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Breeding and Rearing Farmed Animals 161 chapter considers responses to issues raised by the breeding and rearing of farmed animals in terms of policy changes adopted by national and international organisations of governance, the demands of different campaign organisations in civil society which expose and contest different kinds of abuses involved in the raising of non-human animals for food and the alterations in industry practices Prevalence In this section of the chapter, I trace the development of the institutions and practices of breeding and rearing farmed animals, noting that the realisation of the global agribusiness industries of today emerged through entangled histories of colonialism and the development of capitalism From the thirteenth to the nineteenth century, the breeding and rearing of animals for food in Europe took place through small-scale farming which occurred on relatively sustainable pastures and was mixed with a range of species There was regional difference in terms of the growing of different varieties of chickens, pigs, sheep and cattle and the production of different sorts of ‘animal products’ While elements of this trend persist (Johnson 1991), the current scale of animal farming is both extensive and intense, and it has been growing rapidly since the 1950s As a result, there has been a dramatic increase in the populations of farmed animals In 2003, for example, the USA became the first country to raise over one billion farmed animals in a single year, and this was more than twice the number of animals raised for food in 1980 and 10 times the number raised in 1940 (Marcus 2005, p 5) Since 1980, global meat production has more than doubled, but in the South (where levels of meat and dairy consumption are rising year on year), it has tripled Sixty billion animals are currently used each year to provide meat and dairy products On current trends, this figure could reach 120 billion by 2050 (MacDonald 2010, p 34) The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization predicts a dramatic rise in human population to 8.9 billion by 2050, and the rise in the food animal population, is promoted partly by this increase and also by heightened demand in both richer and poorer regions of the globe (Giles 2009) The seeds of this contemporary globalised animal food system are to be found in the centuries prior to the industrialisation of agricultural production in the nineteenth century The process of colonisation involved the
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