How the cult of consumerism ushered in an era of badly made products.
My beloved 10-year-old black bra finally broke last Christmas. The elastic had some slack and it’d been fraying for a while, but its death sentence came when the underwire popped out the side. While it wasn’t particularly special — just a normal T-shirt bra — it was comfortable and had clearly lasted a long time. So, I did what any sensible person who is afraid of change would do: bought the exact same thing, from the same brand, again.
I eagerly waited for my shipment of my new bras (in two trendy colorways!) to come in. When they arrived, I noticed that there were a few key differences: there was a new fourth clasp, the band was tighter, and the material was a whole lot softer. Certainly, these were improvements, I thought.
I was wrong.
Within a few washes, the hooks had become mangled, unable to neatly adhere themselves to the clasps. Instead, they would claw at my back. The straps frayed quicker than I expected. Nothing changed in my care; I had assumed that because I treated my previous bra carelessly throughout my teens and college years, these new versions could withstand similar conditions.
I felt unmoored for months. Why would the same item be worse years later? Shouldn’t it be better? But here’s the thing: My lackluster bra is far from the only consumer good that’s faced a dip in comparative quality. All manner of things we wear, plus kitchen appliances, personal tech devices, and construction tools are among the objects that have been stunted by a concerted effort to simultaneously expedite the rate of production while making it more difficult to easily repair what we already own, experts say.
In the 10 years since I bought that old bra, new design norms, shifting consumer expectations, and emboldened trend cycles have all coalesced into a monster of seemingly endless growth. We buy buy buy, and we’ve been tricked — for far longer than the last decade — into believing that buying more stuff, new stuff is the way. By swapping out slightly used items so frequently, we’re barely pausing to consider if the replacement items are an upgrade, or if we even have the option to repair what we already have. Worse yet, we’re playing into corporate narratives that undercut the labor that makes our items worth keeping.
“If you change the style regularly, people get tired of the style,” says Matthew Bird, a professor of industrial design at the Rhode Island School of Design. “They start to treat cars like sweaters — it’s become grossly accelerated. The pressure to make more stuff, of course, lowers the quality of what’s being made, because the development and testing is just accelerated even more.”
The design process, explained
Design is more than the mere aesthetics of an object; it can also be a solution to a problem. These problems do not necessarily have to be physical or tangible — systems and virtual environments are also subject to design. Ideally, design is the marriage of appearance and utility that creates a considered end result.
When we’re producing objects or services for millions of people, we’re talking about industrial design, or the professionalization of these processes at scale. According to the Industrial Designers Society of America, industrial designers often focus on three things: appearance, functionality, and manufacturability. That last part is where the most change is happening.
Historically, Bird says, if a craftsperson wanted to make something — say, a tea kettle — you would adjust it with each attempt. Maybe the first iteration was hammered metal and the handles were uncomfortable. Perhaps the next was ceramic, but it didn’t sing when the water was ready. You would go back to the drawing board. “Eventually in a couple of generations of tea kettles, I would be making the perfect form that did everything perfectly,” Bird says. “It’s all great because I was responding to my customers one at a time and it was handmade.”
The first major shift came when the Industrial Revolution introduced machinery and tooling into the design process, exponentially increasing the scale of production. Now, instead of hammering out one kettle, you could use a machine to stamp out the parts. Rinse and repeat. However, if you designed a bad tea kettle, you would be stuck with thousands of them — a huge, expensive mistake. This is still the case.
While machines have dramatically increased how much can be produced and how fast, humans are still mostly involved every step of the way from ideation to production. Today, nearly everything is assembled by human hands, even if some parts are 3D printed, cast, or spun by machines. “You’ve done all these other steps, and then you have the person who sits there and actually puts these pieces together,” says Cora Harrington, a writer and lingerie expert. “It doesn’t matter how complicated. It doesn’t matter how simple. We don’t have robots that put together our clothing automatically, so it’s all done by an expert.”
The Great Depression, too, changed the very nature of consumerism. The economy desperately needed stimulation — and consumer goods were one way to do it. It was around this period that advertising heavyweight Earnest Elmo Calkins laid out a selling strategy that came to define purchasing habits for the next century: “consumer engineering,” or how advertisers and designers could artificially create demand, often by making older objects seem undesirable. Real estate broker Bernard London is often credited with coining this process as “planned obsolescence” through his 1932 paper that suggested the government put a lease on products’ life. “That’s when manufactured products started to be sort of done in season for the cycles and fashion,” Bird says.
Fast-forward a handful of decades, and now several generations of people are conditioned to buy the new thing and to keep replacing it. Companies, in turn, amp up production accordingly. It’s less so that objects are intended to break — functional planned obsolescence, if you will — but rather that consumer mindsets are oriented around finding the better object. But “better” doesn’t always mean long-lasting when companies are incentivized to produce faster, and faster, and faster.
