Original subtitles

It all felt deeply unethical.

I went in with pure intentions to make a difference.

It really was every day that I'd cry,

and then I was just suddenly like, I can't do another day of this.

I just want to share my story, and I want people to know

what I've learned about disease.

We have seen multiple episodes over the past several years

where viruses have emerged that have caused cause for concern.

And thankfully to date, time and time again,

measures taken by governments,

measures that have been taken by the WHO,

have managed to combat those outbreaks.

I think the whole of the medical community

is mindful and slightly fearful that eventually

there might come a time where such a virus can't be contained.

There are two sets of laws that we have that control human behavior.

One is the laws that we make.

And in those laws they say sometimes,

"It's okay to do this. It's okay to do that."

Well, it may be OK, and it may be lawful,

but nature has its own set of laws.

And when you or we as people violate those laws,

then nature responds with a consequence all of its own.

And it can be a consequence that we as humans can't tolerate.

We're creating these scenarios in which viruses can mutate in that way.

It really feels like there's so many alarms going off

and it just isn't being spelled out.

I'm Alice Brough,

and I used to be a livestock vet,

so I worked for about four years in the British pig industry,

and I left that about a year ago.

As soon as I understood there was a job

that was involving helping animals, that was the career for me,

and I didn't ever consider anything else.

It was like as soon as I could speak, I wanted to be a vet.

As soon as I turned 15,

I started working on farms every holiday

and the veterinary degree's five years long,

so it's a considerable amount of time put towards it really.

So the year before I left,

I was actually a finalist for Young Pig Vet of the Year.

I really put everything into it,

I tried incredibly hard to achieve what really was my aim,

improving animals' lives.

And I, yeah...

It was a tough job, and I put everything into it.

So why have you since left that job?

That's a tough question.

I think the more I went on, the more I struggled

with a sort of concern that I was facilitating something

which would be potentially very dangerous

to human health further down the line.

I felt I've had to step back from that role

to feel like I'm not contributing to some of the biggest threats

to humanity in the form of pandemics and antimicrobial resistance.

There are many different diseases

that have led to pandemics over the history of time.

And there is typically some sort of link

between human health and animal health

within those types of pandemics.

About half of infectious diseases people can get

can be spread from an animal or be zoonotic.

And for emerging infectious diseases particularly,

scientists estimate that three out of every four

emerging infectious diseases come from an animal source.

Well, the truth is, when you look at the origins specifically of COVID-19,

we think it's come from some of these wet markets in China.

And for many of us in the West, we look and say,

"OK, perhaps they should close down."

And to a certain extent that is true.

But we should also look in our own backyard

and just look at how we are treating animals here.

It's not just over there.

If we are cooping up our livestock in unsanitary conditions,

giving them antibiotics all the time,

we really don't have much of a case

to point the finger at anybody else.

The more I looked, and research I looked at,

it was like going down the rabbit hole in a sense.

Animal agriculture is a big business.

It is causing all sorts of major issues,

but nobody's joining the dots.

I worked in the Office of Counterterrorism

and Emerging Threats of the FDA.

And in that office we were preparing for things like pandemics,

like COVID-19 that we're facing now.

I worked with the CDC,

I worked with the NIH,

I worked with the military, I worked with Homeland Security.

Throughout that entire time,

not once did we ever talk about how these emerging diseases

come about in the first place.

This is the time.

If there is any time,

this is the time to really look into how these infections come about.

So you think about it, we're 8 billion humans

on this planet right now.

But for every human,

there are about 10 land animals raised and killed for food.

So we think there are too many humans?

Think about how many animals.

So we're talking about 80 billion land animals

being raised and killed for food at one time.

You know, with coronavirus, we are being told

to socially distance, and rightfully so.

But we're doing the opposite with these animals in these farms.

We're crowding them into as tight of a space as we can,

and that goes against everything that we know about how to contain

and prevent the emergence of infectious diseases.

Their immune systems are decreased

because of the stress that they face, and then they are so densely packed.

So it's so easy for one animal to catch an infection

and then pass it on to another animal.

And then the virus can spread like wildfire.

So far they've been able to verify the deadly strain of flu virus

is passed on from chickens to people.

In 1997 with the emergence of H5N1,

it was a highly pathogenic influenza virus

that emerged from chicken farms in China.

Now that virus had a lethality rate of about 60%.

Think about it, a virus that killed

60 out of 100 people

who contracted the virus.

You can imagine how deadly that virus is.

I mean, that is a scary, scary virus.

H5N1 came out from animal agriculture.

And it is still out there and it is still circulating

and it is still mutating.

We are not done with H5N1.

It's a ticking time bomb,

what's happening in these factory farms

and the influenza strains that are coming out.

