Big Operations, for example, operate with a skeleton crew of perhaps four people in charge of producing 50,000 pigs a year; the pigs are overcrowded, under cared for and must be fed hormones and antibiotics in such an environment, or the overcrowding and stress will cause infections and keep them from eating properly. This causes a serious rise in cost for society, in terms of increased cancers and other diseases in a human population that ingests the hormones and antibiotics that are fed to the pigs.
It also leads to the contamination of rural soil and watercourses by the high concentrations of manure and the undesirable chemicals in the manure. Almost none of the expenses such practices entail are reflected in the producers' costs or the final consumer price. That means, for example, that pork produced in eastern Canada and the United States, which is habitually sold overseas to Asian markets, is subsidized not just by national governments, but by cash-strapped rural taxpayers in Quebec, Alberta, North Carolina, Georgia or anywhere else there is a concentration of industrial hog farms.
If the true costs were added, no producer could afford to shoulder them and continue to raise meat in such an environmentally damaging way. They would have to adapt existing, healthy methods that make the meat somewhat more expensive but a lot less dangerous, provide more rural jobs and have an actual moral base.
extracted from
Good News for a Change - David Suzuki & Holly Dressel (pg 65)
