I. INTRODUCTION

Just outside of Ruili, a Chinese border town in southwestern Yunnan Province known as a haven for prostitution, drug trafficking, and “as close to an HIV laboratory as one can find in Asia,”2 a factory farms Asiatic brown bears and sun bears for their bile.3 Hundreds of bears, surgically implanted with tubes and valves for the extraction of bile used for traditional Chinese medicine, are kept in “milking cages” measuring little more than one cubic meter.4 Some bears “gnawed at their paws to relieve the pain,” while others had their teeth and claws sawed off to protect their handlers.5 Although the Chinese government reportedly has banned the collection of bile from live bears,6 undercover reporters from China Central Television (CCTV) discovered the illegal farms engaged in business as usual.7 In addition, the London-based World Society for the Protection of Animals conducted an investigation of bear farms in China in 1999 and 2000, many of which are state-run.8

Those who oppose the farming of bears for their bile are motivated solely by a concern for the animals’ well-being. However, there are many more reasons beyond animal welfare to be concerned about the intensive farming of animals for food. Unlike an animal in a small-scale or family farm, who contributes to the ecological well-being of the farm, an animal in a factory farm is only a unit of production in a process that externalizes significant costs, which are not reflected in the price of the meat. Factory farming creates staggering amounts of animal excrement, many times more than human excrement, which pollutes the waterways without the benefit of adequate waste treatment.13 Comparatively, on small-scale farms, animal waste can be used to replenish the soil for crop production. Also, in the United States, raising animals for food consumes a third of the nation’s energy and half of all water used.14 Apart from the environmental costs, intensive farming of animals has enormous health costs, not only for those who must work in the slaughterhouses at the front end of the process, but also for the consumer who ingests the meat at the end of the process.15