Cutting corners and moving fast
Let’s circle back to the bra I bought a decade ago and its lesser younger sibling.
When I spoke to Harrington, the lingerie expert, about my dilemma, her first question for me was about price. To my recollection, the old bra and the new one were about the same: somewhere between $30-$40. That, for Harrington, was the key: In the last 10 years, in the wake of the climate crisis and the pandemic and steady and then skyrocketing inflation, the cost of fabric, other materials, and labor have all increased.
It can be difficult for consumers to recognize that the landscape has changed because they’re not primed to see the full picture, Harrington explains. She mentions how when she writes about the state of fast fashion, she often gets pushback from new readers who say their older fast fashion pieces have lasted a long time. “Yes! Many of us bought cheap clothing 10 years ago that’s still fine,” she says. “But 10 years ago, our clothing was higher quality than it is now. That is actually part of the point.”
It’s actually impossible to buy the same bra I had in high school for the same price. It’s simply more expensive to produce now than it was then.
“People don’t exactly want to pay more for all that stuff,” Harrington says. “So what has to happen if everything is more expensive and the customers still want to pay the same price, something has to be cut and that’s often going to be the quality of the garment.”
Usually that’s accomplished with a change in material. This could be a thinner, new-to-market fabric, or a more fragile clasp, for instance. The average customer isn’t going to know the difference, especially when shopping online. “There is an entire generation of consumers at this point that doesn’t actually know what high-quality clothing feels like and looks like,” Harrington says. “It gets easier, I think, for consumers to just not know any better.”
The electronics industry is also susceptible to material changes because products are competing against each other on price point, says Gay Gordon-Byrne, the executive director of the Repair Association.
“Even though designers may say, ‘Oh, this is just as good,’ the components themselves are increasingly plastic instead of metal,” she says. “They’re using more glue instead of screws. There’s some definite design trends that are making these things not work very long. A friend of mine was a big HP reseller and he said that it used to be that you could take that $4,000 HP LaserJet that you’d have in your office, drop it off the back of a truck, and plug it in. It would still work. But that was no longer the case as new generations came around and they were made with more and more plastic.”
Then there’s the classic way companies keep costs low: underpaying and overworking workers. The speed at which workers are expected to produce and deliver goods is faster than ever before — and speed will always be at odds with quality. An increase in consumer demand for same-day or two-day delivery, as well as the hunger for real-time microtrends, are both incentivizing companies to churn, churn, churn.
Take a gander at ultra-fast fashion giant Shein’s $100 billion valuation. Social media helps accelerate the trend cycle even further. Consumers are buying five times more clothing than they did back in the 1980s. In order to produce goods that fast, both the quality of the item and the quality of life for workers have to take a hit. This is happening alongside a decrease of prices for the consumer (not rooted in reality!) to encourage more trend-oriented shopping and haul buying.
“Time is money,” Harrington says. “Even as poor or cheap as that garment worker’s labor is, it’s still a significant part of the garment because there is no way to replace that labor. Some of what you’re seeing in that race to the bottom is that literally the time is not being spent in making the thing that would help the thing last longer. If you spend cheap money on something, you cannot expect it to be high quality. You have to make a choice there.”
Finally, there are shifts in production methods that help companies avoid higher labor costs. Again, robots do not wholesale make our things, but for products like phones, computers, remote controls, and the like, it’s often cheaper to design in a way that reduces human labor. This can mean using as few parts as possible; if you can design by plate or by chunk, especially if the object has to be manually completed, it’ll save a lot of time, and therefore money.
“In the design of objects, they’re trying to reduce the amount of labor, and that changes what the object is,” Bird says. “That produces cheaper goods, but it doesn’t necessarily produce better goods.”
While pinching pennies can sometimes lead to interesting solutions to old problems, a whole new suite of issues tends to unfurl. For the fashion industry, it’s easy to look at the rise of synthetic materials, which offer utility for exercise clothing as well as a way to avoid using animal products. Synthetic fabrics, however, are made from petroleum and have propelled the industry to become one of the top carbon polluters in the world. Synthetics also have a paradox problem: They fall apart easier, but they don’t entirely decompose as well as natural material.
The tech industry has similarly had to contend with the fallout of seemingly improving on products while at the same time simplifying design elements to save money. Apple’s butterfly keyboard is a prime example; the thinner keyboard was great for reducing a laptop’s weight, but the keys got stuck all the time. Because the keyboard was designed to be one piece, a consumer couldn’t fix a single stuck key by themselves without the right equipment — they had to go to the Apple Store to either replace the keys or the whole keyboard. Kitchen appliances and other utilitarian objects are now also suffering the same fate with the inclusion of techy selling points (touchscreen blenders, automatic espresso machines, those goofy fridges with the screens on them), but with little maintenance infrastructure or the ability to repair those new features, Gordon-Byrne says.
