Factory Farming: Animal Suffering in Germany and Beyond

There is no uniform definition of factory farming. However, it could be described as ‘a system of farming in which a large number of animals are kept in a small closed area, in order to produce a higher yield of meat, eggs, or milk as cheaply as possible’¹.

In addition to factory farming, this may also be known as intensive animal husbandry or industrial animal farming.

The term can be seen critically, as it makes animal individuals disappear into a voiceless, unidentifiable mass. This encourages the public to forget that each of the individual animals in this industry has its own interests, social ties and needs.

Even though there are no clear legally defined characteristics for factory farming practices, certain criteria can be delineated. Some of them, but not all, must apply at the same time:²

• High livestock numbers
• Specialisation in one type of animal (e.g. pig fattening, chicken fattening)
• Feed and young animals are purchased and not grown or bred in-house
• Feeding exclusively with concentrated feed for rapid weight gain
• Use of imported feed (corn and soybean meal)
• Delivery of the slurry to other farms
• Many animals per worker
• Extensive automation of work processes
• Inappropriate husbandry (no access to the outdoors, lack of bedding, high stocking densities)
• The use of “high performance” animals

The overall goal of these facilities is mass production of animal products. Mass production means that processes are rationalised, resulting in low unit costs to produce a high number of the same goods at low prices for the mass market³.

For the animals, this means that they have to live in huge groups in as little space as possible, and that everything that can be automated is automated.

In factory farms, animals are also required to produce the highest possible ‘output’ and are selectively bred to achieve this goal. This means that in meat production, they should reach their maximum size and weight in as short a time as possible. In dairy and egg production, they should produce as much milk and eggs as possible. However, as soon as this performance decreases and they are no longer considered profitable, they are killed and replaced with the next generation.

In Germany alone, around 750 million animals live and die in factory farming every year ⁴. This number does not include fish who are becoming increasing farmed in such facilities.

98% of meat in Germany comes from factory farming ⁵.

Poultry stocks in Germany have almost tripled since 1900, and pig stocks have increased by about 1.6 times, although they have been declining again in recent years ⁶.

At the same time, it can be observed that there are fewer and fewer farms despite the increasing number of animals. Three quarters of chicken fattening farms have given up operations in the last 20 years ⁷. Therefore, more and more animals are concentrated on fewer and fewer farms.

There is no official number of animals that distinguishes a factory farm from a regular farm.

However, based on threshold values from the building laws¹⁰ , it could be suggested that a farm becomes an industrial facility when it has the capacity to raise the following numbers of animals:

• 600 cattle
• 560 sows
• 1,500 fattening pigs
• 15,0000 laying hens or turkeys for fattening
• 30,000 chickens for fattening

Most people, however, already assume mass livestock farming at lower numbers. 90% of consumers already see facilities with 500 cattle, 1000 pigs and 5000 chickens as mass livestock farms¹¹.

The largest factory farm in Germany is in Brandenburg, with 1.6 million laying hens¹². One of Europe’s largest pig fattening facilities in Alt-Tellin gained sad notoriety in 2021 when almost all of the more than 60,000 animals kept there burned to death in a major fire¹³.

The largest pig farm in the world is in China, where 84,000 animals are kept in one facility. Every year, 2.1 million animals pass through these facilities alone, where they live in multi-story high-rise buildings^14,15.

Emergence of Factory Farming in Germany

The emergence of factory farming is closely intertwined with industrialisation. The industrial revolution was accompanied by the industrialisation of agriculture.

Through mechanisation, yields could be increased. Through rail networks, imports and exports could be realised and production steps could be outsourced¹⁶.

As a result, more and more specialisation took place. Instead of a classic farm with many different animals and its own fodder cultivation, farms emerged that specialised in one particular sub-sector and were dependent on buying or selling for the other sub-sectors^17,18.

Factory farming prevents animals from living out their many needs. They are forced to live in a barren, stimulus-free environment.
In addition, they live in far large groups in very confined spaces, while in some forms of husbandry they may never see daylight throughout their lives.

When it comes to animals on factory farms, there can be no such thing as ‘good welfare’.

The effects of intensive husbandry and profit maximisation on the bodies of animals are evident in many ways. Only a few examples are listed here.

