People have this false idea that before society industrialized, animals had better lives, and farmers were less cruel to them. The opposite was true — people in ages past were much crueler to animals:
Many people assume that before the days of factory farming, livestock lived in peace and happiness—with pristine, spacious surroundings, fresh grass to consume and kind treatment from good-natured family farmers, at least until the moment of slaughter. Sadly, the reality of how farm animals lived in the preindustrial and early industrial age was often far removed from this image. Consider the plight of the unfortunate creatures that provided our ancestors with beef and milk.
First, beef. In England, it was once illegal to sell “unbaited” beef. Between 1661 and 1687, over 40 cases of selling unbaited beef were prosecuted, notes British historian Emily Cockayne. For example, in 1662, an unfortunate fellow named Thomas Stevenson “was fined for selling unbaited bull meat.” To the people of that era, the idea of selling unbaited beef was outrageous. After all, baiting was standard and expected.
What differentiated baited beef from unbaited beef? The former came from an animal that spent its last moments alive being tortured. An excited crowd would gather to witness the “baiting,” or the releasing of dogs to attack the bull and induce a state of panic. The dogs were trained to bite the bulls’ necks and faces, especially the mouth and nose. The bull was typically trapped in a small, enclosed space or chained to an iron stake to prevent escape. Special dogs, from which the modern bulldog and pit bull derive their names, were bred for the task: to keep their jaws clenched into the flesh of a bull even as the bull ripped out the attacking canine’s entrails.
After a dog latched onto a bull with its teeth, the dog breeders would sometimes hack off the dog’s feet to test the canine’s toughness. “During a bull-baiting contest, the feet of the bulldog were chopped off to show gameness. This was done for the benefit of the spectators, and to put a higher value on the price of the pups of this dog. A bulldog that would quit after its feet were chopped was disposed of and not used for breeding.” In other words, the dogs were bred to keep biting the bulls even while being mutilated themselves. One bullbaiting witness in the 19th century, when the practice was dying out, wrote, “It was a young bull and had little notion of tossing the dogs, which tore the ears and skin of his face in shreds and his mournful cries were awful.”
What was the point of tormenting bulls and dogs in this manner, let alone legally requiring that bulls spend their last moments of life this way before becoming sellable beef? While the blood sport provided entertainment, baiting was also thought to produce higher-quality meat. Dying in battle meant that the bulls’ muscles worked hard until the final moment. This was thought to tenderize the meat and, inexplicably, to improve the beef’s nutritional quality. Today, in contrast, people consider the highest-quality beef to be that of certain Japanese cattle that live in a stress-free environment with daily massages to work out muscle tension and even soothing classical music. And most farmers now go to great lengths to ensure cattle’s final moments are calm, using a carefully designed system.
Next, consider dairy cows. Before the development of railways, it was difficult to transport milk from the countryside into cities without it spoiling first. As a result, many dairy cows were kept inside cities, decreasing milk transport times but often resulting in appalling conditions for the animals. Cockayne wrote this of London’s urban cows: “With a small and diminishing number of grazing opportunities and little space to store fodder, beasts were left to wallow in their own excrement, tied in dark hovels, where they fed on brewers’ waste and rank hay. Their milk was known as ‘blue milk,’ and was only good for cooking.” The already poor quality of the unhappy creatures’ milk was further diminished when the substance was taken into the marketplace through the city’s squalid streets…the harsh realities of preindustrial farming are at odds with the popular romanticized notion of what farming was like in the past.
People also don’t realize how filthy water was before the 20th century. Rivers near London and Paris stank even back in the 17th century, well before industrialization. Terrible cholera outbreaks were common. To avoid being sickened by contaminated drinking water, people in ancient and medieval cities drank alcoholic beverages, even young children, to kill the germs: “water was so despised throughout the preindustrial age that drinking it was sometimes considered a punishment. ‘In the time of Charlemagne, high-ranking military officers were punished for drunkenness by the humiliation of being forced to drink water…..among the Pilgrims of New England: ‘Drinking water—any water—was a sign of desperation, an admission of abject poverty, a last resort. Like all Europeans of the seventeenth century, the Pilgrims disliked, distrusted, and despised drinking water. Only truly poor people, who had absolutely no choice, drank water. There is one thing all Europeans agreed on: drinking water was bad—very bad—for your health.'”
Drinking water has gotten much cleaner in the last 50 years. So has the water people fish and swim in. Drinking water also grew cleaner from the 19th century to the 20th century.