“One of the problems being a designer is that you solve some problems and in the process of solving them, you invent all these new problems,” Bird says. “That’s just an inherent part of design. There’s no way to not do that. If you’re creating innovation, you’re also creating future problems.”
So the cycle continues.
What it takes to keep what you own
Design has shifted more toward manufacturability and appearance than functionality, when it should be a balance of all three. Arguably, it’s nearly impossible for corporations to avoid participating in the trend cycle as long as consumers have an appetite for more — whether it’s a predilection for cooler clothing or whatever new incremental, yet buzzy technology just came out. At the same time, the blame does not lie on consumers’ shoulders; corporations are responsible for creating and stoking the “new and more is better” culture we have today.
Perhaps if companies took the first step and made their products feel timeless both in form and function, there’d be less demand for new things and a decreased pressure for speed. But major corporations will almost certainly never go for that, and it’s unlikely the majority of consumers will unlearn current buying habits.
“A better iPhone would be one that I can use for 20 years and keep upgrading,” Bird says. “But that’s not how we define better, right? Nobody wants an iPhone 14 because it will last for 10 years. They want it because it has a fancier camera or whatever.”
Even if you do want to hop off the treadmill of constantly buying and keep what you already have, companies have made that harder too. Your goods probably have a shorter lifespan than they did years ago, and if you want to repair them — especially tech — you’ll come up against major barriers.
For years, Apple opposed right-to-repair laws, claiming they would expose company secrets. Because their screws are proprietary, you need special equipment to open up a device. This meant swinging by the dreaded Genius Bar or an authorized third-party shop to fix a broken screen until 2021, when Apple announced it would finally sell the parts required to open (and therefore fix) a device following years of activism from folks like Gordon-Byrne and pressure from regulators. Apple’s products still remain some of the toughest to repair on your own, according to iFixit, but the company is not alone in opposing right-to-repair; Microsoft, Amazon, Google, Tesla, John Deere, and General Electric have all spent billions lobbying against right-to-repair laws.
“Why I’m fighting so hard for a right to repair is that nobody is telling me I can’t sew a button,” Gordon-Byrne says. “Nobody is refusing to sell me a needle and thread. Where that’s exactly what’s happening with technology. It shouldn’t happen. That level of control should not be their level.”
There is hope thanks to consumer action, says Gordon-Byrne. New York was the first to pass a right-to-repair law last month, and the Federal Trade Commission has been investigating the issue.
“I see this every day,” Gordon-Byrne says. “Consumers are so much more powerful politically, legislatively than they ever dream — and it’s not the act of voting. That’s probably the least powerful thing. The most powerful thing is for a consumer to literally pick up the phone, call their local representative. Let me tell you, when I sit down with a legislator, I can hand them a list of 400 names of their own constituents that say, ‘I want my right to repair.’ That’s huge. That moves the needle. It moves the ball.”
Learning how to fix your own stuff can be simultaneously overwhelming and empowering, says Zach Dinicola, the founder of Mr. Mixer, a company that repairs KitchenAids in Kansas and other parts of the Midwest. It’s a “crying shame” that there are efforts to make it harder to fix things on your own, he said, which is why he shares tutorials with more than 450,000 followers on TikTok.
“I think that there are more people who want to fix it,” he says. “They just don’t necessarily know it’s an option. People don’t know what they don’t know. There’s a DIY person in all of us. If someone can present the information in a format that’s easy to follow along, more people would be willing to do that.”
The beauty of fixing an object and keeping it around in your life, Dinicola continues, is that they become very sentimental. “That’s one thing that I just know from being in this business,” he says. “These mixers really become part of the family, especially when they’re handed down from grandmother to mother. I’ve worked on third- and fourth-generation mixers that have been handed down from great grandma to grandma to mom to daughter.”
You could probably say the same thing for vintage clothing — what’s better than getting a chic leather purse from your mom’s closet or the cool secondhand shop in your neighborhood? Although no one is prohibiting people from repairing clothing, the lack of quality in modern fashion means it’s important to be thoughtful about what you’re buying and how you’re taking care of what you already own. Knowing what material your clothing is made of is key to knowing how to wash and dry it, which can elongate its life. “If I visit the tab for fabric composition and there’s nothing there, it’s an instantaneous red flag,” Harrington says. “You want to know what fibers are in the garments you’re buying. That in and of itself is something everyone can do. That can be the first step toward getting more familiar with what quality garments might look and feel like.”
