The Carnivore's Dilemma: Is It Ethical to Eat MEAT from Industrial Farms? | ENDEVR Documentary

[Music] meat production worldwide is set to almost double by 2050 as Nations become wealthier and demand more animal protein to maintain our present level of consumption at this present time Beyond 2050 we would need an additional half a planet [Music] as I become a father for the first time there are more and more Revelations about the way we are raising the animals that feed us [Music] a major new study from the World Health Organization has revealed that eating processed meat can cause cancer [Music] thank you meat consumption isn't just the source of health problems it

could also lead to widespread species Extinction according to a recently published study feeding my son his first mouthfuls and seeing the animals around him through his eyes has led me to look at this information in a new way it has caused me to consider the choices that we make to feed ourselves more closely as if suddenly for him I could no longer remain indifferent and had to find out more [Music] we've rationalized and made efficient the production of meat and we've industrialized it as we've industrialized almost every other form of production on Earth and uh

the efficiency uh allows us to produce more meat than ever before by far before World War II let's say there was none of what we're talking about many people raising two pigs six pigs 10 pigs 20 pigs 200 pigs no one was Raising ten thousand picks all pigs were pastured pigs chickens same kinds of thing they may have been raised by the hundreds now they're raised by the hundreds of thousands so the scale has gone from a human scale that's comprehensible to a scale that's really incomprehensible the problem is that the system has an expiration

date is it still possible to feed animals to our children while respecting the planet the animal's welfare and our health I'm not an animal rights activist I'm a journalist the best way to answer this question is to go out into the field traveling all over the world I'm going to meet with men and women who are inventing innovative ways of raising animals that respect man nature and animals I want to put these initiatives together to find out if another way of consumption is possible and viable and if there is still time left to do things

differently we created we created industrial agriculture it was intentional there was a decision made to say how can we produce the most grain possible how can we produce the most animals possible there were other directions we could have gone in we could have said how can we make the healthiest diet for our people possible how can we make sure that our land is poisoned as little as possible how can we exhibit human-ness towards animals as much as possible we chose to ignore those issues in favor of yield now it's time to move in a different

direction [Music] oh [Music] I heard about a man in the plains of the American Midwest who decided to challenge the dominant industrial model he has developed a new method of livestock farming that is closer to Nature to prove that doing things differently is still possible I'm Jude Becker and my farm has been operated by me since I returned from University in 1999. and the farm is certified organic I began this system with only six sows and today we have 150 and we are producing more than 2 000 pigs per year my farm could be considered

the opposite system from the industrial philosophy our philosophy is based on allowing the pigs to express their Natural Instincts because this promotes animal welfare and I think it promotes health of the animals if we were very quiet I will show you a litter of piglets which was born during the night you can see there are about 12 pigs well this this house is insulated and there is around two 10 centimeters of insulation so the wall is quite thick and it's made of steel so it's very strong and in Winter it keeps the sowl quite warm

and also it keeps the heat out in summer because we open the back window and keeps keep ventilation it's a more natural system the pig can grow in its natural way by living outside and experiencing the Earth because a pig is has this special nose to dig in the Earth and if it cannot have this what it's not complete it's not completely a pig something is missing this kind of farming resembles the images that we see in adverts however over 80 percent of pig meat doesn't come from farms like Jude Beckers but from industrial Farms

like this one here everything happens inside the buildings foreign apartment increase no no this is foreign foreign [Music] professional yes this is a particularly the system economics the parallations so here you don't choose gestation messages we don't need any kind of a crate or cage it's not necessary in the system in the outdoor system we are relying on the instincts the motherly instincts of the sow to raise her piglets and so we don't spend too many too many hours here every day for me this kind of work is very interesting to be in charge of

a natural system and be responsible for the care of these creatures produces a kind of joy just to walk amongst the pigs in the field it's a kind of therapy to Simply watch them run and play and as a farmer that's very fulfilling they're not just a kind of product to maximize the efficiency for uh like a factory they are they are living sentient creatures [Music] [Music] farming that takes into account the animal's well-being and frees them from their cages is indeed possible but is it economically viable on a larger scale industrial production has radically

