Eveliina Lundquist studied to become an animal attendant between 2011 and 2012 and wrote a book about her experiences. She wanted to learn more about other animals and to find out what happens inside animal farms.
“The first thing I felt was embarrassment. The type you get when you’ve been told to do something inappropriate. I stood before a large animal. Or more accurately, her breasts. And I was supposed to wash them. To encroach on someone’s private space – something for which I didn’t feel like I had permission or even desire. There she stood, right in front of me, udders bulging with milk.”
This is the beginning of my diary from the animal farms I worked at between 2011 and 2012. I was studying to become a farm animal attendant, and after each workday, I wrote down my thoughts and the day’s events. This first entry crystallizes a self-evident fact about animal farms: animals are exploited. Their private space is violated, and the milk they’ve worked hard to produce is given to humans instead of their own offspring. Animals are killed when they no longer produce enough.
I interned at piggeries, broiler halls, sheep barns, and cattle sheds. I already knew a lot in advance: after all, I had been part of the animal rights movement for almost half my life, written my master’s thesis on chickens, and visited countless farms. Even so, many things surprised me. For instance, I hadn’t previously realized just how often animals are hit. Cows suffering from leg pain were hit with dung scrapers to make them walk faster. Pigs were kicked so that their narrow pens could be cleaned. Pigs were also driven into slaughter trucks by shocking them with electric prods.
I hardened my heart and mind. I cried once. It happened when I saw the castration of male piglets:
“The woman lifted the first piglet out of the cart by its hind legs and looked at its rear: boy. She injected the painkiller under the skin of the neck, took the knife and slit an incision into the piglet’s testicles. After that, she plopped out the testicles and ripped them out along with the testicular cord, then threw the bloody lump into the pen next to the piglets’ mother. […] During the whole operation, the piglet was dead quiet. After being lowered by its leg into the pen, it huddled next to the wall.”
A painkiller is not the same as local anesthesia. It is equivalent to giving the animal an ibuprofen pill and then ripping out its testicles. The pain is indescribable. The operation is done to all male piglets, and organic farming is no exception.
Another example of causing extreme pain is when the growing horns of calves are removed by cauterizing. On half of cattle farms in Finland, the operation is performed without a vet. This means no general or local anesthesia. It means holding the calf down violently and inflicting third degree burns. I tried to get the farmers to call for a vet to perform the operation, but none of them were willing: it cost money.
In the end, though, the worst thing for the animals is captivity itself. Day after day in narrow concrete pens, in cages, or tied by their necks to their stalls. Day after day, blatant disregard for the animals: In one piggery, for instance, they had bolted a 30-centimeter metal chain to the wall as enrichment. The pigs also received a few handfuls of wood chips. This was considered enough. The pigs would be happy. I saw that they were not. Those things are not enough for such active and intelligent animals. The pigs bit each other or their pens in frustration. Many of their tails were bloody or even chewed off. They were also given antibiotics for arthritis every day.
Chickens that had spent a year in battery cages had bright red backsides like those of baboons: the birds’ feathers were worn or pecked off completely. The chickens’ claws were like a witch’s long nails, and they got caught on the structures of the cage. In the cage, it was impossible to scratch the ground to keep their claws short.
In cow barns that use tie stalls, the cows are kept in place, tied by their neck for 8 to 10 months a year. The only possible movement is half a step forward or half a step back. They have no real contact with their fellow cows. “Tie stalls were cheaper to build than a free stall barn,” was the answer when I asked why someone would still build a tie stall barn in this decade.
People want to drink cow milk. This means that calves are separated from their mothers usually straight after birth or after a couple of weeks at the latest. I learned to recognize that desperate, heart-wrenching cry that can be heard even outside the cow barn when a calf has been taken from its mother. The mother keeps searching and searching for her baby. She goes back and forth across the hallways of the barn – if she’s not tied by her neck – and keeps searching for several days. The calf huddles in a narrow pen. It gets taught to drink milk substitute from a bottle or bucket. Or it gets taken to a bull barn along with other male calves who are facing the same grim fate. What does it feel like losing the baby you just gave birth to, time and time again? What does it feel like living without a mother’s care? I can’t even imagine it.
I spent a few days interning at a broiler farm. This farm, which is brightly advertised as a “family farm”, houses 120 000 birds. On broiler farms, sick birds are not cared for by a vet, but instead put down – that is, if they’re even found among the tens of thousands of chickens. The farm has its own crematorium, where it’s easy to dump the birds that were killed and the ones that died on their own after inspection rounds of the halls. There were a lot of birds, and during later stages of their growth, they spread out into a tight mass. So tight, in fact, that it was difficult to move the cart used for gathering the carcasses.
One of the biggest issues for broilers is intensive breeding, whose purpose is to make the animals grow as fast as possible with the least amount of food. Every day, I found dozens of birds that were slowly and painfully dying, and that we were told to “weed out”. Equally many were already dead. The dying ones were killed by grabbing them by the head and twirling them around like a sling.
“Most of the birds had one leg in a weird position, and they tried to drag the leg behind them. One chicken had four legs. Some birds had slanted heads, some broken wings. Some just slouched down, looking sick, and did not move when they were picked up.”
Someone claimed that the farms I interned at were exceptions to the norm. This is very much not the case. If you have visited one broiler farm, you can say you’ve seen them all. The watering or feeding system might be different, but the farms all use the same kind of breeding halls. In some, broilers live to the age of 31 days, in some, 39.
Piggeries are largely the same. Most sows live almost half of each year in a cage that prevents turning around. With cow barns, there is more variation: half of cows in Finland live in tie stall barns, half in free stall barns. Still, at every dairy farm, cows are separated from their calves either immediately or a couple of weeks after giving birth. The cycle is unavoidable: giving birth – separation – grief – artificial insemination – giving birth – separation – grief – artificial insemination. If pigs have straw, calves at a dairy farm are allowed to stay with their mothers or chickens have outdoor access, these are rare, one-off cases.
In the end, slaughter inevitably awaits every individual. It comes when the animal no longer has utility for humans. When chickens can no longer lay 300 eggs a year. When a broiler is only five weeks old but already grown into a bundle of muscles. When a pig’s buttocks have grown large enough or when a cow can no longer get pregnant for one reason or another. All this, just because humans want to eat food that tastes a certain way.
I did my last internship at a German animal sanctuary. There, I got to know a small piglet with a broken leg. I spent my days playing with it to cheer it up. When the piglet got to go outside after three weeks, it started digging with its snout. Oh boy, how the piglet dug! Dug and dug and dug. For three hours, its fierce small snout dug the hard loamy ground. After the piglet’s leg was completely healed, the uncontrollable need for digging subsided, because it was able to dig whenever it wanted. At every Finnish piggery, there are as many animals with the need to dig as there are pigs. The places where pigs are allowed to dig are very few. I got away from the factory farms, but inside them remained thousands of animals breathing in stinking, cramped and depressing facilities. There is no life there, only breathing.
Whose fault is all of this? Animal farmers often work long days, even on weekends, but the animals are suffering.
“Legislators,” say the farmers.
“Consumers,” say the legislators. People refuse to pay enough for animal products.
“The farmers,” say the consumers.
All sides blame each other, and a vicious circle is complete. I say: “our view of animals.” We need a holistic cultural change to free farm animals from the role we have reduced them to throughout history.
Eveliina Lundquist
The writer is a trained teacher, a Master of Science in agriculture and forestry, and an animal attendant, who plans on founding an animal sanctuary. Her book, Salainen päiväkirja eläintiloilta (“A secret diary from animal farms”) was published in 2014.