I hate to say that the onus is on us, but in many ways it is. Corporations aren’t going to do this work for us, or without us. Consumers need to be able to identify quality, learn to take care of what they own, and advocate for regulations and legislation wherever right-to-repair doesn’t yet exist. Buy less or secondhand, and when you do buy something new — it happens! — make sure to do your research.
To fight the cruel meat industry, veterinarians have to fight their own profession.
The American Veterinary Medical Association (AVMA), the premier organization that represents most of America’s 121,000 veterinarians, might not seem like an obvious target for protests. But at the organization’s annual convention last summer, disruptions were anticipated — animal activists had been gearing up to protest the AVMA for months. Outside the conference in downtown Philadelphia, they unfurled an enormous banner that read, “TELL AVMA: STOP ROASTING ANIMALS ALIVE.”
The protesters were referring to the AVMA’s backing of a method of mass culling animals on factory farms known as “ventilation shutdown plus.” It involves sealing off the animals’ housing and turning up the heat to lethal temperatures so that they die of heatstroke over the course of hours, like a dog dying in a hot car. The method, known as VSD+ for short, was used widely by the poultry and egg industries to cull tens of millions of chickens and turkeys during this past year’s bird flu epidemic.
It is also widely thought to be the most cruel, distressing option for exterminating animals — a practice that opponents say amounts to essentially cooking animals to death.
Yet it continues to be commonly deployed, in part because of AVMA policy. While the organization says ventilation shutdown alone, without the addition of extra heat or carbon dioxide, is not recommended, it deems VSD+ “permitted in constrained circumstances” if more preferred methods aren’t available. This finding became the basis for the US Department of Agriculture’s bird flu containment policy, allowing VSD+ to rapidly become a meat industry default. The method’s prevalence has drawn the attention of federal lawmakers: Sen. Cory Booker (D-NJ) and Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-WA) both recently introduced bills to end its use.
/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/24324079/1._AVMA_protest_photo.jpg)
Direct Action Everywhere
In her past work as an emergency veterinarian, Gwendolen Reyes-Illg has cared for numerous animals suffering from heatstroke. Its symptoms are almost too disturbing to print: “chunks of mucosa and blood come pouring out of the rectum, and vomiting of blood is common as well,” as Reyes-Illg told me for a previous story. While Reyes-Illg treats her patients’ heatstroke, with VSD+, that same condition is induced on purpose, with the AVMA’s stamp of approval. “I think if you surveyed the veterinarians in the United States, the vast majority of them have no idea that this is happening, and if they knew they would be outraged,” said Reyes-Illg, who is a veterinary advisor to the Animal Welfare Institute and is among the veterinarians organizing to withdraw their profession’s support for VSD+. More than 1,500 vets have signed a petition urging the AVMA to stop condoning the method. So far, their efforts have been unsuccessful.
The controversy over ventilation shutdown represents the most recent, high-profile example of long-simmering tensions over veterinary medicine’s values. While the public associates veterinarians with cats and dogs, imagining it as a job for animal lovers, veterinary medicine is also deeply embedded in the factory farm system. Veterinarians provide the research, expertise, and scientific and moral authority that allows the US to raise nearly 10 billion land animals in intensive confinement every year.
“At present, the official stance of the veterinary profession in the US often serves to legitimize practices that cause extreme, prolonged pain and suffering on a massive scale, such as intensive confinement and the use of heatstroke as a method of mass on-farm killing,” Reyes-Illg said in an email. “The veterinary profession helps shield such practices from questioning and criticism.” But a new generation of veterinarians is challenging what they see as the “corporate capture” of their profession, as vet Crystal Heath put it, by the meat industry and other sectors that kill animals for profit.
If they’re successful, they argue, they could help topple a crucial pillar of support for factory farming. While the AVMA doesn’t control what methods meat producers choose to use, the veterinary profession’s positions inform legislation and rule-making around how animals are allowed to be treated. The USDA’s rules on how to kill poultry birds due to avian flu, for example, are taken directly from AVMA guidelines. Vets are also, in my experience, the preferred excuse used by the meat industry and regulators to justify extreme cruelty. Ask an agriculture department bureaucrat why they’re condoning mass extermination via heatstroke, and they’re likely to shrug and say, it’s AVMA-approved (that is almost verbatim what I was told by Chloe Carson, who was then the communications director for Iowa’s agriculture department, in April).
“The AVMA is critical in our political system for animal welfare, so Congress tends to think of the AVMA when it comes to animal things,” said livestock veterinarian James Reynolds, a professor at Western University’s vet school. “Congress will take no action until the AVMA changes its position” on how animals are treated in the food system.
