We pay premium prices for meat from animals who lived ‘humane’ lives. Here’s what we’re really getting

In fact, some meat producers and animal rights advocates say commonly used phrases such as “humanely raised” are so open to interpretation that they’re basically meaningless.

“It means nothing in Canada and the U.S.,” said Vincent Breton, CEO of duBreton, a Quebec-based pork processor that advertises itself as using pigs from farms that treat animals well above industry standards. Without any strict certification or inspection, he said, one farm’s version of “humanely raised” can be much different from another. 

What a lot of shoppers in Toronto expect when they buy “humane” meat probably looks something like a scene from “Charlotte’s Web” — pigs, cows and chickens living pleasant lives, roaming around on open, green pastures. But modern farming methods dictate that most animals — even many that produce meat labelled as humane — are almost exclusively kept indoors. 

That’s partly because it’s expensive to raise animals on pasture. It takes up more space and, because animals can move around, they burn more calories and require more feed. Letting animals go outside can also raise the risk of exposure to infectious diseases.

David Fraser, a professor emeritus at the University of British Columbia who has studied animal welfare since the 1970s, said there are duelling philosophies in the sector about what makes a good life for an animal raised for slaughter. 

If your philosophy values an animal’s physical health, you could argue that it’s more humane to raise laying hens in an indoor, caged system rather than expose them to the risk of hen-on-hen aggression and cannibalism in a free-run barn, or to parasites, bad weather and disease outside on pasture. 

A more recent school of thought tries to account for the animal’s mental welfare, by placing more value on an animal’s ability to express natural behaviours, such as socializing, nesting, running or rooting in soil. To explain the difference, some producers have come up with labels such as humanely raised, free-run and free-range.

Maple Leaf Foods, the Canadian meat-processing giant that advertises its products as “humanely raised,” told the Star that well-run, audited indoor farms “are the best way to keep pigs and chickens healthy and happy.”

In a statement, the company said its farmers have added “enrichments” in barns to help animals exhibit their natural behaviour, like toys for pigs to play with as well as perches and “pecking objects” for chickens. 

The Canadian Food Inspection Agency (CFIA) says food companies must be able to substantiate any advertising claim on the label if a federal inspector asks.

In egg production, the industry defines some standards that “free-run” and “free-range” farms must adhere to. Free-run farms should be cage-free operations that allow hens to roam around a barn, though the hens don’t have access to the outdoors. Free-range hens are in similar, open-concept barns but are allowed some access to the outdoors, when weather allows. Canadian standards for organic eggs and meat also require the animals to have access to the outdoors. 

On its website, however, CFIA warns consumers that free-range claims aren’t subject to “specific requirements” on how long the animals get to spend outside or “type of environment.”

And what the space looks like matters, said Fraser. For example, to get a chicken to go outside, you need to entice it. To do that, you have to understand what a chicken wants, and what it fears.

“This bird is descended from a jungle-dwelling fowl,” Fraser said. So to a chicken, a measly strip of bare land running alongside the barn, with the sun beating down on it, isn’t an attractive proposition. 

The best outdoor spaces have plenty of cover and shade from trees and shrubs. Absent any strict standards on the design for outdoor spaces, Fraser said, there is the possibility that a so-called free-range hen in Canada may have rarely stepped outside.

“It comes down to the producer,” he said. “Welfare is more complicated than just having the freedom to move around a bigger space.”

At this point, industry standards for free-range hens are focused mostly on protecting them from coyotes and other dangers while they’re outside. But the Egg Farmers of Canada says within the next year it’s planning to launch a new free-range inspection and certification program, which would set extra standards on operations, such as the level of vegetation on the range. 

“Ideally, they would be going outside. That’s what that label implies,” said Lynn Kavanagh, farming campaign manager at World Animal Protection. “Not to say that farmers or producers or companies lie. But when there’s no standardized mechanism to ensure the systems are being met … there could be variation.”

In 2021, World Animal Protection published a guidebook to help consumers better understand marketing terms around animal welfare. The book cautioned that phrases like natural, farm fresh and farm-raised don’t “refer to a set of agreed upon standards.”

Terms like “local” or “locally raised” don’t necessarily mean the product comes from a high-welfare local farm, Kavanagh said. 

With all this confusion, consumers who want to support higher-welfare farming operations can be wary — and wonder how they can be sure they’re getting what they’re paying for.

One way to ensure consumers know what they’re buying would be to set a higher national standard for raising animals that all farmers must meet. Welfare specialists argue that all shoppers want their meat to come from ethically treated animals, but just can’t afford it — especially after years of high inflation. And a national standard would give every shopper peace of mind, regardless of their budget. 