It's no coincidence that when we think of past pandemics,

we think of swine flu and avian flu.

And pigs and chickens

are the most intensively farmed animals on the planet.

Intensive farming acts as a crucible

for the development of pathogenic organisms.

It's our insatiable need for cheap food

and for animal protein.

If we didn't have those,

we wouldn't have a lot of the drivers for zoonotic emergence.

So I've been driving everyday farm to farm

and seeing generally similar sorts of problems across the board,

whether that be disease or welfare issues.

And these conditions are not exceptional, not one-offs.

This is how our meat, dairy and eggs are produced every day.

We do a lot of unnatural things to animals.

You know, we routinely mutilate young animals.

We cuts off teeth, tails, testicles and beaks, horns,

creating a direct route for bacteria.

And it's also greatly stressful and painful obviously.

We know dairy calves

are removed from their mothers straightaway.

Chicks don't get maternal time,

and piglets are weaned about three to four weeks old.

When you move them into an environment

that's frightening, away from their mum,

and on a completely different feed,

it's very common to see things like post-weaning salmonella

or E. coli diarrhea or meningitis.

When there's been an outbreak of disease

that requires my input, I'll go and take some samples.

And I might swab some tonsils or nostrils,

or take some blood from their jugular vein.

And the whole time, I'm kind of leaning down

in front of the nose and mouth of a pig

which might have died

from something like swine flu, which could potentially pass to me

or some unknown disease which we haven't discovered yet.

The level of ammonia coming from tons of waste

from these animals and the dust that builds up,

everything those pigs are breathing out,

you're just breathing in, so you come out and your eyes are red

and streaming and you're choking in it.

But those pigs are in it 24/7.

That's the reason we see so much respiratory disease

and you see lungs coming through.

The abattoirs that have got pneumonia and various bacterial diseases,

like the concoctions of respiratory pathogens,

because of those enclosed spaces are phenomenal.

It was quite soul-destroying really, because most of the time what I felt

was probably the best option for the animals I saw

suffering or sick or injured was to shoot them.

And I was doing that most days.

I carried a bolt gun in my car and a screwdriver

to euthanize animals daily.

It just wasn't, it wasn't really

what I signed up for as a vet, let's be honest.

To shoot an animal, you have to look in their eyes.

That was a daily occurrence, I'd go home

with these eyes of animals that were utterly miserable.

I'd have horrible nightmares

all the time about killing animals

and spent quite a lot of time in slaughterhouses.

And I'd just get this recurring loop of animals

getting killed in my dreams.

The way that I dealt with it at the time was,

"If I'm not doing it, then somebody else will

who probably doesn't care."

These are studies that show drops in lung function,

around factory farms and things like that.

So there are many, many, many studies,

that very clearly show disease.

If you look at every step along the pathway,

the use of animals for food causes disease in humans,

starting with the farms.

The people who work there and who live there,

we see increased rates of respiratory ailments,

GI ailments from water contamination,

increased rates of skin and wound infections.

Then to the slaughterhouses.

As they are slaughtering the animals, they are often opening the belly.

When they open the belly, they often have to do it

so quickly that they tear into the intestines.

So now you have spillage of intestinal contents, i.e. feces,

splashing on the person, on the flesh itself.

Then you move to the processing of it.

So you now have products that are contaminated with bacteria.

There are plenty of studies to show this.

Now you shift over to the consumer,

because it has moved to the consumer.

There was a study done by the University of Minnesota

in which they went to 10 large retailers

and collected samples of the meat,

the pork, and the beef products sold in all those grocery stores.

And they sampled them, and they found that

there was E. coli in 60 to 70%

of the beef and the pork products

and 92% of the chicken products.

These are just some of the infectious disease risks

coming from these factory farms.

Another bleak day of record COVID figures.

And at Croydon University Hospital it is status red.

Ambulances asked to take patients elsewhere

if at all possible across London.

COVID-19

has pretty much brought the world to its knees.

Over a million people have now died.

That's a huge number of people to have lost their lives.

It's a huge number of people to be out of work and unable to socialize.

But the thing to remember is that COVID-19,

it spread very quickly, and infected a lot of people,

but potential pathogens for pandemics in the future

have much, much higher mortality rates.

The CDC have tipped the next pandemic as an avian influenza,

which has a mortality rate of 40%.

It's a horrifying thought, but it's a very real possibility

and the more that we're

creating these scenarios in which viruses

can mutate in that way, there is a very real risk

of something much worse than COVID-19 happening.

We only need to look at past pandemics to know this.

Well, the last global pandemic that we had

was the swine flu pandemic of 2009.

Scientists are fairly certain that it originated from a factory farm.

Now global estimates place about 500,000 people

as casualties of that last pandemic.

So incredibly serious stuff originating right down the road

from a massive pig facility.