The schism in veterinary medicine is long in the making
While VSD+ has emerged as a flashpoint among vets only in the last few years, conflicts over factory farming have been long in the making. The US Supreme Court will soon release its decision on a pork industry lawsuit that could strike down one of the strongest farm animal protection laws in the country. Under challenge is California’s Proposition 12, which bans the sale of pork raised using gestation crates — narrow metal cages, not much bigger than an adult pig, where pregnant pigs are kept for most of their lives, unable to turn around or stretch their limbs. Pigs are often observed biting the bars of the crates, among other signs of distress. But in a brief filed in June, the American Association of Swine Veterinarians, an organization closely tied to the pork industry, urged the Court to strike down Prop 12. “Proposition 12 is likely to harm animal welfare rather than help it,” the group argued.
When she read that brief, Reyes-Illg remembers, “I was horrified that this might be the sole message the Supreme Court would hear from veterinarians about gestation crates.” She led an effort to submit a brief to the court, which was signed by 378 veterinarians and animal welfare scientists, refuting the swine veterinarians’ claims as inaccurate and driven by pork industry interests. “The weight of the scientific evidence strongly supports the conclusion that gestation crates cause profound, avoidable suffering and deprive pigs of a minimally acceptable standard of welfare,” they wrote.
/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/24323993/WAM26888.jpg)
Jo-Anne McArthur / We Animals Media
Gestation crates have been a topic of heated debate in the AVMA. Its policy statement on housing for pregnant pigs says they should be provided with “adequate quality and quantity of space that allows sows to assume normal postures and express normal patterns of behavior” and that there are “advantages and disadvantages” to different systems, including gestation crates. The organization hasn’t, in any document I could find, taken a position on gestation crate bans like Prop 12, but it declined to comment on a question about this.
In an email in March that was obtained by Vox through a public records request, Michael Costin, assistant director of the AVMA’s division of animal and public health, alerted the AASV about the federal PIGS Act, a House bill that would ban gestation crates. “You may want to touch base with the AASV reps so they are prepared when this comes to them,” he wrote, noting that the AVMA’s animal agriculture liaison committee and animal welfare committee have representatives from AASV on them. “I assume AASV would oppose this bill.” Costin didn’t respond to requests for comment on the correspondence.
The gap between veterinarians like Reyes-Illg and those aligned with industry reflects a longtime debate in veterinary ethics: Should vets represent the interests of animals, or those of the humans who own and profit from them?
Veterinary medicine encompasses society’s paradoxical relationship with nonhuman animals, from love and companionship to commodification and killing. Today, most US veterinarians care for companion animals, like cats, dogs, and other pets, but it wasn’t always that way. Modern veterinary medicine has its origins in treating animals raised for food and horses used for transportation. “I don’t think there’s any question that in North America, organized veterinary medicine” — institutions like the AVMA — “by and large reflects that history,” said Lisa Moses, a veterinarian and bioethicist at Harvard Medical School. “The people who are the national spokespeople for veterinary medicine are still very much entrenched in food production and in the agriculture industry in a way that the majority of practicing veterinarians are not.”
These disparities, combined with the factory farm-ification of animal agriculture, have led to a “growing schism between the companion animal side of the field and the food animal production side of the field,” Moses said.
As meat production industrialized, the profession accommodated it. “The veterinary response was largely a technocratic one, technological, and very much politically aligned with animal production,” said Susan Jones, a science historian at the University of Minnesota and a veterinarian. Economic shifts in agriculture necessarily drove changes in how industry vets viewed their patients, “seeing animals less as living sentient beings and seeing them more as production units,” Jones said. “This means that [vets] don’t see animals anymore as individuals in need of health care or welfare considerations. You see them as populations.”
Professional backlash for criticizing factory farming can be steep
Veterinarian Crystal Heath, who is one of the best-known critics of her profession’s relationship with the meat industry, seeks every opportunity to start conversations about how vets could end the biggest harms facing animals, like ventilation shutdown, rather than participate in them. She arrived at the AVMA convention in late July with that goal in mind. On her first day there, she and her friend Daniela Castillo, a fellow vet pushing for change in the profession, said they noticed being watched by a security guard. When they approached to ask him what was going on, he explained that he’d been told to look out for them because they might be protesting. “Obviously, we’re being surveilled,” Heath said in a video posted to Twitter that evening. “It seems like the AVMA is extremely unwelcoming and is not supportive of people who are doing animal advocacy.” The AVMA declined to comment on these allegations.
Heath, a Berkeley-based shelter veterinarian who devotes much of her time to spaying and neutering cats and dogs, was used to this kind of treatment. Her advocacy has made her a lightning rod within the profession. While she’s hardly the first vet to voice misgivings about factory farming, she’s done so particularly publicly — often bringing her critiques to social media, engaging with audiences outside the profession, and posting examples of veterinarians conducting gruesome research on the meat industry’s behalf. “We should use our innovation to end the exploitation of animals instead of devising more macabre killing methods,” she said in a tweet last fall. And although she grew up steeped in animal agriculture, she’s now vegan, which can feel like an existential threat to industry veterinarians.