In the case of dairy cows, for example, the enormous, unnatural amounts of milk they are required to produce, housing that is not appropriate for the species, and frequent parturition lead to²²:

• Mastitis, painful udder inflammation (an estimated 20 – 35 % of cows are affected)
• Lameness
• Reproductive organ disorders
• Circulatory and behavioural disorders
• Susceptibility to injuries of the skin and hooves

For pigs, due to the conditions under which they are kept, they commonly suffer from the following²³:

• Bursitis, swellings at the leg joints that are caused by hard, slatted floors
• Calluses, also due to the concrete slatted floors without bedding
• Foot injuries
• Stomach ulcers
• Fertility disorders in sows
• Constipation
• Behavioural disorders such as tail and ear biting, navel sucking, ‘belly nosing’ of other piglets, urine drinking, mouthing behaviours, and ‘mourning behaviour’ (apathetic sitting position with head down and eyes closed)²⁴

Natural behaviours and needs have no place in factory farming:

The natural social structures of animals find no place in factory farming. In addition to the lack of opportunity to express natural behaviours, animals are a forced to live with thousands of others in a confined space. This prevents the formation of normal social grouping. As a result, the animals are distressed and are prone to behavioural disorders including aggression.

In addition, injuries are regularly caused by the environment itself. Slipping on wet slatted floors, standing on cage grids in laying hen or rabbit cages, calluses from hard floors and chewing on constricting bars are just a few examples.

As well as serious animal suffering, factory farming also creates direct hazards for humans. Not only does this industry have negative effects on the climate and the environment, which also affect humans indirectly, it can also create specific health hazards.

Pandemics and Contaminations

Industrial animal husbandry is a breeding ground for pandemics. 75% of all pandemics are zoonotic⁴⁶. These types of diseases can be transmitted from animals to humans or vice versa. They can be transmitted, for example, directly from wild animals to humans (through consumption of meat from wild animals or contact) or from wild animals to farmed animals⁴⁷.

With the ever-increasing presence of humans and the reduction of pristine wildlife habitats, humans and human-owned animals are coming into contact with novel wildlife viruses more frequently.

On the other hand, the huge sheds and barns themselves make perfect breeding grounds for viruses and other pathogens. Highly lethal viruses, which do not spread so quickly in wild animals because they kill individual animals quickly, spread rapidly in factory farming sheds because the distances from one host to another could hardly be shorter.

Due to the fact that the animals here are so genetically similar, new viruses can spread unchecked in industrial animal farming systems⁴⁹.

Apart from the danger to humans, full populations of farmed animal stocks, which can be in the thousands, are also repeatedly culled (emergency slaughtered) due to epidemics and pandemics. Some well known examples include avian influenza and swine flu⁵⁰.

‘Food scandals’ caused by contaminated meat, eggs or milk also occur repeatedly, such as the occurrence of BSE (Bovine spongiforme Enzephalopathie or mad cow disease)⁵¹, caused by feeding animal protein to cattle, or the Dixion scandal with eggs in 2011⁵².

Antibiotic Resistance

Antibiotic resistance is also a major threat. According to the WHO, this is one of the greatest threats to global health and food safety⁵³.

This is understood as the ability of microorganisms to resist antimicrobial treatment. In short, antibiotics no longer work because a bacterium has become multiresistant, i.e. has adapted⁵⁴.

Antibiotic resistance is attributed to overuse or misuse of antibiotics.

In factory farming, antibiotics are administered to promote growth (banned in the EU since 2006, but not yet in other parts of the world) and to prevent disease⁵⁵. It is estimated that 70-80% of the world’s antibiotics are used in animal agriculture⁵⁶.

Mass use poses an immense threat. Multi-resistant germs can develop here and the effectiveness of antibiotics can be reduced.

If zoonotic, resistant bacteria are involved, there is a serious risk to humans, as treatment with antibiotics is ineffective from the outset.

In addition, it is also becoming increasingly difficult or impossible to treat numerous bacterially triggered diseases such as pneumonia, tuberculosis, sepsis, gonorrhea or salmonella infections⁵⁷.

The bottom line is that common illnesses and minor injuries can once again have fatal outcomes, as they did in the days before the discovery of penicillin⁵⁸.

Hormones

In the EU, although the administration of growth hormones to animals is prohibited, sex hormones are routinely administered.

In pig breeding, for example, the hormone PMSG is administered to sows. This is obtained on horse farms from the blood of pregnant mares, whose foals are aborted as soon as the hormone is no longer present in the blood⁵⁹.

The sexual cycle of the pigs is synchronised for ‘improved’ fertility management and the sows give birth to unnaturally large numbers of piglets⁶⁰.

Substances with hormonal effects, such as carcinogenic and mutagenic steroids, also end up on fields and in drinking water from the slurry produced by intensive farming⁶¹.

Since the hormones are present in the meat and milk of animals, they are absorbed by humans who consume them. According to studies, there is a connection with breast and prostate cancer in humans⁶².