reduced food prices 1950 European households spent an average of 45 percent of their budget on food today it is just around 15 percent the pursuit of economic efficiency at any cost which has benefited us all has been pushed to its limits by one type of farming in particular by any industrial standard of productivity the chicken industry is a model of how to do things efficiently cheaply there is nearly complete genetic uniformity these animals have been bred to grow fat and very quickly and so they're kept in complete confinement chicken production today is that these birds

have been bred to mature five to six weeks it's it's remarkable how short their lifespan is what is the normal life expectancy for a chicken if you took a wild jungle foul and looked at its normal life expectancy which is where these chickens ultimately come from 20 years today chickens are bred twice as fast as they were 40 years ago but they are twice as big thank you what's up exactly so now we go just down here and then down there just in case that the car comes we would go like in the just follow

us so making we have to lay down the ground you have to watch over the camera but I don't think that something will come okay yeah industrial chicken farms no longer allow cameras in so the only way to film them is at night covertly I go along with Christian Adam and two of his friends German activists who are against industrial farming 200 meters away in front of us it's a chicken farm full board at all 120 000 chickens so there are three holes or forty thousand chickens that's weird actually it's a normal family so that

the chickens are always hungry because of the breeding in a way that they they are always hungry that they eat and eat and eat so they can grow very very fast and that means lots of problems for the animals and this is something that happens in every farming now you can smell it yeah exactly where we go in just okay you move more very slowly these chickens were born only 20 days ago but they only have 10 days left before they are killed and arrive on our plates the smell of bird droppings is hard to

Bear it is humid and hot thank you this is what the industry never wants to talk about from this point I already see 10 dead animals they're laying lying about the the living ones and actually that is pretty much but if you think about normally in a farm like this you have a mortality rate of about eight percent and that means that in some like this over the time they are raised 4 000 animals die not in slaughterhouse but because of the conditions here when you look at the ground that's all old from the animals

some are thirsty they can't get you can get to the to the to the water so when they come stand up they will die of thirst these are the chickens we eat and every normal store on the Gastronomy this is how about I think 95 I think at least 95 of chicken in Germany is raised and piece of the chicken sweet we were here and he said midnight around midnight and the the the whole the whole Hall is full of light it's um that the animals do eat all the time because everything is here to

to make them grow as fast as they can and uh this is one part of it they they should not sleep because they should eat and that's why the the Halls are lit up all the night long [Music] the race for economic efficiency has also been particularly damaging for the well-being of animals in the egg production industry the majority of the eggs we eat come from Battery Farms like this one these animals will never see daylight until they leave for the abattoir there are 13 chickens per square meter everything is done to minimize the cost

of production worldwide 60 percent of egg laying hens live in cages 68 in France seeing this with my own eyes I realize that it really is time to consume differently and avoid eating products from industrial farming as much as possible [Music] but are the alternative methods realistic can Animal Welfare be respected without causing an excessive increase in production costs in the United States there is an Innovative method for farming egg-laying hens on a large scale while respecting their well-being foreign I have a meeting with the brunquels they have created egg Innovation one of the biggest

initiatives for free-range hens in the world every day one million eggs are packaged in their Factory three thousand per second they have a turnover of more than 50 million euros per year I grew up on a caged Farm then probably 20 years ago I stepped into my first cage free Barn and it kind of you know destroyed some of my stereotypes and then we took that a step further every couple of years and you know said okay let's let the doors open [Music] when we saw the Improvement of the bird's Health their their welfare it

was it was just hard to say that this was incorrect [Music] there's nothing in a cage that is going to lean into the bird's natural behaviors of perching foraging dust bathing socialization cages simply aren't going to provide that and they it's impossible it's impossible for them to provide that John brunquel freed the hens from their cages and gave them access to the open air but he hasn't given up mass production he owns 1 million three hundred thousand hens spread over 65 buildings like this one throughout the country yes and is it a normal size for