“I was vice president of my 4H club,” an organization that trains kids in animal agriculture, Heath said. “I raised goats; I was an animal science major.” Now, she said, some veterinary colleagues view her as biased for repudiating animal agriculture, but she points out that the bias runs both ways: “I could easily argue that you have a biased perspective because you are committed to eating animal products. I look at all of these people who they consider to be unbiased, and they all work for industry.”
A 2020 story in the Intercept revealed how Heath was branded an extremist and targeted for her advocacy by the meat industry. A flier of unknown provenance had circulated on Facebook, displaying her photo under the warning “BEWARE” and claiming she supported the Animal Liberation Front and Earth Liberation Front, radical groups from an earlier era of animal activism, which she said she knew nothing about at the time. “I got kicked out of all the veterinary Facebook groups that I relied on on a daily basis for networking,” she remembers. Some livestock vets openly berated her. “Crystal your deranged activism here and throughout the animal agriculture industry is quite annoying,” one vet commented on a post she made in a Facebook group. “[Y]ou’re literally, by name, a topic of conversation in board rooms from Ag business to organized veterinary medicine across the nation. Your name is literally toxic.”
Heath regularly receives messages from vets and veterinary students who sympathize with her but say they’re afraid to speak out because of the potential consequences for their careers. Daniela Castillo, who’s worked extensively in shelters and spay-and-neuter, said that she’s been ridiculed so much for being vegan that she’s considered leaving veterinary medicine — a problem she feels is compounded by being a woman of color in an overwhelmingly white profession. “People become so defensive,” she said. “They either get angry or they treat you as a joke.”
“It’s not science when you have a bias at the beginning”
Heath realized that veterinarians needed a support network to be able to withstand industry retaliation. In fall 2020, she founded Our Honor, a nonprofit that helps vets challenge unethical practices in their profession. It was a few months after the public learned about ventilation shutdown — not in the poultry industry, but in the pork industry. Due to meatpacking plant shutdowns at the beginning of the Covid pandemic, meat producers couldn’t slaughter as many animals as they normally do — so, instead, they killed and disposed of millions of them. Activists from the animal rights group Direct Action Everywhere were tipped off that Iowa Select Farms was using ventilation shutdown plus, a then little-known method, to exterminate its pigs. In an investigation later covered by the Intercept, the activists secretly planted recorders and captured audio of the pigs shrieking for two-and-a-half hours as they were killed with high heat and steam.
/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/24324038/Worker_untying_dead_pigs_close_up_.JPG)
Direct Action Everywhere
These revelations, and the fact that the AVMA considered VSD+ acceptable, galvanized a coalition of farm animal advocacy groups and veterinarians who are AVMA members. They petitioned the AVMA and submitted a resolution to its House of Delegates, a voting body that guides the organization’s policy, to re-classify VSD+ as “not recommended” in its guidelines. They wrote op-eds and ran an ad in the Philadelphia Inquirer ahead of this summer’s AVMA convention that read: “You wouldn’t say it’s okay to roast an animal alive. So why would the American Veterinary Medical Association?”
The European Union considers any type of VSD to be a method that’s “likely to be highly painful” and “must never be used.” But the AVMA hasn’t changed its position, and there are signs that it doesn’t intend to. In 2021, the Journal of the American Veterinary Medical Association published a case study of ventilation shutdown plus, by veterinarian Angela Baysinger and three other vets, in which 243,016 pigs were killed with temperatures reaching as high as 170 degrees Fahrenheit. To achieve heat that intense, the paper notes, “commercial-grade mobile steam generators typically used in the railroad industry to heat railcars were obtained.” The study measured the animals’ “time to silent.” “I think that report was published as a way to validate what they were doing and lend legitimacy to” ventilation shutdown, Heath said. Baysinger, who is vice president of the American Association of Swine Veterinarians and serves on the AVMA’s animal welfare committee, didn’t respond to a request for comment.
The only research on VSD+ in poultry birds cited in the AVMA’s guidelines is an unpublished, poultry industry-funded report, which has been criticized and accused of lacking scientific validity. At the International Symposium on Animal Mortality Management this past June, Cia Johnson, the head of the AVMA’s animal welfare division, said: “We need data from you … Even if it’s not published, if it’s a case report, if it’s proprietary data, if it’s unpublished data, the panel needs it. Some of these methods are at risk of leaving the guidelines. I think you probably have an idea of what those methods might be. We need data to support them staying in the document.” Johnson didn’t respond to multiple requests for comment.
