One big issue is that the term “free range” is essentially meaningless as defined by the USDA, and often gives consumers the false sense that products marked as “free range” come from animals who had a higher standard of living than non-free range, therefore making their farming more ethical. In reality, this is basically never true.
To qualify as “free range” an animal needs to have “continuous access to the outdoors for 50% of its life”. Sounds good on paper, but “outdoors” isn’t rigorously defined in this standard. This means that situations that no reasonable person would call “continuous access to the outdoors” still count. For example, you could cram 1000 chickens into a small barn to the point where they barely have space to move, but as long as there’s a hole in one wall that opens into a tiny one-foot-by-one-foot pen with no roof, it still counts. If that teeny tiny “outdoor” space can fit at least 1 chicken, then congratulations, all 1000 are now “free range”. As long as you cater to some very specific loopholes, you can get away with factory farming while still having the legal right to claim on your packaging that your animals were treated humanely.
Terms like “organic” and “pasture raised” are similarly deceptive to the point of being meaningless, and so it’s basically impossible to know what conditions your food was subjected to during it’s life based on the packaging alone. Of course you can always try to do your own research about individual companies (or if you’re lucky enough to have access, individual farms), but there are lots of laws on the books protecting them from having to disclose specific details to anyone but the USDA, so good luck getting any meaningful information. There have even been cases of farm workers and journalists being prosecuted for things like sharing pictures of farm conditions or publishing personal accounts of how livestock were treated on private farms. Fortunately the “ag gag” laws that allow these whistleblowers to be prosecuted are rarer than they used to be, but there are still a handful of states that have them (if you tried to guess which ones, you’d probably get most of them right).
In reality, the only way to know if an animal was raised to your own standards of ethics is to raise it yourself.
One big issue is that the term “free range” is essentially meaningless as defined by the USDA, and often gives consumers the false sense that products marked as “free range” come from animals who had a higher standard of living than non-free range, therefore making their farming more ethical. In reality, this is basically never true.
To qualify as “free range” an animal needs to have “continuous access to the outdoors for 50% of its life”. Sounds good on paper, but “outdoors” isn’t rigorously defined in this standard. This means that situations that no reasonable person would call “continuous access to the outdoors” still count. For example, you could cram 1000 chickens into a small barn to the point where they barely have space to move, but as long as there’s a hole in one wall that opens into a tiny one-foot-by-one-foot pen with no roof, it still counts. If that teeny tiny “outdoor” space can fit at least 1 chicken, then congratulations, all 1000 are now “free range”. As long as you cater to some very specific loopholes, you can get away with factory farming while still having the legal right to claim on your packaging that your animals were treated humanely.
Terms like “organic” and “pasture raised” are similarly deceptive to the point of being meaningless, and so it’s basically impossible to know what conditions your food was subjected to during it’s life based on the packaging alone. Of course you can always try to do your own research about individual companies (or if you’re lucky enough to have access, individual farms), but there are lots of laws on the books protecting them from having to disclose specific details to anyone but the USDA, so good luck getting any meaningful information. There have even been cases of farm workers and journalists being prosecuted for things like sharing pictures of farm conditions or publishing personal accounts of how livestock were treated on private farms. Fortunately the “ag gag” laws that allow these whistleblowers to be prosecuted are rarer than they used to be, but there are still a handful of states that have them (if you tried to guess which ones, you’d probably get most of them right).
In reality, the only way to know if an animal was raised to your own standards of ethics is to raise it yourself.