Intensive livestock farming is anything but sustainable and is responsible for devastating environmental pollution and climate damage. Th following examples are often connected with industrial animal farming:

• Rainforest clearing
• Species extinction
• Displacement of indigenous peoples
• Biodiversity loss
• Greenhouse gas emissions
• High water consumption
• Soil pollution
• Groundwater contamination

90% of the world’s crop yields are fed to animals. Soy accounts for a large proportion of this. It is used as a cheap source of protein in animal fattening as concentrated feed. 80% of the soy grown is processed into food for animals⁶³.

For the ever-increasing demand of the global market for animal products, huge areas of rainforest are being cleared for soy plantations and other pastures, especially in Brazil ⁶⁴.

The importance of rainforests for the world’s climate is enormous. They are often called ‘the green lungs of the world’ and store huge amounts of CO2 in their plants and soils^65.

They are also home to 90% of all primates, 80% of all insects, 40% of all birds and 60% of all plants on earth 66. Furthermore, in the course of deforestation, indigenous peoples are being driven from their homes⁶⁷.

Environmental pollution is also manifested by significant emissions of, for example, harmful ammonia, gases that affect the climate, odors, dust, bioaerosols, fungi and bacteria⁶⁸.
Cows emit large amounts of the greenhouse gas methane. Methane is considered ten to twenty times more harmful to the climate than CO2. In fact, almost 40% of agricultural greenhouse gas emissions could be attributed to animal digestion alone⁶⁹.

Soy, corn and cereals for animals are mainly grown in huge monocultures. Outside the EU, the varieties are mostly genetically modified for higher yields⁷⁵. Since they are used for food for animals in the agriculture industry, the EU ban on genetic engineering for food does not apply.

Cultivation in monoculture strongly affects the soil, as nutrients are removed very unilaterally, and is a major factor in the destruction of ecosystems and biodiversity⁷⁶. Especially since high amounts of pesticides are used in this area, which are harmful to humans, animals and the environment⁷⁷.

In Germany, the following animals are the most commonly found in factory farming systems:

• Chickens
• Turkeys
• Pigs
• Cattle

However, rabbits, goats and sheep are also kept in factory farms. For the latter, there are no specific legal requirements on how they are to be kept.

There are also factory farmed fish and other marine animals that are kept in aquacultures, which causes many separate problems for oceans, wild animals and entire ecosystems. Even for octopi, which are actually solitary, the world’s first industrial factory farm was built in Spain⁷⁸.

Furthermore, intensive animal farms exist not only for the production of animal-based foods, but also for wool, fur, pearls and silk.
For example, huge farms of merino sheep in Australia, fur farms with mink, arctic foxes or dogs, breeding farms of oysters and factory farming of silkworms.

Intensive animal husbandry creates suffering, environmental damage, and health hazards.
But in smaller farms, the animals are also subject to exploitation.

Only a form of husbandry in which the bodies of animals are not subjected to the profit interests of humans can offer animals a fulfilling life according to their own interests.

In the transformation phase until the end of factory farming, animals rescued from industrial production can live a peaceful and species-appropriate life at animal sanctuaries.

In addition, repurposing existing agricultural land for plant-based human food could save resources, feed more people, and reduce climate and environmental damage.

In order to avert the effects and dangers in all areas, the following is therefore necessary until factory farming is a thing of the past:

• A gradual reduction in the number of animals (Link zu englischen Artikel einfügen)
• Promoting the cultivation of plant proteins for human nutrition
• Conversion of agricultural land currently used for animal feed production
• The prohibition of prophylactic antibiotic use and hormone administration
• Higher animal welfare standards that make life in the animal industry more bearable
• Stronger controls and higher penalties for violations

Turning away from factory farming is in the interest of all living beings on this planet, but first and foremost of the animals living there, who are subjected to unspeakable suffering, pain and death.

FAQs

What is the Argument Against Factory Farming?

The main argument against industrial livestock farming is that the animals suffer greatly and are exploited. Factory farming also poses great risks to humans due to pandemics, antibiotic resistance and hormones. This industry also damages the environment and climate due to over fertilisation, rainforest clearing and high water consumption.

How do Animals Feel in Factory Farming?

Animals suffer in intensive livestock farming. They have hardly any space, no access to fresh air and daylight. They cannot have family relationships and friendships, they often suffer from behavioural disorders, stress and injuries. The barn facilities are barren, uncomfortable and the animals do not have  their needs met.

Where is Factory Farming Most Prominent?

The most factory farming in Germany is in Lower Saxony, Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania and North Rhine-Westphalia. Worldwide, China is the country with the most pig farming (more than half of all pigs are kept there), the most beef is produced in the USA, Brazil and China, and most broiler chickens also live in the USA.

Can Factory Farming be Abolished?

Almost 70% of Germans want a ban on factory farming. An abolition of factory farming is also necessary and possible: with a gradual reduction of animal stocks and a restructuring of agriculture by promoting the cultivation of plant proteins for human nutrition.