Canada doesn’t have government-regulated standards for livestock care at the national level, since animal welfare on farms fall under provincial jurisdiction, not federal.

The closest thing we have to a national standard comes from a not-for-profit group, the National Farm Animal Care Council (NFACC).

NFACC develops codes of practice for different animals through negotiations with industry lobbyists, veterinarians, academics, animal protection groups, grocers and restaurant chains.

Industry groups, like the Egg Farmers of Canada, then use the codes to come up with certification programs for their members, which include inspections to make sure farms are following the rules.

But using the NFACC codes to change how animals are raised will take years, if not decades. And animal rights groups have criticized the NFACC codes for not being rigorous enough, saying they are influenced by the industry. For example, the rules still allow farmers to keep hens in cages and pigs in gestation crates — a heavily criticized practice that involves confining a sow to a stall so small that she cannot turn around throughout her pregnancy.

A decade ago, NFACC’s pig code set 2024 as the deadline for the industry to be totally free of gestation crates. But that deadline has since been pushed to 2029, to give farmers with existing crate barns more time to fund and transition to new, crate-free systems.

On the egg side, the NFACC code for laying hens set a goal to phase out conventional cages, also known as battery cages, by 2036.

Jackie Wepruk, who leads the NFACC program, said rushing the changes, without feedback and buy-in from farmers, risks thrusting animals into new, untested situations that could end up being worse than what we have now. Switching to free-run systems can lead to more aggression and trampling deaths. And if you put previously caged sows into groups out in the open, it could lead to fights, Wepruk said, especially if that breed of pig was developed for confinement, not socializing.

“So it’s easy to be critical of the codes. It’s much harder to be a part of this process,” she said. “How do we ensure … that we’re all collectively moving forward?”

As progress toward higher universal standards in Canada grinds along, marketing phrases about animal welfare will still have a place in Canadian meat departments, said Renée Bergeron, an associate professor of animal biosciences at the University of Guelph who has studied pig welfare.

“If you don’t have a label, you can be sure that your pig never saw the sunlight and never actually rooted the ground or ate grass,” she said. “There’s huge differences between the conventional system and those labels.”

Breton, the CEO of duBreton, said that at the moment, the best way to know if the marketing terms are backed by legitimate practices is to look for stickers on the package from third-party certification bodies.

Certifiers typically conduct regular audits to make sure farms adhere to a set of standards well beyond NFACC codes. But they also come with a fee, and small farmers say it’s tough to justify the expense.

Breton said his company, which slaughters roughly 500,000 pigs a year, spends about $1 million annually on certification services. The company pays for its producers to be inspected by Humane Farm Animal Care, which provides products with a “Certified Humane” seal if operations meet industry-specific standards. For pigs, the standards don’t require outdoor access. But for laying hens, the standards set out requirements for any operation calling itself “pasture-raised,” “seasonally pasture-raised” or “free-range.”

DuBreton also participates in the Global Animal Partnership (GAP), which grades operations on a five-step scale based on how well they meet standards on pasture bedding, physical alternations, quality, transport times to slaughterhouses, and how long babies are allowed to spend with mothers before being separated.

Breton also produces organic pigs, and those standards require animals to have access to the outdoors. Those pigs cost about 2.5 times what it takes to raise a pig with conventional farming methods, he said. To have pigs outdoors, you need infrastructure, land, fencing, maintenance and more feed. His GAP and certified humane pigs don’t currently access the outdoors, and cost about 1.5 times as much as a regular pig.

Breton said he wants to transition his entire operation to outdoor, organic pigs, but the demand just isn’t there. 

In the middle of an affordability crisis, he said he has struggled to get his pork into more major Canadian grocery stores, because of the price he has to charge.

“The retailers are really focused on value,” he said. 

Instead of labels, Murray Thunberg just tells people about his pigs. He runs a butcher shop in Hamilton, as well as a stall at the Saturday farmer’s markets at Evergreen Brick Works and St. Lawrence Market, selling products from his farm in Cambridge, Ont. 

His pigs are raised outdoors, with huts them to nest. “I’ll have lots of straw in there,” he said. “You won’t see a pig because they’ve all nested down beneath the straw. And then you’ll go out in the morning and bang the feed pail and just all of a sudden, you know, 50 sows will pop up from the straw.”

When people come by his stall at St. Lawrence Market, he’ll tell them the pork and bacon comes from happy pigs.

“I think it’s a pretty good life for an animal,” he said. “They seem happy to me.”