The Straits Times - July 10, 2006 Factory farm meat is unhealthy
It's quite understandable why Mr Christopher Turner has taken issue with the SBS bus hamburger advertisement. (More meat? No thanks; ST, July 2).

The concept of a factory farm totally disregards the inhumane methods of rearing animals, its only consideration being economic interest at the expense of all else. With conventional farming methods, prices at fast-food restaurants would have been sufficiently prohibitive to ensure that most fast-food restaurants would have gone the way of dinosaurs.

The Meet Your Meat video clip http://www.meat.org/ shows how animals are reared in factory farms which most of us have never seen. A cow grazing happily in an open field is only a figment of our imagination. These animals never see daylight, the only time that they do is when they are being transported to the abattoir.

In a factory farm, five to 10 chickens are usually crammed into a cage with only standing space. Fights ultimately break out but even injured animals are deemed fit for consumption. Pigs and cows are not just unable to move about but are not even able to turn around. They stand in the same spot till the day they are brought to the slaughterhouse.

A factory farm is like a warehouse containing thousands or tens of thousands of animals. Animal waste containing ammonia permeate the entire factory farm. This is unhealthy for the animals (and human beings as well). But animal sufferings do not end here. The manner in which these animals are transported to the slaughterhouse, as well as upon arrival, is simply inhumane. Factory farm and slaughterhouse employees also indulge in animal abuse beyond description.
The extreme cruelty of human beings in this 12-minute video clip is beyond words.

If we are not doing it for the animals, then the least we should do is for our health because factory farm meat is not as healthy as made out to be.