This Documentary Exposes the Dark Side of Factory Farming

My team made this film in the early 1980s for the ASPCA. They asked us to make a film for high school students. While the industry has evolved technically, many of the core issues of brutality and confinement shown in this film have not only persisted—they have actually scaled up significantly. I do thank my co-worker, Andre Hurst, for leading the team that made this documentary. In the 1980s, the consolidation of family farms into corporate-owned operations was well underway, but today that process is near total. The U.S. now raises and slaughters roughly 10 billion land animals every year. The sheer volume of animals packed into confinement buildings is vastly higher than it was fifty years ago. Due to intensive selective breeding, animals are pushed to anatomical extremes. Modern broiler chickens, for example, grow so rapidly and disproportionately compared to 1970s breeds that their skeletal structures often struggle to support their weight, causing widespread joint and heart issues. Many of the stark visual images shown are still standard practice across the country. Practices like docking tails (hogs), debeaking (chickens), and castrating without anesthesia remain completely standard in mainstream industrial facilities to manage the stress-induced behaviors caused by overcrowding. In the 1980s, the routine use of low-dose antibiotics to accelerate growth and keep animals alive in crowded conditions was booming. Today, it has created a massive public health crisis regarding antibiotic-resistant "superbugs," prompting tighter regulations on growth-promotion claims, though heavy prophylactic use remains common. The biggest difference between 1980 and today is that the secrecy of the industry has cracked, and a powerful legal and consumer movement has gained real traction. Organizations like the ASPCA and Humane Society have successfully lobbied for state-level laws banning the worst forms of confinement. The most famous is California’s Proposition 12, which requires breeding pigs, egg-laying hens, and veal calves to have enough space to stand up, turn around, and extend their limbs. Despite furious meat-industry lawsuits, the Supreme Court upheld it. Multiple states now have similar bans. If you walked into a standard, industrial CAFO today, you would recognize the exact same institutional brutality in this film y fifty years ago—just on a much larger, more corporate scale. The difference is that today, the public is watching, the courts are acting, and the industry is facing an unprecedented level of scrutiny and resistance.