Help Protect Vulnerable Animals Before Disasters Strike
Protect Vulnerable Farmed Animals in Disaster Prone Areas
Over nine billion chickens, pigs, and cows are raised for food in the U.S. each year. Most of them spend their lives cooped up in tightly crowded barns or confined to cages, unable to live natural healthy lives.
Intensive farms tend to be in areas at high-risk for natural disasters. This is likely due to a combination of factors: the low cost of land, lax environmental or tax regulations in the region, zoning, and right-to-farm laws.
Help us urge state legislators to set policies that require farm operations with farmed animals in high-risk disaster-prone areas to adopt higher-welfare practices to protect animals, the environment, and communities in natural disasters.
The concentration of farms and animals means that when disasters do strike, like during Hurricane Florence two years ago, millions of animals are killed and injured.
Climate change is increasing the severity and frequency of disasters. We must also work to build greater resilience to the consequences of a changing climate.
Certain areas of the US are at higher risk of for disasters like hurricanes, tornadoes, floods, earthquakes, wildfires, blizzards or extreme heatwaves. These are vulnerable areas that are completely inappropriate for intensive farms for animals.
Animals confined to cages, like sows, laying hens, or veal calves, are unable to escape. During Hurricane Florence, industrial farmers chose to leave the animals locked up to drown to collect the insurance money.
These animals were treated like commodities, not like the sentient animals they are.
Sign petition to protect vulnerable farmed animals
State regulations or a farm’s insurance policy may actively prohibit farmers from releasing animals in a disaster so they can seek safety.
Cage confinement also leads to physical weaknesses, lameness, and injury that can also inhibit an animal’s survival during disasters. Most animals in intensive farms also have compromised immune systems making them more susceptible to disease that may be exacerbated by a disaster, such as in the case of floods. That disease cannot be contained in a flood – it poisons the land and water around it harming other animals and humans as well.
The enormous number of animals on a single farm makes it impossible to evacuate them ahead of a predicted disaster. Further, state regulations or a farm’s insurance policy may actively prohibit farmers from releasing animals in a disaster so they can seek safety.
Something needs to change now! We need to protect these vulnerable animals before disasters strike.
We urge state governments to act and set policies that ensure that farm operations with farmed animals in high-risk disaster-prone areas do the following:
- No farmed animals can be continuously confined in individual cages or stalls.
- Implement higher welfare strategies that increase the resilience of farmed animals: providing open housing for animals, reducing crowding and stress, maintaining healthy growth rates, and reducing the incidence of malformations, improper physical development, or impairment.
- A detailed disaster preparedness plan must be filed with their state’s Department of Agriculture, including a plan for evacuating all animals. Operations must stock animals at numbers that support successful evacuation based on the preparedness plan.
Please join us in acting on behalf of these vulnerable animals before it is too late.
All photos credited to WeAnimals
