Organic and Free-Range Animal Products: Fact or Fiction?

A recent Gallup poll found that 96 percent of Americans believe that animals should be protected from cruelty, yet animals on today's farms receive no protection from even the worst abuses.¹ As people become more aware of the horrors of factory farming, companies are responding by adding labels to their products with comforting words such as “organic,” “free-range,” “cage-free,” and “natural.” These labels may conjure up images of animals who roam freely in green pastures, but the reality of life and death for animals on organic and free-range farms is very different.

On organic and free-range farms, most animals are mutilated without the use of painkillers, kept in filthy, disease-ridden sheds, and finally forced to endure a long trip to the slaughterhouse without food or water. There are no humane slaughterhouses—in fact, free-range and organic animals are often sent to the same slaughterhouses that kill animals from factory farms.

Industries that exploit animals like to put out statements or design labels that are designed to trick consumers into believing that they treat animals well. Two of the most heavily marketed “animal welfare programs” are “Swine Welfare Assurance Program” (SWAP) and “United Egg Producers (UEP) Certified.” These labels are simply fancy names for factory farming—both were created by meat and egg lobbying groups, and both simply serve to put a happy face on the absolute worst practices in today's factory farms.

The UEP Certified label reads, “Produced in Compliance With United Egg Producers' Animal Husbandry Guidelines.” What the label doesn't say is that the "guidelines" mean next to nothing. The program allows factory farmers to cut off hens' sensitive beaks with a hot blade, cram six or seven hens into a tiny cage where they can't spread even one wing, and house them in filthy sheds with more than 100,000 other hens.² UEP had been stamping its egg cartons “Animal Care Certified," but after Compassion Over Killing sued the industry for misleading consumers, the industry was forced to adopt the less deceptive “UEP Certified” label. However, the exact same horrific treatment of hens continues. Watch what happens on UEP-certified farms.

The SWAP label shows a gentle hand cradling a pig. In reality, SWAP allows all the worst abuses, including keeping mother pigs in filthy cement-and-metal crates so small that they can't even turn around and cutting piglets' ears, yanking out their testicles, and chopping off their tails—all without any painkillers. SWAP even allows farms to kill sick piglets by slamming their heads into the pavement.³ Most people would agree that the products from animals who are abused in these ways should not be labeled “care certified” or “welfare assurance,” but the meat and egg industries have adopted these phrases to con consumers and increase their profits.

Animal products with labels designed to make us feel good about eating animals are typically not much better for the animals themselves than the regular animal products are, but they are also nearly as harmful to our health. The only advantage that organic products have is that they are not laced with arsenic, antibiotics, or hormones. Although flesh from these animals might be safer than that from drugged animals, the best choice is to avoid all meat. Organic, natural, and free-range flesh, milk, and eggs are devoid of complex carbohydrates and fiber and are laden with artery-clogging saturated fat and cholesterol, just as all animal products are. Major studies linking the consumption of animal products to heart disease, cancer, and other leading killers suggest that it's these components of animal foods-animal fat, animal protein, and a lack of fiber-that cause disease. Organic and free-range animals are killed in the same filthy slaughterhouses as animals from factory farms, so their flesh is subject to the same bacterial contamination from unsanitary conditions as well.

A Word on Farmed Fish

The meat industry has also been promoting farm-raised fish as a sustainable alternative to wild-caught fish. What the industry doesn't want you to know is that farm-raised fish must be fed 5 pounds of wild-caught fish in order to produce just 1 pound of meat, making aquafarming worse—by a factor of five—than commercial fishing, which is destroying our aquatic eco-systems.⁴ Fish farms cause fish to suffer too—conditions on some aquafarms are so horrendous that as many as 40 percent of the fish die before farmers can kill and package them for food.⁵ Farmed-fish flesh contains contaminants such as mercury, dioxins, PCBs, and other toxins.

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¹ David W. Moore, “Public Lukewarm on Animal Rights,” Gallup News Service, 21 May 2003.
² Animal Care Certified, “UEP's Animal Care Certified Program,” 2004.
³ National Pork Board, “Swine Welfare Assurance Program,” 2003.
⁴ John Robbins, The Food Revolution (Berkeley: Conari Press, 2001) p. 298.
⁵ “Authority Wants to Stop 'Fish Torture,'” Aftenposten, 28 Jul. 2004.