Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
because it reduces aggression between pigs. The beak of a
chicken is a weapon, and adult hens can be surprisingly cruel,
so their beaks are trimmed at a young age. These are all exam-
ples of trading one aspect of animal welfare for another, and
not everyone agrees on whether the trade-off is ethical.
Some controversies regard whether a procedure should be
performed. For example, some dairy farmers used to routinely
dock the tails of their cows. Recent research suggests the ben-
efits are small or nonexistent, and so most farmers now leave
cows' tails intact, and docking is even banned in numerous
states in the United States (California, Rhode Island, New
Jersey, and soon Ohio [2018]) and Europe (Denmark, Germany,
Scotland, Sweden, the United Kingdom, and some Australian
states). The European Union is attempting to eliminate all
castration of male pigs by 2018. Other times the debate is not
whether, but how a procedure is performed, like whether
castration is accompanied by anesthesia, a practice that is
mandatory—though not always followed—in the European
Union (if the piglet is older than six days).
Housing
Although controversies about the severity of management pro-
cedures will continue to exist, the most consequential debates
concern livestock housing, and this is probably because con-
sumers and citizens generally dislike housing animals in
small, barren cages. In the United States, for example, most
egg production takes place in battery cages where a few hens
are placed in a barren wire cage, as shown in Table 8.2. The
wire allows manure to drop through the floor onto a conveyor
belt, keeping the cage sanitary, and with few hens in each cage,
aggression is not much of a problem. These cages are now
banned in the European Union and three US states. Will these
bans improve hen welfare? It depends on what replaces the
cages. If the barren cages are replaced with larger enriched
colony cages, many agree that the hens' behaviors and ability
