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Élevage intensif : entre militants animalistes et industriels, qui croire ?

By November 25th 2021January 27th, 2022No Comments

Document type : Article published in The Conversation

Author: Romain Espinosa

Preview: On Thursday 18 November, the French Parliament adopted the law on animal abuse, which paves the way for the gradual disappearance of wild animals from circuses and dolphinariums, a ban on the sale of puppies and kittens in pet shops, and tougher penalties for abandonment or abuse.
In the course of the debate, some MEPs expressed their regret that the draft legislation did not address the major issue of intensive farming. Indeed, 89% of the French population say they are against this practice, and there is often disagreement between animal rights activists and farmers on the realities of livestock farming in France.
Animal rights activists regularly condemn the predominantly intensive nature of livestock farming, using video footage taken in French farms as proof of the highly precarious living conditions of thousands or even tens of thousands of animals crammed into small spaces. On the day of the vote, the animal rights organisation L214 published a fresh video, yet again condemning the living conditions of chickens on a French farm.
As each new video appears, there is nevertheless an outcry from the farming community, who assert that such videos are not representative of French farming methods. The veracity of the images released by the associations is never questioned by the courts.


So, whom should we believe? Does French livestock farming cram hundreds of millions of animals onto factory farms, as claimed by animal protection associations, who have published more than a hundred videos of French livestock farms over the last fifteen years? Or are these factory farms the exception in France, where  livestock farming is carried out on a human scale, with mainly small and medium-sized farms, as those who represent the farming industry claim? 
If we look at the official figures, a statistical paradox emerges that is easy to understand, but which is a source of error among both consumers and law makers.


The paradox of intensive livestock farming
What if animal rights activists and farmers are both partly right? Let's take a look at each point of view.
On the one hand, animal rights groups concern themselves with an animal's experience of daily life on a farm. In other words, for activists, the reality of 'average' animal husbandry corresponds to what the 'average' animal experiences: if we take a random animal in France, is it more likely to be raised in an intensive or family farm?
On the other hand, the focus of farmers is on their own experience as farm workers or managers. For them, the 'average' in animal husbandry is farming as it is  practised by the 'average' farmer: if we take a farm at random in France, is it more likely to be an intensive farm or a family farm?
It is from this difference in perspective that confusion arises: French farming is both intensive, when you look at the lives of the animals, and small-scale, if you look at the lives of the farmers. In France, the vast majority of animals live on intensive farms, whereas the vast majority of farmers raise their animals on small farms.


To unpick this paradox further, we can look at the French Ministry of Agriculture's figures for 2019. In pig farming, 46.3% of farmers work on small farms (with between 1 and 19 pigs per farm) and 18.1% on medium farms (with between 20 and 499 pigs per farm). In other words, more than one in two farmers looks after fewer than 500 pigs and, what is more, 4 out of 10 farmers work with fewer than 20 pigs.
But if we look at the figures from the animal's point of view, we can see that 65% of pigs are raised on what could be described as factory farms (with more than 2,000 pigs per farm). Thus, the majority of pig farmers work on small and medium-sized farms, while the vast majority of pigs are raised on factory farms - this is the paradox of intensive farming in a nutshell.
The paradox can also be seen for other animal species farmed in France. More than one in two chicken farmers work on farms with fewer than 10,000 animals. But the reality for the animals is different: 70% of chickens are raised on factory farms housing more than 20,000 birds. The same is true for laying hens: 70% of them are farmed in systems with 50,000 hens or more, while 69% of farmers work in systems with fewer than 10,000 hens. To a lesser extent, this paradox also arises in cattle farming: more than half of farmers work in farms with fewer than 70 cows, while almost 60% of cows are raised on farms with 70 cows or more.


The average farmer vs. the average animal
This gap between the experiences of farmers and animals is also reinforced at national level by the proportion of the contribution made by each farm type  to the total number of animals killed.
Cattle make up a very small proportion of the total number of animals killed in France for meat production (less than 0.5% of animals killed per year), whereas cattle farms account for more than half of all livestock farms (64%, excluding mixed farming). The majority of farms are therefore cattle farms, which tend to be small. By contrast, poultry and pig farms, where animals are mostly raised on a massive scale, account for just 13% of farms but for more than 95% of the animals killed each year in France.
The definition of French livestock farming thus depends on your point of view: that of the animals or that of the farmers. The 'average' ('median' to be precise) farmer is a cattle farmer who looks after fewer than a hundred cows on his farm. By contrast, the 'average' animal is a broiler chicken raised on a factory farm containing more than 20,000, and sometimes as many as 50,000, birds.

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