“This intrigues me: AVMA leadership actually put out calls for research to support ventilation shutdown. That’s not science. It’s not science when you have a bias at the beginning,” said James Reynolds, the Western University professor. “Their position is completely unreasonable. Not founded on reason, not founded on science.”
/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/24324065/Screen_Shot_2022_12_29_at_12.30.07_PM.png)
Footage by North Carolina State University obtained by Animal Outlook via public records request.
Heath and her allies aren’t giving up, despite the AVMA’s intransigence. In the fall, they gathered 278 signatures to submit yet another resolution to change ventilation shutdown plus’s status to “not recommended,” for the AVMA’s House of Delegates to vote on at its next meeting this month. But the AVMA didn’t allow the resolution to move forward, citing procedural reasons.
The AVMA declined an interview for this story, but said in a statement that it “believes animals should only be depopulated in emergency situations, and only after all other options are considered and found not to be viable … Alternatives are exhaustively sought, but when thousands to millions of animals are impacted by such emergencies, depopulation is sometimes the only option. In many cases, the method used to depopulate the animals is limited or dictated by the situation (e.g., containment to control disease spread, natural disaster, or other unprecedented urgent situation). Selecting a depopulation method often involves ‘least bad’ choices; however, failing to depopulate animals in a timely manner can lead to even worse suffering for those animals and/or pose unacceptable health and safety risks for the people who are caring for them.”
Entrenched factory farming prevents vets from asking bigger ethical questions
Even knowing how livestock veterinarians see their roles, it’s hard not to wonder how they can willingly inflict so much suffering on animals. One answer might be that they believe, or their vocation has convinced them to believe, that there’s no other choice. “Veterinarians are stretched way, way, way too thin, and are almost always inevitably overwhelmed with work,” Lisa Moses, the bioethicist from Harvard, said. “And that does not allow you to have the mental space to ask big-picture questions. You’re just trying to figure out how to get through terrible situations as best as you can.”
Often in her advocacy, Heath said, livestock vets ask her: What else do you expect us to do? If meeting America’s demand for abundant cheap meat sometimes requires inflicting great suffering, their thinking goes, that’s the price we have to pay. “I personally believe [ventilation shutdown] is a compromise — a necessary compromise, and an unfortunate compromise,” poultry veterinarian Simon Shane, who criticized Heath and other opponents of VSD+ in a blog post, told me. “People who have protested against ventilation shutdown should provide a viable alternative.” Pressed on whether not raising so many animals in intensive confinement could be a viable alternative, he replied, “I’m in the business of feeding people” and, later, “I really don’t want to get involved in a fruitless discussion on ethics and morality.”
Other vets argue that instead of taking the American system of meat production for granted, the profession could actively challenge it. “If the only way to ensure that large swaths of our patients are not routinely killed by heatstroke is to put in place restrictions on CAFO [factory farm] size, then core principles of veterinary medical ethics, like the duties of beneficence and nonmaleficence, require that our profession advocate for such restrictions,” Reyes-Illg wrote in a letter to the AVMA on behalf of the Animal Welfare Institute in May. In June, at a continuing education course held by the American College of Animal Welfare, Cia Johnson was asked whether the AVMA has considered studying ways to reduce the need to mass cull animals. “Not at this time,” she replied.
The idea of cutting down meat production is a non-starter in the veterinary community, vets interviewed for this story agree, even though it’s considered a necessary part of addressing climate change and would surely be better for animals. When she took livestock medicine courses in vet school, Reyes-Illg said in an email, “The message I got was that pig vets had to work with industry somehow — there was never any mention that veterinarians might have a role in disrupting the ongoing expansion and intensification of animal agriculture.”
Outside North America, veterinary groups often espouse a different philosophy. “At the British Veterinary Association, we encourage everyone to consider the environmental impact of their dietary choices and have long campaigned for a ‘less and better’ approach to consuming meat,” Justine Shotton, the British Veterinary Association’s then-president, told the Daily Mail last summer.
This is the discussion that forward-thinking vets in the US dream of having. “If all the AVMA is doing is thinking about depopulation, then that’s all we’re going to get,” Heath said. “But the more the AVMA could put energy and thought into scaling down animal agriculture, then we have the possibility of moving things in the right direction.” For now, though, she and fellow animal advocates are laser-focused on ending the worst meat industry practices — on making the bad system we have a little less bad. She’s looking forward to the AVMA’s next conference this month, where she plans to keep starting conversations the AVMA would rather not have.
Republican Kevin McCarthy failed to become House speaker on the first ballot, something that hasn’t happened in a century.
On Tuesday, the House of Representatives met to elect a new speaker and begin the 118th Congress. But after five hours and three separate ballots, they adjourned without a speaker being chosen and with members not yet officially sworn in. Despite winning the majority of votes, Republican Kevin McCarthy was unable to muster the absolute majority constitutionally necessary to be elected speaker. It was the first time in a century that Congress required more than one ballot to elect a speaker.
