Livestock Essay ⋆ Environment Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

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The term livestock refers to domesticated animals utilized for food, fibers, hides, fertilizer, and/or labor. The category of livestock includes such domesticated ungulates as bison, camels, cattle, donkeys, goats, horses, llamas, reindeer, sheep, swine/pigs, water buffaloes, and yaks, with cattle and sheep being the two most abundant types of livestock worldwide. Nonungulate livestock include first and foremost poultry, as well as rabbits, guinea pigs, and even honeybees, among other animals. Livestock are usually distinguished from wildlife and pets, although there occasionally is categorical overlap (e.g., farmed ostriches or herding dogs).

The domestication of plants and animals for food began some 11,000 years ago in southwest Asia and was a hallmark of the Neolithic, or New Stone Age. Some humans transitioned from hunting, gathering, and fishing sustenance strategies to more stationary ones based on the deliberate production of foods. Based on archaeological evidence from northern Mesopotamia, it appears that sheep and goats were among the first animal domesticates ancestral to today’s livestock. Although dogs appear to have been domesticated by 16,000 years ago, they apparently served as hunting companions and not a food source. Aurochs, the now extinct ancestors of today’s cattle, were likely independently domesticated in multiple sites through Asia and Europe. Domesticated pigs had become popular in parts of southwestern Asia and chickens in southeastern Asia perhaps by 8,000 years ago. The domestication of these latter species overlaps with increasing trends of humans becoming less nomadic and the expansion of agriculture. From that point onward, humans intentionally and unintentionally reconfigured their environments, as they constructed ways to raise their domesticated plants and animals, as well as protect them from pests and predators.

Although domestic animals and animal husbandry practices have varied greatly around the world, livestock have become crucial to agricultural life in general. Livestock convert low quality (by human standards) roughage into protein, fat, and other nutrients fit for human consumption and provide fertilizer for croplands. Ungulates supply additional labor power as pack animals, transport, and plowing aids, and their manure can also be dried and then burned for fuel. With increasing specialization in agriculture and the growth of pastoralism, people have endeavored to control the reproductive rates and birth timing of their livestock and to breed them selectively for certain qualities.

Specialized pastoralism in precolonial East Africa serves as an example of how livestock-keeping, under certain conditions, fits ideals of ecological sustainability. In this semiarid savanna region, pastoralists focused on cattle, sheep, and goats, while also keeping donkeys and sometimes camels. They practiced transhumance, moving herds and family between wet-season pasturelands near temporary water supplies and dry-season grazing lands based near permanent water sources. They managed the grasslands by moving livestock in such a way as to limit encroaching bush while not overgrazing and thus damaging grasslands, and would practice what have been called “cool burns” of dry, nonnutritious grasses to promote new grass growth, with a side livestock benefit of reducing tick populations.

It appears that such management techniques also generally benefited wildlife, as wild ungulates grazed the new grasses and were afforded some protection from predators by remaining close to human activity. Conflicts arose between humans and predators when the latter attacked livestock. Still, the livestock and wildlife populations remained relatively stable for more than a century prior to the onset of the colonial enterprise in the late 1800s.

Colonialism in East Africa, as elsewhere, introduced new concepts of land management and ownership. Efforts to commercialize pastoralist livestock production and to make pastoralists stationary led to a series of land laws that restricted pastoral movement to more marginal lands, introduced commercial livestock industries, and placed various pressures on pastoralists to increase livestock turnover rates and sell animals for slaughter. The essential components of pastoralism-land, livestock, and labor-were largely appropriated and reconfigured into quantifiable, commodified units, managed by experts, i.e., government authorities and eventually outside development agents. In a context of an ever-growing global population, rural farmers and pastoralists became increasingly tied to regional and world commodity markets, had reduced access to land and other necessary resources, and thus became ever more vulnerable to natural disasters.

Meanwhile, in North America, the development of mechanical refrigeration enabled the dramatic expansion of the meatpacking industry. By the late 19th century, the Chicago stockyards had become an iconic representation of American capitalism and economies of scale. In 1906, Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle exposed the brutal working conditions within the slaughterhouses and meatpacking plants, and Congress enacted the Pure Food and Drug Act and the Federal Meat Inspection Act that same year. Labor organizations began to improve some aspects of meatpacking, securing better wages and somewhat reducing job hazards. In the 1960s, a major revolution in meatpacking occurred when IBP (Iowa Beef Packers) redesigned the slaughter and packing process to fragment tasks and deskill work, thus reducing wages while making it easier to replace laborers; sped up the chain of production; and relocated plants to rural areas, which were less expensive operation locales and also without organized labor. The IBP model dominated beef processing and was adopted in poultry and swine operations.

Changes have also occurred in the rearing of livestock, as many moments in the production of milk, meat, and eggs have been consolidated by large, even transnational agribusinesses. For example, swine and poultry may now be raised entirely indoors to control all aspects of their growth. Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations (CAFOs) confine beef cattle to small areas and large amounts of grain (hard for the animals to digest) to fatten them up prior to slaughter.

Artificial insemination, antibiotics, and hormones are commonly used in industrial livestock to control for breed quality and durability. Genetic engineering and modification of livestock has expanded beyond selective breeding to include cloning, transgenic processes through which certain qualities of animals might be enhanced, and animal bioreactors (genetically modified livestock that produce pharmaceuticals used to treat human diseases).

Critics note that there are many negative repercussions of such practices, including problems with the general health of the livestock, as well as threats to the health of people and other animals in the ecosystem; high concentrations of manure leading to water, ground, and air pollution; heavy reliance on fossil fuels for the production of feed, as well as the transport and processing of the animals.

According to the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI), demand for livestock foods is expected to more than double over the next twenty years. ILRI argues that this Livestock Revolution will see so-called developing countries producing 60 percent of the world’s meat and 52 percent of the world’s milk by 2020, and that could provide several hundred million people with the opportunity to raise themselves out of absolute poverty.

Currently, some 600 million rural poor people base their livelihoods on livestock. Although livestock contributes up to 80 percent of agricultural GDP in developing countries, livestock production efficiency is only one-fourth that in developed regions like the United States. Small-scale farmers and pastoralists face a variety of problems, including unfavorable policies, inadequate access to markets, degraded natural resources and poor livestock feeds and forage, and in some settings, debilitating livestock diseases. Whether they can overcome these problems and not be consumed or outperformed by agribusinesses will impact not only their individual livelihoods, but also the very future of livestock production and ecology.

Bibliography:

John McPeak and Peter D. Little, eds., Pastoral Livestock Marketing in Eastern Africa: Research and Policy Challenges (Intermediate Technology Publications, 2006);
Michael Pollan, The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals (Penguin Books, 2006);
Valerie Porter, ed., Mason’s World Dictionary of Livestock Breeds, Types, and Varieties (CABI Publishing, 2002);
Donald D. Stull and Michael Broadway, Slaughterhouse Blues: The Meat and Poultry Industry in North America (Wadsworth/Thomson Learning, 2004).