you yes so our bar This Barn is 24 000 square feet everything is measured so there's 1.2 square feet per bird inside there's 22 square feet of pasture there's six inches of perch space can there be really happy because there are so much in the same place so so a really good indication of happiness is if if you walked into a cage Barn you would see a lot of anxiety even in a cage-free barn they would typically run away the fact that I can walk up to the birds and they stay and they're curious and

the fact that I can do that that is a sign of happiness that tells you how calm they are they're not afraid of people because they've been allowed to engage in natural behavior so they have the room to move around this is a choice they're making if they want to they can go outside nothing's stopping them okay she's not running away hey you prayers don't like to be petted they like to be stroked underneath their chin what we found is every time we improved welfare I found my production went up my mortality went down good

things happened with the birds and and we did it initially because it was a belief but the belief was proven to be accurate by the productivity of the animal so we can blend scale and size with Animal Welfare John brunquel has succeeded in improving the well-being of his chickens while providing eggs for the breakfasts of five thousand Americans every day but he has two problems left to resolve end of his hen's Lives who after a year and a half when they no longer lay enough eggs will be slaughtered and go into the food chain and

the beginning of their lives where does it come from the cheeks we will buy day old chicks from the Hatchery and then that's when we will start taking over and managing the bird [Music] this is actually a kind of Link in the supply chain that is rarely talked about hatcheries of course you don't know whether you're getting a male or a female upon hatching and they employ a very highly skilled individuals called chicken sexers it's very hard to tell it's very hard to pick up a chicken toe if it's a male or a female and

what these chicken sextures do of course if it's a hen they will put it in the keep you know box and if it's a male they will usually these males are thrown into a grinder or into a bag where they suffocate or in some cases they will just gas a bunch of the the male chickens um Hatchery might produce in a in a day 50 000 chickens half of them so yeah 10 20 000 a day being killed [Music] [Music] they may not be perfect yet but whether it's on a small or a large scale

methods that respect animals already exist but respecting animals is not the only thing we should take into account when feeding our children we should also ask what kind of planet do we want to leave them with seven and a half billion people on Earth meat and fish consumption is excessive and has become a serious problem to produce the animals that we eat today we are damaging the world they will grow up in tomorrow I mean the numbers are pretty clear if you want to just begin with greenhouse gas emissions industrial agriculture industrial animal agriculture is

responsible for at least 18 of all greenhouse gas emissions and that's a kind of remarkable chunk of responsibility for just one industry in the global economy [Music] actually more productive of greenhouse gases overall than the entire Global Transportation industry just to kind of put that in perspective to face the rising consumption of meat we have chosen to produce more animals more intensively [Music] as you know citizens foreign [Music] to fatten up the billions of animals as quickly as possible and to increase their yield we grow more and more genetically modified grain plant them we destroy

forests which increases global warming and destroys biodiversity quantity of required for these crops like corn or soy exhausts the groundwater and the huge quantities of pesticides and chemical fertilizers that we apply destroy the soil and endangers our health [Music] are you okay with the smell but when you are here after 2-3 days you get used to it do you heat this meat you don't like it why hello I don't like to see how we feed the cows to feed too much chemicals every day there is about 10 years every day really yeah sometime more there

is another consequence of this massive industrialization to distribute the grain all around the world they are loaded onto huge petrol guzzling ships that cross the oceans further impacting global warming foreign it is safe to say that industrial animal agriculture represents perhaps the worst misallocation of Natural Resources in human history if we feed the world the way we're feeding the world now we're going to run out of resources and it's going to lead to political instability it's going to lead to a situation where the world's poorests suffer the consequences the most it's going to lead to

perhaps Wars over land and access to land and access to water I mean things could become very severe so we need to start thinking about using our land in ways that produce the most calories with the least environmental impact and the least amount of resources place [Music] a new generation of farmers have decided not to follow this dominant system and try to reinvent farming methods to feed the world differently in the United States Portugal France they are concerned with respecting animals but also preserving the environment and our health [Music] foreign [Music] [Music] the animals are

