The New Jersey Supreme Court will consider this term whether regulations promulgated pursuant to a law mandating humane treatment of farm animals go far enough. The regulations reportedly do not prohibit castrating male piglets without anesthesia, removing chicken beaks and turkey claws without painkillers, or confining veal calves and pregnant sows in cages small enough to restrict turning around. As this ongoing debate shows, the extent to which animal protection laws should apply to the agricultural industry remains in dispute. In addition to considering the merits of factory farming and animal protection, the symposium poses the larger question: Should laws criminalizing animal abuse apply to animals raised for food?

One morning in January 2008, images of horrific animal cruelty were blasted by Internet, television, and print media throughout the country. The story was all the more shocking in that the animals at issue were cows at a commercial slaughter plant—a place from which Americans usually avert their gaze. The images of dairy cows so ill or injured that they could not stand, being battered, shocked, and nearly drowned to force them into the kill box, struck a chord with the American public. Abusing downed animals is at odds with our venerable national public policy against torturing animals.

Should laws criminalizing animal abuse apply to animals raised for food?” The answer is yes, and yes especially because farm animals are generally now under the control of business corporations. State and federal criminal law have proved critical in modifying corporate policy and practice in other areas, a current example being worker safety. Criminal liability today would include criminal liability of the corporate entity itself, and would thus also introduce the most effective regulation of individual handling of farm animals—regulation by the corporation, which has methods and resources public agencies cannot match.

Since the beginning of history, people have used farm animals to assist with their work and to provide a source of food. These agricultural pursuits were not questioned; rather, they were a widely-accepted way of life. In fact, many people still say that the very purpose of livestock on this Earth is to provide these resources for mankind. As for the proper way to treat our livestock, we commonly hear farmers and livestock producers make comments like, “If we take care of the animals, they will take care of us,” and, “We treat our animals well because that’s just good business.”

The most abused beings in the United States are those whom we raise and kill for food. The numbers of dead are staggering. Most are victims of the severe and almost entirely unregulated practices that Americans permit on their factory farms. According to the United States Department of Agriculture’s National Agricultural Statistics Service, in 2007, a total of 10.4 billion land-based animals were killed by the American food industry. These included 9.4 billion broiler chickens, 450 million laying hens, 317 million turkeys, 121 million pigs, 39 million bovines, 28 million ducks, 10 million rabbits, and 4 million sheep and goats—fifty times the number killed in biomedical research, for sport, as pests, and for all other reasons combined, carrying a value of hundreds of billions of dollars a year. The degree to which animal enslavement is embedded in our society is difficult to calculate or fathom.