Eating Animals

We are fairly certain that they do not live in the past

or look to the future.

Then the man told her

"If they don't dwell on the past

"and they can't hope for the future

"they can only live in the present.

"And if their circumstances lead them to suffer..

...then that is the totality of their existence."

This is 16 weeks.

This is still the pattern which I follow today.

The Hamburg, an ancient old German breed.

Here's the king of all the egg chickens, the Leghorns.

"The American Standards Of Perfection."

You get a copy of "The Standards"

and you look at the chicken and you look at the picture.

You look at the chicken and you look at the picture

until you imprint it in your head.

The slight arch of the tail

the height, uh, where the neck is over the head.

So when I began to try to bring back standard-bred birds

and as I did my work, I thought I'm going to go back

to the original utility farm birds.

I grew up on a farm here in Kansas..

...and my father showed cattle and stuff

and did it for a living back then.

And as a kid, you know, county fairs to me

was just as exciting as Christmas or holidays

or anything.

And then I started seeing all the chickens.

My dad said that all of a sudden, I would be gone

He always knew where to find me.

I would always be over in the chicken barn.

At the age of five, I got my first show chickens.

This is what we breed here.

The Barred Rock is the oldest American breed that there is.

This is the breed that everybody raised

in this country by the millions

from about 1850 to 1950s.

The White Jersey Giant was a wonderful breed.

Extremely slow-growing and everything

and that's part of the reason why they lost favor.

Other than the 40 or 50 I have here

there's probably not another 20 in the whole world.

Everything I'm doing here is nothing new.

In fact, this is all very, very old.

This is poultry farming 50 years ago.

There was this wonderful system

of farmers who got together

and supported each other to produce the best.

That is completely gone today.

He tells them the story

how in 1923 in the Delmarva Peninsula

a small, almost funny, accident happened

to an Ocean View housewife named Celia Steele.

She had received 500 chicks

instead of the 50 she had ordered.

Rather than get rid of them, she decided to experiment

with keeping the birds indoors through the winter.

Confined and lacking sun and exercise

her birds would never have survived

were it not for the newly discovered feed supplements.

Steele's loop of experimentation continued.

In 1923, she had 10,000 birds

and in 1935, 250,000.

Ten years after Steele's breakthrough

the Delmarva Peninsula had become

the poultry capital of the world.

She had perhaps unknowingly

given birth to the modern poultry industry

and begun the global creep of factory farming.

No one fired a pistol to mark the start

of the race to the bottom.

The Earth just tilted

and everyone slid into the hole.

Pull that first bottle, pull the first bottle out

see what they got for clarity.

You got the sample number? Great.

Great.

This is sample number 3-E.

- Okay.. - Hey, Larry.

There's somebody that's movin'

right on the other side of that shed over there.

Yeah.

There's a creek that runs through this tree line

off in the distance.

Somewhere just over three miles long.

In that one creek, there are 31 CAFOs

Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations

that eventually drain into that one specific creek.

So we've actually, uh, started doin' some

some checkin' on this creek, on these -- on these waters

to see what we're comin' up with.

Here in Eastern North Carolina

the area is rural, the people are poor

very little political clout.

And we have one of the heaviest concentration

of swine in the world.

And very soon, we'll likely have the highest concentration

of poultry operations in the world.

This river was just a paradise.

You'd catch more fish in just a few hours

than you knew what to do with.

This was a place that you could really make a living fishing.

And then all of a sudden in the early '90s

my son and I began to see fish with sores on them.

We began to see fish dyin' in larger and larger numbers

and then we began to get the sores that the fish had.

We continued fishing until this river out here

was coated shore to shore with these dead fish.

There were so many dead fish, they were burying them

with a bulldozer on the other beach.

So we shut everything down.

I remember the early days.

I went out to near the mouth of the river

and I could see sediments running in and different things

but I didn't see a source anywhere

which would account for all the carnage

that was going on in the river.

When I got back to New Bern, I told the pilot

let's fly up the Trent River to figure out what was wrong

with this river and get it fixed.

When I got into Jones County, I began to see

all these pink Pepto-Bismol-lookin' lagoons.

Uh, I didn't know what they were.

I had no idea.

I saw the barns

but I really didn't know what I was lookin' at.

Everywhere you look.

You can be at 1000 feet over Duplin County

you look out over the horizon, you can count 100 lagoons

as you look around the airplane. 100.

I remember I called some folks over

some friends I had in Division Water Quality in North Carolina.

I said, "Hey, what are those things?"

And then he said, "Rick, don't you know?

Those are hog lagoons."

You know, you say pink lagoon. Doesn't that sound nice?

You know, you got a girl in a bathing suit layin' out

a little chair and table with some cocktails on it

and everybody's stretched out in front of the lagoon.

Here's what's goin' on in a lagoon.

You got 10,000 pigs

in these confinement buildings

and what they're doing is they're defecating.

They're poopin' right on the floor

and it goes through slats

and then it goes under the floor

out to these huge cesspools

that are nothing but dirt-lined.

No concrete liners, no plastic liners

just basically dirt.

It goes in that lagoon

and as that lagoon begins to fill up

with this fecal marinade of feces and urine

they gotta do something with it.

They shoot up in the air

and it ends up in the ditches and it ends up in our water

and then our river goes out of balance.

And the fish begin to die and people begin to get sick.

The Earth is about 5.3 billion years old.

Mammals have only been around 60 million years.

Anatomically, modern humans have been around

for about 200,000 years.

And then virtually everything that we associate

with human culture and human civilization

has occurred in the last 10,000 years.

And in that 10,000 years

this incredible spike

of population, of consumption

uh, of essentially humanity freein' itself

from the constraints of many natural systems

has all happened in the last 200 years

beginning in the 18th century but really becoming intense

in this post World War II period

that people call the Great Acceleration.

This transformation now is called the Anthropocene.

This is the period that's dominated by humanity.

We are the Goliath

and nature in all of its forms is the David.

There's never been a time in world history

in which there's been so many people

with so much access

to the conditions of a decent life.

There's also never been any point in human history

when there have been so many people who don't have access

to the necessary conditions of a decent life.

Never has humanity been so powerful

since we crawled out of the trees.

But probably never have individual humans

actually felt so disempowered.

The truth is, we don't really know what to do with ourselves.

We don't know what we want

and in part, we don't know what we want

because we don't know who we are.

And so the place to begin is to try to go back

and try to understand who we are.

Colonel..

...Harland..

...Sanders. Is that right, sir?

That's right.