not here to feed us the animals and the other beings are here because the planet need their functions that's the big change using their energy it's also a function of each being they are here to be part of these wonderful very intelligent system where we also belong what I like about it is it's kind of bringing back the the initial way that things were done you know hundreds of years ago is what we've moved away from and realized that probably wasn't the right system so now we're coming back to what worked for Generations long before

us [Music] so what these cattle are eating or different several different varieties out here you've got some cabbages kales there's millets there's vetch which would be a very high protein you also have clovers which would be another very high protein crop so this is a very high energy crop that they're grazing so these cattle are gaining could be two pounds a day just on this there's nothing brought to them in the very conservative American Midwest John Wood and his son Johnny are pioneers of a new method which emerged some years ago to feed their cows

they decided to turn their back on intensive farming and completely avoid grain their cattle only eat the grass that's in the field the Candler moved daily they can eat is there a choice the feed is they come to the feed the feed is not brought to them which would be different than the conventional model they're eating what they're designed to eat so that the cancer mayor can eat what they're designed to eat this whole system is with the future in mind it's good for the animals it's good for the planet it's good for the people

I mean it's a it's a holistic system everything ties into one and it's all based off of what we're standing in right here with this system the woods must wait an extra six to seven months before their cows go to the slaughterhouse the fact it takes longer for them to fatten up therefore in the end the meat is a bit more expensive but it's completely grain free it reaches consumers all over the U.S who want to support more environmentally friendly Farms we're seeing more and more Farms succeeding economically when opting for alternative methods of production

[Music] is [Music] foreign [Music] [Music] yeah he grows the grass himself next to the pastures and to supplement the food for his calves he grows his own grain a few hectares of barley a year suffice this system is very far from intensive agriculture but he is not concerned with the profit margin just with satisfying the demand his meat is a bit more expensive but his farming method makes it a product that is very desirable for restaurant owners [Music] foreign [Applause] foreign is foreign has proven that farming animals sustainably is possible but there is another method

that goes even further agroforestry this allows farming that usually contributes to global warming to become a weapon against it [Music] agroforestry has existed in certain regions of Portugal for centuries it involves combining several species of animals vegetable farming and trees on the same plots foreign Lisbon a farmer has brought this system up to date by putting agronomic knowledge and modern technology together we go inside close to the coast okay I work forestry it's the way to cooperate with nature understanding nature getting deep on the knowledge of nature the industrial attitudes in an attitude of dominating

nature the completely opposite stories the results of dozens of years of industrial agriculture are plain to see on one side are the wooded pastures of Alfredo Kunal on the other is a desert the result of Decades of intensive cereal farming now it's not a soil it's a subsoil it's dead and without soil you can produce but not with the natural fat fertility cycle you have to bring in from outside if you think that chemical fertility is biod on fuel on petrol whenever you don't have access to petrol what what will we do so it's of

course needed to re-establish another ways to grow food and that's for us the unique way that we know now it's based on the natural cycles of fertility here I have future I I'm growing my soil I I'm managing my ecosystem I'm getting the ecosystem more Rich every day so I don't need a liter of oil here it's completely autonomous in Alfredo's farming every living animal or plant has a role and at the center of it all are the trees mm-hmm [Music] they are a source of fiber means a source of food whenever you don't have

fiber in the first step on the floor they can fit directly from the trees or we can cut and bring this fiber to the soil but they create Shadow what is very important on the on the summer for the animals if you look with carefully you will see that behind the tree the pasture is a different quality much more quantity and a different quality because there is more organic matter provided by the tree at the same time the cows are also helping the tree with their manure directly these beings are not here only to produce

