Smaller farms could save animals

With climate change putting livestock increasingly at risk, unregulated mega farming should be outlawed. Instead, farms should be small enough that in the event of heat waves or flooding, the animals living there have a chance to make it out alive.

That’s the gist of a recommendation from the animal rights group Animal Justice.

It may sound unworkable at first reading, but ultimately it makes a lot of sense.

Animal Justice is making this pitch at a time when flooding in British Columbia has put thousands of farmed animals, including chickens and hogs, at risk.

Most chickens and hogs are kept caged — mainly because it is cheaper to do so than to let them run free.

But when a heat wave strikes or floods threaten, these cages become death traps.

Animal Justice estimates that during the late summer heat wave, about 651,000 chickens and other birds died on B.C. farms.

While there are few confirmed numbers yet, it estimates that hundreds of thousands of chickens, hogs and dairy cattle died from drowning and hypothermia in flooding associated with B.C.’s most recent weather event.

Animal Justice notes that these numbers could have been dramatically reduced if farmers had been required to evacuate animals deemed at risk.

But there are no legal requirements that farmers do anything to prepare for catastrophic events such as heat waves or flooding.

As Animal Justice points out, there is no limit on the number of animals that can be housed on a farm, and no regulations setting out compulsory welfare standards for farmed animals.

Nor is there a requirement that farmers make plans for handling a climate emergency.

And while farmers have an incentive to rescue expensive livestock such as dairy cows (the Abbotsford News reported that about 6,000 head of cattle were successfully evacuated from flooded area farms), there is no incentive to save the lives of less expensive animals like chickens.

It’s cheaper to let them drown. A legal size requirement that limited the number of farmed animals held on any individual property could help here — particularly if combined with a requirement that the animals’ owner take responsibility for their welfare.

“Warehousing large numbers of animals inside factory farms is a recipe for mass suffering during a weather emergency,” said Animal Justice executive director Camille Labchuk.

Ultimately, Animal Justice wants to do away with farmed livestock entirely. The group notes it contributes to global warming, among other things.

But even if governments are reluctant to go this far, the proposal to limit the size of factory farms would be a useful step.

And it would make sense. If farmers want to raise livestock, then they should be willing to bear the cost of saving that livestock from the cruel depredations of climatechange emergencies.

And if that, in turn, requires smaller farms that in the end cost consumers more for their wings and burgers, then so be it.

“The sad part is that it always seems to take a catastrophe to get things fixed,” Henry Braun, the mayor of the hard hit B.C. agricultural city of Abbotsford, said this week.

He was so right.