even pieces of their own kind – chickens fed back to chickens, bits of cows fed to cows. It was all done on the basis of ‘waste not, want not’.

As the years went by new ways were found of making animals grow faster and bigger, because the bigger and faster they grew, the more money could be made from selling their meat. All the time they were treated less like animals and more like Frisbees. Instead of individual farmers working the land to make a living, food production became big business. Many farmers turned into mega-big producers and City companies invested large amounts of money in them. Of course they wanted something back – more money. So farming became an industry where profits were much more important than how the animals were treated. It’s what’s now known as agribusiness, and in Europe, Britain led the way.

The bigger and more powerful meat producers became, the less the government tried to control them. Large amounts of money were involved and this was spent on equipment , machinery and automation to take place of farm workers. And that’s how Britain’s farming got where it is today – a massive industry which employs fewer farm workers per acre that any other countries in the world.

Before the Second World War, meat was a bit of a luxury, something people ate once a week or on special occasions. Now, producers grow so many animals that meat is something most people eat every day in one form or another – bacon, sausages, burgers, ham sandwiches, pepperoni pizza, chicken nuggets – it’s even in some biscuits, cakes and pastries as animal fat. It’s everywhere! But what about the animals themselves, the 760 million or so which are killed for meat in Britain every year? This section looks at what happens to the animals that become the meat products in our lives.