Feedlots

One of the big memories I hold from the years when I had my own big truck travelling all over the US and Canada is the memory of the beef cattle feedlot farms in Texas, Oklahoma, Nebraska, and Colorado especially, but in other places as well. 

  
The first thing you find out about them is that God-awful stink. You can pick it up for a couple miles away. I remember a place I used to go just west of Amarillo where you could smell it from three miles away. You come up over this little rise and there it is, a giant feedlot full of cattle as far as the eye can see. It doesn't have a single blade of grass in it and the ground is sheer black muck, a lot of it stuck to the sides and legs of the cattle.

I've seen these even in Vermont and there is one right in the middle of a beautiful little town in central Ohio. You come out from St. Johnsbury heading south and there is this big, stinking feedlot, backdropped by the majestic mountains. You come into this little idyllic Ohio town I tell you about and you wonder how the townspeople tolerate having this right in the center of town.

These feedlots are sometimes called “confined animal feeding operations” or “factory farms.” They are fed, among other things, 60% of all the anti-biotics used in the US and several hormones three of which are synthetic. These drugs get into the local ecosystems as well as into the meat and from there into our own bodies.

There's nothing new in my speaking of this. Everybody knows. What makes the difference, what turns you off from eating meat ever after is the actual, physical, seeing and smelling of these feedlots. You can read about them, hear about them, think about them, but actually to see and to smell them is another thing.

I am incapable of addressing the “humanity issue” with regard to non-humans, and can only respect my own personal feelings.

But I often slept in the parking lots of truck stops where there were cattle- and pig-hauling trucks overnight right beside my truck. You could hear the cattle stomping around during the night, bellowing, stinking. I remember some pigs being transferred from one trailer to another at one of these truck stops. The pigs were actually screaming. They sounded to me like humans screaming even though they weren't humans. I remember getting up one morning from my bunk, looking out my window at a stinking cattle trailer parked right next to me, and there was this great, big, terrified eye of a steer looking out through an oval opening on the side of the trailer. That did it for me. I have eaten meat a couple times since that morning ten years ago, but never enjoyed it again. It was the feeling of simple, very deep, personal revulsion that did it rather than some intellectual consideration.

There are all kinds of intellectual considerations, however, worth reading. The latest issue of Popular Science, for example, has a fascinating article on dietary substitutes for meat entitled “Can Artificial Meat Save the World?” Here's a sample:

80 percent of the world's farmland is used to support the meat and poultry industries...a single pound of cooked beef...requires 298 square feet of land, 27 pounds of feed, and 211 gallons of water...That same pound of hamburger requires more than 4,000 BTU's of fossil fuel energy to get to the dinner table...That process, along with the methane the cows belch throughout their lives, contributes as much as 51 percent of all greenhouse gases produced in the world.

I'm sure that it is possible to dispute such studies and statistics because the reality is so complicated. What about the incalculable medical costs of putting those anti-biotics and hormones into our own bodies through meat or the costs to our own feelings of well-being? It's so complicated that I think we are left with having to rely on our feeling, our intuition, our inner sense. That's what I got from the feedlots like the one near Amarillo: I felt “This can't be right.”

Here's Banksy's "Sirens of the Lambs:"