Increasingly, agricultural production in the United States is consolidated in the hands of a very few powerful corporations. For example, just four companies (Tyson, Cargill, Smithfield, and JBS) make over 85 percent of all beef that is sold in the United States (Napach 2014). Tyson Foods , based in Springdale, Arkansas, is one such corporation. In the 2016 fiscal year, Tyson, on average, killed 35 million chickens, 125,000 cows, and 415,000 pigs per week (Tyson Foods 2016). Tyson is emblematic of āagribusiness ,ā or interest in the profitability of food production, and the rise of āindustrial agriculture.ā Industrial agriculture describes agricultural production that is conducted via intensive farming practices. That is, large quantities of resources (e.g., labor, fossil fuels) and technological advances (e.g., machinery, irrigation, genetic selection) are utilized to produce the highest yields from the smallest amount of space. I will be using the terms āindustrial agriculture,ā āindustrial farming,ā and āintensive farmingā interchangeably throughout the book as all of these terms refer to the system of agricultural production that is currently dominant in the United States.
A concomitant of agribusiness concentration is harm , especially to nonhuman animals1 and the ecological environment .2 Although the agricultural industry in the United States is subject to government regulation, many of the harms that are perpetrated by the industry fall within the bounds of the law. In particular, the harm inflicted upon animals on the industrialized farm proceeds on a mass scale, muchāthough certainly not allāof it perfectly legal.
For this project, I use Presserās definition of harm , ātrouble caused by anotherā (2013: 2). Applying this definition to harm to the environment , harm /trouble is anything that would threaten or reduce the ability of the ecological environment to sustain life. To apply this definition to animal harm , I also borrow from Agnewās definition of animal abuse: āany act that contributes to the pain or death of an animal or that otherwise threatens the welfare of an animalā (1998: 179). Pain and death can certainly be considered ātrouble.ā I will also talk of āanimal suffering ā in this book, and by that I mean a negative emotional state caused by adverse events. Although there is some debate as to whether animals can suffer (see Dawkins 2008; Rowman 1988), I take the position of the evolutionary biologist Marc Bekoff that animals are capable of experiencing a range of emotions, including suffering (Bekoff 2010).
This book investigates the discursive construction of harm and ābusiness-as-usualā by US agribusiness by means of a case study of corporate behemoth Tyson Foods . The overarching point of this project is to demonstrate just how such harms are normalized through dominant discourses . Specifically, utilizing critical discourse analysis, I examine the ways in which Tyson Foods culturally legitimizes harm -doing through the use of discourses on their3 corporate website.
I chose Tyson Foods as an exemplar of big agribusiness because it is the largest US-based corporation involved in livestock production,4 with net sales exceeding $37 billion for the 2016 fiscal year. Tyson employs more people (114,000) and operates more plants (107) than do any of its competitors (Tyson Foods 2016). Like many other chicken producers, Tyson is characterized by vertical integrationāmeaning they control/own most all aspects of chicken production. Tyson owns the chickens they eventually slaughter and package; they contract farmers to raise the chickens to their specifications. For the 2013 fiscal year, Tyson contracted with 5500 poultry farmers (Tyson Foods 2013a). Although the cattle and hog industries are not similarly vertically integrated, Tyson maintains partnerships with many suppliers who rely on Tyson as a purchaser of large quantities of livestock (cows and pigs). Tyson has partnerships with 7500 cattle and hog suppliers (Gazdziak 2013; Tyson Foods 2013a). Because Tyson is such a large player in meat production, it makes sense to examine their discourses for how the harms of industrial agriculture get culturally legitimized.
In order to provide some context on the point of animal harm , I now turn to a brief discussion of how this subject has been conceptualized in academic literature. Other scholars note that much of the literature on animal harm deals with the so-called link between (illegal) violence against animals, usually companion animals, and violence against humans (Beirne 1999; Taylor 2011). Early work that examined animal harm was concerned with the role of animal cruelty in childhood development. That research links harming animals in childhood to later offenses and posits animal cruelty as one of three signifiers of later sociopathic behavior, the other two being enuresis (or bed-wetting) and fire-setting (Felthous 1980; Felthous and Bernard 1979; Felthous and Kellert 1987; Hellman and Blackman 1966; Wax and Haddox 1974). Other research investigates the co-occurrence of animal abuse with other family violence such as spousal or child abuse (Arkow 1997; Ascione 1997; Deviney et al. 1983). More recent work continues to focus on the link between childhood cruelty to animals and later violent offenses against humans as well as the co-occurrence of violence in families (see, for instance, DeGue and Dilillo 2009; Flynn 2011; Merz-Perez et al. 2001; Schwartz et al. 2012; Tallichet and Hensley 2004).
Although work that examines the link between violence against animals and violence against humans is important, it is equally and perhaps more important to examine harm to animals that is widely accepted and legal. As South and colleagues note, focusing on the link and instances of where animal harm is connected to interhuman abuse ādoes not serve animals especially well because it ignores those sites where animal abuse occurs much more often and is socially acceptable and almost invisibleā (South et al. 2013: 34). As such, this project is inspired by my desire to understand how some forms of animal harm are normalized and rendered āalmost invisibleā within the cultural context of the United States.
There is little contention that industrial agriculture inflicts major harm on animals, humans, and the environment . For example, animals that are raised for food within the large agribusiness model are forced to live in conditions that constrict their ability to satisfy their natural instincts and infringes upon their general well-being (Harrison 1966; ASPCA 2013). Small-scale farmers experience a ācost-priceā squeeze whereby the profitability of their operation decreases due to the advanced techn...