Growing up in suburban Long Island, New York, I had no knowledge or understanding of how animals on farms were cared for or where my food came from. I first became aware of how food animals were treated in the book Animal Liberation by Peter Singer,1which I read long after graduation from veterinary school. In the United States, we raise and kill approximately 9 billion animals per year on farms far removed from the clean offices where we practice as small animal veterinarians. Singer and others2 have described how over the past 60 years animal agriculture has shifted from a culture of husbandry, in which the farmer was a steward of his or her small herd living on pasture and felt a responsibility to ensure the animals' welfare, to its present state of industrialization, in which animals are bred to be increasingly large, processed in higher numbers and confined in smaller spaces. We have moved from an era in which farmers were the animal's caretaker to one in which we have sacrificed virtually any commitment to farm animal well-being.
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