meat if we only have trees or if we only have cows all the system will be weaker and directly less resilient the acorns from the oak trees alone provide 60 percent of the food for Alfredo's Pigs and the benefits for the environment are considerable if you imagine in terms of Energy Efficiency you imagine the feature efficiency of having a tree producing and pumping food during three four hundred years completely adapted no fertilizer no machinery and now think the other system to feed pigs that it's based on cereals every year you have to move the soil

every year you have to use a lot of fossil fuels to produce cereals to feed the pigs the energetic efficiency it's completely different here it just wait and eat industrial agriculture releases a lot of carbon here it's the opposite with this system and with this structure of agroforesty we trap a lot of carbon more than one tone per hectare per year if we go in this direction and if we go in the direction of our Forestry we can have a big part of the solution of the emissions that we've done very quick that's the great

part of the story it's not a problem that we do mistakes the problem is that we are not conscious about that and we don't correct it [Music] Alfredo's Farm will soon be home to new trees that he is preparing to plant they will revive the land that has become infertile due to Industrial Agriculture and will allow for new herds to graze love and hear it like a love on a larger scale introducing agroforestry in France and Europe could allow us to meet the goals for reducing greenhouse gases but can we feed the planet with such

farms and their more limited outputs can we really do without industrialization surface we have to change things why would you not change things the only reason not to change things is because you're the person benefiting from them who benefits the people who are making the most money Farmers don't benefit the eaters don't benefit the processors don't benefit the big corporations who provide the seed who provide the fertilizer who process the Grain and so on and they are vertically organized those are the people who benefit from this and there's no reason for them to change unless

we give them incentive to change so on a very small level you can give them incentive to change by saying I'm not going to eat that way every I'm not going to eat that way anymore I'm going to eat a different way there are ways of farming animals while respecting their well-being the planet and our health but there is one thing that we can't avoid in the end to eat them we have to kill them today the most stressful moment in a farm animal's life is when they are crammed into the trucks and transported to

the abattoir they often travel hundreds of kilometers before being killed in huge slaughterhouses can we kill the animals without making them suffer however there is another alternative and it could easily be used on a large scale [Music] the Mobile's Lottery is moving some weeks 800 kilometers we are going from one Farm to another every day [Music] sometimes there are small roads and we have to go very very slowly but we managed so far [Music] [Music] with this system the cows don't go to the abattoir instead the abattoir comes to the farm once we come to

the farm in the morning we start then to the slaughtering process inside this Lottery is like an ordinary slaughtering but in a minimized area and also the veterinary is inside to inspect everything so everything is okay for for for food safety it's important that the animals are at their Farm because it's their usual environment they can they know everything about the smell the sounds all the other cows the individuals are there and also the farmer is there who takes care of them every day and that's just normal it's better for the animals because they don't

have to be loaded onto a transport mixed with other animals they have never met before and animals get very stressed when they meet new individuals so they start to find a fight with each other and when they are in a new place their last 24 hours will be a nightmare for them and I really wanted to change that you seems to take care of the the welfare of the animals and I at the same time at the end you you kill them and you bring them Dust how do you live with that yeah of course

it's a difficult part art but if you accept to eat meat then you have to realize that we are killing the animals of course I respect the people who don't eat meat because they don't want to kill the animals but I think it's okay if you really care about how they are bred when they are alive [Music] foreign [Music] [Music] if you're going to eat any meat you're killing some animals but there is a difference between killing animals one or ten or a hundred even at a time or in the course of the day and

killing thousands of minutes which is how things work now there's a dehumanization Factor going on here is different from how animals have been treated and dealt with by humans for the first 200 000 years of humans existence this is all new [Music] so should we stop eating animals it's a choice we all have to make for ourselves but meeting those who produce our food has shown me it is already possible to do things differently viable Alternatives exist and can feed us all it also shows that we can move things along at our own level by

eating less meat and using the savings to buy better meat that is produced ethically and sustainably it's what we've decided to do with our son Scandal of industrial farming is one that we can all act on now without waiting for public decision making part of the solution right here in our hands [Music] [Music] [Music] thank you [Music]