[matthewtoast]

My understanding is that the vast majority of cattle (80%?) in the United States is raised in factory farms; the vast majority the meat Americans available to purchase grocery store, served in restaurants, and processed for fast food, is sourced from those same farms.

And my understanding is that the conditions would be horrific by almost any standard: the animals are kept confined, in extremely cramped and nasty conditions, often unable to move or turn around, all day and every day, seldom or never permitted to roam. (I'm ignoring the whole antibiotics overuse question.)

When they're ready for slaughter, they're crammed into trucks and transported for hundreds of miles, in all weather, standing in their own feces. Exhausted, terrified, and freezing or overheated after transport, many are shocked with electric prods or beaten to force them back out of the trucks. Then they are hit with bolt guns to "stun" them, after which their throats are slit.

The lucky cows are unconscious before they are sawed apart, but you can bet that the types of workers who do these dirty, low-paying jobs, hundreds of times per day, as quickly as possible, without clogging up the factory line, aren't always trained well enough nor concerned whether they cause suffering.

[evandev]

The bolt gun is not to stun them, but an ethical method of killing an animal.

> A captive bolt stunning gun kills the animal and reduces it instantly unconscious without causing pain.

https://www.grandin.com/humane/cap.bolt.tips.html

[chrisco255]

No, 91% of cattle ranches are family owned and about half of all cattle are raised in small herds of 50 head or less.

You are also belittling the work of these professionals. You sound like you have little knowledge of the industry in general.

[matthewtoast]

Whether owned by family or raised as a member of a small herd is immaterial to where the majority of these cattle end up as adults: loaded on transport trucks to concentrated feed lots where they await processing by the factory slaughter system. Maybe the first 1/2 of their life is great, even idyllic, but that's not much of a comfort.

I'll admit phrased that last part ("types of people") very badly, so let me clarify. First, I should say that I'm very keen to believe that most of these workers are (as you say) professionals. It sounds like, in your direct experience, they are, which is great. But here's the issue:

This work is dangerous (dealing with deadly equipment and huge stressed animals), dirty (in the Mike Rowe sense), and low-paying (at or near minimum wage, per Google). So the gist of what I'm saying is, in that type of high-pressure, low-ethical-incentive situation, it's simply inevitable that:

1. Mistakes get made. 2. Corners get cut. 3. Equipment fails. 4. A worker stops caring (or didn't care to begin with).

Even if we imagine that literally all workers in these jobs are infallible, professional, and compassionate, we still have to deal with equipment working non-optimally (see the link about the bolt guns above; they ain't perfect). This means that some nonzero % of cattle processed suffer during slaughter. Even if we're charitable and say that that number must be small, like 1%, that's still a hell of a lot of cattle suffering.

In addition, you can easily find first-person accounts from slaughterhouse workers who describe exactly this imperfect system in vivid detail, where some animals end up dismembered while still "sensate". (And this is totally skipping over all of the ethical issues with confinement and slaughter in the first place!) So, to sum up:

We know logically that we make cattle suffer at scale.

We know empirically that we make cattle suffer at scale.

I would really, really like to be wrong about this.

[6gvONxR4sf7o]

The top result I got on google said 78% of cattle comes from factory farms. Its source doesn't cite further sources though. It sets off my BS-meter. Do you have any sources yourself on how much cattle is factory farmed?

Cattle aside, it does seem like most all small animal meat is factory farmed (poultry & pork).

[chrisco255]

https://www.nass.usda.gov/Publications/Highlights/2015/Cattl...

[wccrawford]

>Operations with 1,000 or more head of cattle on feed accounted for 75 percent of the inventory in 2007 and 77 percent in 2012.

That's from your source there. While most farms/ranches might be family owned, most cattle are in large operations.

[mrfusion]

You kind of have to think of the human toll on those workers too. Granted they are free to leave which helps but still. That’s a lot of weight on ones soul.