Intensive Animal Husbandry (Review) (Hansard, 3 July 1996)

§ Mr. Chris Mullin (Sunderland, South)

I beg to move, That leave be given to bring in a Bill to establish a body to investigate and report upon intensive animal husbandry and its implications for animal health and welfare, and for human health.

The Bill also wants the body to make recommendations for the establishment of humane and morally defensible systems of animal husbandry.

There is a view that the bovine spongiform encephalopathy crisis is a terrible but isolated disaster, which can be resolved by the introduction of a few practical measures and the shelling out of a great deal of public money to compensate an industry that has, to a large extent, brought the disaster on itself, after which business can continue as usual. I do not take that view. BSE is nature's revenge on factory farmers. Rather than continuing down the same old road, we should view the BSE scare as an opportunity for everyone concerned—producers and consumers alike—to learn lessons of a more general nature than any that have so far been suggested.

In the past 40 years, the principles of mass production have been introduced into the farmyard. Animals are treated not as sentient beings, capable of feeling pain and emotion, but as agricultural products. The treaty of Rome defines them as such. In the name of the great God efficiency, production systems have been devised that inflict unspeakable suffering on calves, pigs, chickens and turkeys throughout their short and miserable lives.

Pigs are locked in crates, where they can only stand or lie and where they suffer great stress, are bred to unnatural sizes and are forced to produce more than 20 offspring a year—many times their natural output. Broiler chickens, reared for their meat, never see daylight and are crammed together in huge windowless sheds that are littered with excrement, which is never removed in their 42-day lives. They are forced by selective breeding to grow from chicks to adults at twice their normal rate of growth, to the point where they can barely walk.

Hens are reared for their eggs and confined for their entire productive lives in battery cages so tiny that they cannot stretch their wings, let alone walk. Cows are selectively bred to produce much higher milk yields. They are milked to exhaustion, their swollen udders forcing their legs apart; they are often in great pain from mastitis; and they are separated from their calves within a few days of birth. What a terrible fate awaits their calves—or at least it did until the collapse of the beef industry—in the veal crates of France and Holland. The breeding pattern of sheep has been manipulated in response to the demands of supermarkets, so that lambs are produced in winter and not in spring, with the result that hundreds of thousands die of exposure.

How can that be morally justified? It cannot. Agribusiness can get away with it only by hoping that consumers do not find out or that, if we do, we shall avert our eyes. What are we to make of the appalling mutilations visited by factory farmers on their animals? Lambs are castrated either by cutting off their testicles with a knife, or by using a rubber ring to cut off the blood supply so that the testicles drop off. Chickens and turkeys are debeaked with red-hot blades. Piglets have their tails removed with knives or hot irons. Some even have their 982 teeth clipped. All those mediaeval tortures are allegedly made necessary by the need to stop those unfortunate animals turning on each other in the frustration caused by their close confinement.

Who knows the effect on human health of the diet of antibiotics fed to factory-farmed animals to promote faster growth and to stave off the infections brought about by the awful conditions in which they are reared? The most common types of food poisoning are campylobacter and salmonella. A report published earlier this year by the Advisory Committee on Microbiological Safety concluded that one chicken in three is contaminated with salmonella and that 44 per cent. are contaminated with campylobacter. Who knows what new crises the future holds as long as this madness is allowed to continue?

Gradually, thanks to organisations such as Compassion in World Farming, which I am proud to support and which is the inspiration for the Bill, the consumer is becoming aware of the terrible suffering inflicted in our name. It is for each of us to search his or her conscience and to decide how to respond. For my part, I gave up eating meat some years ago, not because I feared for my health or because I dislike meat, but because I do not wish to be party to the infliction of such barbarity.

I regret that none of the main political parties takes this issue sufficiently seriously. Farm animals' welfare has been scarcely mentioned in any of the many debates and statements in the House arising from the BSE crisis. My party, thanks mainly to the work of my hon. Friend the Member for Glanford and Scunthorpe (Mr. Morley), has some sensible policies, but for some reason we hide our light under a bushel—presumably because farmers have votes and animals do not. That approach is short-sighted.

A growing number of people of all political persuasions—especially the young, who are otherwise disillusioned with politicians—care passionately about the treatment of farm animals. An excellent series of articles on the evils of factory farming appeared in the Daily Mail on 17, 18 and 19 June. It is not every day that I find something to praise in the Daily Mail, but that fine piece of journalism graphically described the effects of unrestrained market forces on the farming industry. A leading article in the Daily Mail on 19 June stated: We may reckon to have progressed beyond the rustic barbarity of cock fighting and bear baiting. Yet, in all conscience, can anything compare to the systematic cruelty of factory farming?

Even people who are oblivious to the suffering of farm animals are beginning to notice the potential threat to their health and that of their children. My Bill confronts the issues head on. We need a wholly new approach to meat and dairy production. We need to restore morality to meat production. We must wean agribusiness off factory farming and away from the over-use of antibiotics and routine barbarity. We need a system of subsidies that encourages good practice and not merely discourages but penalises bad practice. We should not wait until the message reaches the European Union, although we must do our best to take our EU partners with us. We should act now, in the hope that we can set an example that will be followed by the rest of the world.

My Bill would establish a body that would include veterinarians, doctors, and members appointed after consultation with animal welfare organisations and farming interests. It would have a wider remit than the Farm Animal Welfare Council, whose work I 983 acknowledge. The new body would be asked to consider the implications of factory farming for not just animals but human health. It would be asked to make specific recommendations on how to bring factory farming of animals to an end. The time has come to return to a morally defensible system of animal husbandry, consistent with life in a civilised country.