The California Republican faced a rebellion from the hard-right members of his conference who made a series of interlocking demands that mixed the political, the procedural, and the personal. While Democrats held united and voted for their leader, Hakeem Jeffries, Republican dissidents split their votes. Ten voted for Rep. Andy Biggs (R-AZ), who ran as a stalking horse opponent against McCarthy in an internal ballot of the GOP conference in November. Nine scattered their votes for candidates like Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH) and Rep. Byron Donalds (R-FL).
The rebels were members of the House Freedom Caucus, many of whom had been loyal supporters of Donald Trump and backers of an uncompromising brand of conservative politics. While some had roots in a Tea Party brand of conservatism like Rep. Chip Roy (R-TX), many were MAGA bomb throwers who have come to political prominence more recently, like Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-CO). However, not all of the three dozen or so members of the House Freedom Caucus members were opposed to McCarthy. Some, like Reps. Majorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) and Jordan, have been vocal supporters.
On the second ballot, the rebels consolidated around Jordan, despite the fact that the Ohio Republican gave a speech nominating McCarthy. All 19 anti-McCarthy Republicans voted for Jordan while all Democrats remained united around Jeffries, and McCarthy’s supporters stood by the California Republican. The margins remained almost unchanged on the third ballot, with Rep. Byron Donalds (R-FL) voting for Jordan after supporting McCarthy on the first two ballots. This set the stage for a political impasse that is unprecedented in modern history.
What do McCarthy’s opponents want?
The short answer is less power for McCarthy and more power for the right wing of the House Republican Conference. Part of their demands include efforts to weaken the office of speaker generally and enable rank-and-file members of the House — and, in particular, rank-and-file members of the House GOP — to have more influence over legislation. In recent years, speakers from both parties have centralized more and more authority in their own hands. This has meant members have less opportunity to introduce amendments, that most key legislation is negotiated by leadership in both parties, and it is presented for a vote in a handful of comprehensive bills such as the 2022 social spending bill Democrats dubbed the Inflation Reduction Act.
They also want to increase their leverage on McCarthy. One key point of contention has been a procedural question called the “motion to vacate,” which allows for an up or down vote on whether the position of speaker should be declared vacant and a new vote held. This was used by Republican rebels in 2015 to force out then-Speaker John Boehner. At the time, any individual member could force a vote on this question. Boehner was managing a fractious House GOP conference then, albeit with a far larger majority than Republicans have now.
Under House Democrats, the House rules were changed so that only party leaders could offer the motion. McCarthy’s critics want to return this precedent. With Republicans holding a nominal majority of five in the House, the motion to vacate threat functions as a sword hanging over any speaker. It means that a mere handful of Republicans would have the leverage to oust McCarthy from the speakership at any moment. Needless to say, McCarthy had been dead set against this. However, a recent offer he made to win critics was to lower the threshold to five for a motion to vacate. In other words, five members would have to jointly offer the motion to force a vote.
But more than this, they also want to shape the GOP agenda with hard-right members on influential committees and guaranteed votes on priorities like term limits, a balanced budget, and border security. From their perspective, past Republican Congresses have failed to hold Democrats accountable. Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL) told reporters before the vote, “Our position is that if Kevin McCarthy is the Speaker of the House, and we don’t have an ability to ensure that there is oomph behind the agenda and energy behind our oversight, [then not much else matters].” Gaetz went on, “I’m not here to participate in some puppet show where we pass a bunch of messaging bills, send them to the Senate, watch them die, fail to use leverage, and don’t hold the Biden administration accountable.”
What does everyone else think?
Most rank-and-file Republicans are not happy. Speaking to reporters before the vote on Tuesday, Rep. Kat Cammack (R-FL) said of McCarthy’s critics, “[I]t was all about controlling the committees and trying to fundamentally put people in positions where they can raise more money. This has nothing to do with bettering our country.” She described those willing to vote against the Republican leader as “the radical 2 percent.” Rep. Mike Gallagher (R-WI) expressed frustration that this could delay Republicans from getting started trying to pass their agenda as well. “You really have to go out of the gates fast in that first quarter to have an effect … so there’s no time to waste right now.”
What happens now?
Speaking to reporters before the vote, McCarthy said, “I have the record for the longest speech ever on the floor. I don’t have a problem getting a record for the most votes [held in a speaker election].” The record is 133 rounds of voting, which were cast over two months in 1856 to pick a new speaker. As of now, with this many votes for someone else that would need to swing his way, it looks as though McCarthy has a chance at exceeding that distinction too.
Update, January 3, 6 pm ET: This story has been updated with the result of the third ballot and adjournment.