Americans love inexpensive meat. Many think it would be a terrible fate to be deprived of cheap diner bacon and drive-through burgers. For over a century the meat industry has catered to and cultivated this taste, mass-producing beef, pork, and chicken in ways that permit efficiencies of scale—but necessitate inhumane treatment of the animals. These creatures are warehoused like objects and herded along fear-ridden assembly lines to certain death.

The meat industry has great power in American politics and even has a voice in the confirmation of cabinet-level officials involved in regulation.¹ Factory farming is expanding, increasingly squeezing out small family farms, where animals may actually be able to move around a little and enjoy the short lives they are allowed. And laws protecting animals from cruel treatment routinely exclude the animals people like to eat.

The Animal Welfare Act (1966), for instance, carefully defines “humane treatment” for each species but utterly exempts the food industry from all regulation; similarly, the Migratory Bird Treaty Act (1918) omits all birds that people eat. Recent federal legislation on animal cruelty has been limited to extreme cases unconnected with eating. The Preventing Animal Cruelty and Torture (PACT) Act (2019) focuses on prohibiting the production of “crush” videos—pornographic films showing small animals being stomped to death, typically by a woman’s high-heeled shoe—but lists as exceptions to the law’s anticruelty measures: normal veterinary or husbandry practices, hunting, trapping, fishing, predator or pest control, and medical or scientific research. The Help Extract Animals from Red Tape (HEART) Act, introduced in the House in 2021, protects animals seized in federal cases involving dogfighting and helps find them adoptive homes. Needless to say, this law is in tune with common American sentiments, which cherish dogs while ignoring pigs, cows, and chickens.

Read more at The New York Review