Climate breakdown is killing farmed animals
The climate is breaking down before our eyes. This year has seen extreme weather events around the world, from the catastrophic floods in northern Europe and China to raging wildfires in Turkey, Greece, and the US, that have even shocked climate scientists. The disasters have produced many casualties, both human and non-human, with farmed animals among them.
Turkey is currently in the grip of ferocious wildfires, fuelled by high temperatures, strong winds, and low humidity. The country’s Agriculture and Forestry Minister, Bekir Pakdemirli, told journalists that more than 2,000 farmed animals have died in the province of Antalya. "The animals are on fire," a resident of a small village on Turkey's southern coast told CNN. "Everything is going to burn. Our land, our animals and our house. What else do we have anyway?"
Heavy rains in Henan province, China, caused terrible flash flooding that has killed more than a million animals across 1,678 large farms, while in the village of Wangfan, at least 200,000 chickens and up to 6,000 pigs drowned in the flood.
“Everything is going to burn. Our land, our animals and our house. What else do we have anyway?”
Reuters reported on the scene at one of the village’s farms: “Chinese farmer Cheng wades through knee-deep water, pulling dead pigs behind him one-by-one by a rope tied around their ankles as he lines up the bloated carcasses for disposal.” The farmer said, “I'm waiting for the water levels to go down to see what to do with the remaining pigs. They've been in the water for a few days now and can't eat at all. I don't think even one pig will be left." There are now concerns that animal carcasses and waste spread by floods will cause outbreaks of diseases such as African swine fever, which would kill even more pigs.
Wildfires raging in the US are likely to have killed numerous grazing cattle, which is what happened during the 2020 fire season. One cattle rancher recently told the Independent how he discovered the burnt bodies of half a dozen cows by a watering hole after they had tried to escape a wildfire. “They all died trying to get to water. I felt so bad for them, the terror of that and dying from lack of oxygen because of the smoke,” he said. Other cows in his herd later died from their burns or had to be put to sleep.
A video taken during the current spate of wildfires in California shows cows fleeing an advancing wall of fire, giving an indication of the dangers many animals will be facing right now.
Wildfires have become so frequent and devastating in the US that the University of California, Davis, has launched a new program with the help of state funding and legislation: the California Veterinary Emergency Team. The program will support and train a network of government agencies, individuals and organizations to aid domestic animals and livestock during natural disasters. “Recent wildfires have overwhelmed the state’s ability to safely evacuate and care for household animals and livestock,” said Senator Steve Glazer, who authored the legislation to provide funding for the team. “We need this new team to help train, coordinate and lead the hundreds of volunteers who are eager to help.”
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While many animal deaths have occurred this year as a direct result of climate disasters, some will be because of the ongoing impacts of extreme weather. The severe ongoing drought in southern Manitoba, Canada, compounded by the summer’s prolonged heatwave, is forcing many farmers to sell their cattle, including breeding stock, for slaughter early. One farmer with 2,000 calves told CBC that they don’t know where most of their hay and other feed needed for the cows will come from in the coming months, as the drought has stunted the growth of grasses and feed crops. “The damage is done," he said. "The only solution is to stop the bleeding and slaughter the cows.”
The moral of these grim tales is not just that being farmed can make an animal more likely to die in disasters made worse and more likely by climate change. In some cases that is true, as being confined to barns or hemmed in by fencing can prevent animals from escaping floods, fires, or extremes of temperature. Animals also suffer and die in transit from farms to slaughterhouses in countries, like Canada for example, with no regulations regarding temperatures in which animals can be transported.
The moral is also that dying in climate catastrophes is another way in which animals pay the price for being viewed as food.
The evidence is clear that animal agriculture is a significant driver of climate change and habitat destruction. Trees are important for flood protection as their roots help the ground to absorb more water, yet the accelerating pace of deforestation globally is largely due to more land being cleared for agriculture, including for cattle grazing and growing feed for factory farms.
While the California Cattlemen’s Association claims that grazing cattle actually mitigates wildfires by eating grass and other vegetation that acts as fuel, ecologist George Wuerther argues that this is not the case. “There is some rationale to the idea,” he writes, that “less fuel under “normal” fire weather conditions can influence fire behaviour.” But “almost all large fires...occur during extreme fire weather conditions” including “drought, low humidity, high temperatures and high winds” which “overrides the normal influence of fuels.” Meanwhile, farming cows continues to produce greenhouse gas emissions that make those extreme conditions more likely.
Saving animals from climate catastrophes cannot be done only by getting them out of the way of immediate harm. They must also be freed from the exploitation that is helping to make the world so much more dangerous for them in the first place.
Claire Hamlett is a freelance journalist, writer and regular contributor at Surge. Based in Oxford, UK, Claire tells stories that challenge systemic exploitation of and disregard for animals and the environment and that point to a better way of doing things.
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