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Abstract
The number of animals raised and slaughtered for food in the U.S. has increased dramatically since 1945. We examine how two factors have been fundamental in this expansion of "meat" consumption: the market and the state. U.S. agricultural policies that emerged form the New Deal centered on price supports and production controls. While these policies were aimed at controlling supply, they instead spurred intensive and industrial techniques that resulted in continuous overproduction, especially in corn, wheat and soybeans. As a result, farm organizations and the state promoted "meat"1 production and consumption as a way to alleviate the surplus. To handle this expansion, intensive and industrial methods reshaped "meat" production, resulting in more oppressive living conditions for animals raised as "meat." We explore this connection between the market, state policy and animal oppression. We also briefly analyze how this relationship has likewise affected workers and peripheral nations in the world economy.
Animal rights activists decrying the abuse of animals frequently cite the direct consumption of animals as food (Singer, 1975). Billions of other animals are "produced" in deplorable conditions, brutally killed and eaten by relatively elite groups of humans. Such critiques tend to focus on the ethics and morality of such practices, but often overlook social structural forces - such as the integral links between a "free market" economy and government economic policies and the consumption of other animals as food.
In this paper we examine the links between New Deal-inspired U.S. agricultural policy and the expansion of animal oppression after 1945. U.S. agricultural policy encouraged increased "meat" consumption to help reduce the oversupply of feed grains, in particular com. This policy expanded the oppression of animals in two ways. First, the consumption of animals obviously increased, which meant that more animals were slaughtered. Second, animals considered "food" experienced increasingly oppressive conditions: large feeding lots, diets of feed grains rather than pasture, the use of growth hormones, shorter life spans, chemically-altered growth patterns and assembly-line style slaughter. "Livestock" production became increasingly scientific and used more technology (see Finlay, forthcoming; Thu and Durrenberger, 1998). We argue that the expansionary and profit-driven market economy underlay each dimension of animal oppression, and that this development is fueled and maintained by state policies.
The expansion of "meat" consumption...