And it makes sense that that pig farm was ground zero

for the 2009 pandemic.

Pigs and humans share a lot of genetic material,

so pigs are this perfect host,

and when that happens, influenza mutates

and it can become highly pathogenic

and wreak absolute havoc in the human population.

As far as the 1918 pandemic, we know why that happened.

It was a virulent disease that occurred

when troops were moved all over the world.

So you had massive movement of people in confined spaces.

Just because the 1918 flu did not involve factory farms,

it does not mean that it didn't involve other animals.

In fact, they recently sequenced the genome

by taking samples from lung tissue

of people who had actually died of the Spanish flu,

and they found genetic material for avian viruses,

swine viruses, so very clearly there is still some relationship

between the 1918 flu and animal use.

We very clearly know that the more recent epidemics,

the 1957 epidemic, the 1968 epidemic, 2009 swine flu,

these were all related to our use of animals.

We're in the middle of a pandemic.

It's like there's no bigger wake-up call.

I don't know what more we need

to start taking action on this.

The only thing that will stop us from picking up zoonotic disease

is stopping messing with animals.

But obviously we don't know for sure where COVID came from.

People are very focused on the wildlife trade

and even these lab leak theories.

But in particular, people are looking at wet markets.

So because we don't have anything like that over here,

to what extent can we wash our hands of these issues?

I went to document a wet market.

In these wet markets,

there were several stalls that have live frogs,

bullfrogs that are kept in cages and slaughtered on the spot,

that have turtles kept in buckets,

and they stay there in dirty water, in their own feces.

They are not fed.

They are kept in stressful, unclean conditions.

There are no hygiene precautions whatsoever.

And this is really an environment that is really ripe for having

all kinds of pathogen develop and transmit again very easily,

from one bucket to another bucket.

We cannot talk about physical distancing

and apply really strict measures to prevent people

from visiting their loved ones,

while allowing these wet markets to still

continue business as usual.

This is not okay.

Coronavirus, right?

Kung Flu. Kung Flu.

Kung Flu.

Asians around the world have reported discrimination

linked to coronavirus.

Those we've spoken to fear the numbers

being verbally abused and assaulted

will rise even more sharply in the weeks ahead.

This year, even from the end of January I would say,

before COVID-19 had hit the UK,

I was sitting on the train to work and someone sat down, looked at me

and got back up, covering their face with the collar of their coat.

I looked, they're not doing it to anyone else.

It's obvious what's going on here.

The new strain of coronavirus...

All the media reports only showed East Asian people

We noticed like a 60% decrease in overall sales,

and then footfall was so far down.

You'd see people walk past and point and laugh.

I could notice people saying things like,

"Don't bother supporting them. Chinese people are dogs.

They eat dogs, they eat bats.

They're so dirty."

I've never known a level of racism

as explicitly and as common as during this time.

I definitely feel that the fingers

pointed to people just generally not in the West.

Inevitably, when something bad happens,

you can look to blame someone else.

And in doing so, what you can end up doing is alienating

parts of your own society.

I think, pointing the finger,

we're kind of missing the crux of it,

which is that our own patterns of consumption,

whether that's food, fashion, entertainment,

are driving us down a road that won't be easy to come back from.

It's really interesting looking at the conditions

of wet markets in China, animals stacked on top of each other,

mired in their own feces and urine, highly stressed,

close human and animal contact,

and that's where we suspect COVID-19 came from.

But if you take those similar characteristics

and look at factory farms in the West,

in the UK, in America, all over Europe, extremely similar situations

of incredibly stressed animals

who are denied all that comes naturally to them.

And it's when human beings treat animals badly

we see disease mutating quite quickly and then jumping the species barrier.

So the comparisons between wet markets and factory farms

I think are incredibly fair, and as a Western society,

we absolutely must look at what's happening in our backyard first.

Even if we just look at the wildlife trade

and ignore factory farming,

that's not something we can completely wash our hands of.

Yeah, it's easy to say that the problem started over there.

It's not our fault.

It's much harder to turn the mirror onto ourselves

and look at how we are increasing

our risks for these infectious diseases.

Every country is involved in this wildlife trade,

that leads to things like the wet market,

leads to animals being shipped around the globe,

captured from the wild, used in circuses,

used to stock zoos, used for laboratory experiments,

used as medicinal objects, used for their fur

and their skin and their meat.

And the United States is one of the biggest importers

and biggest exporters of wildlife.

Europe is a big importer and exporter of wildlife too.

So we are a huge culprit.

We expose ourselves to more animals, ship them around the globe.

These animals are treated incredibly horribly,

they're distressed and their immunity is down

so they can very easily catch infectious diseases.

And so the wildlife trade brings together

a lot of sick species, species which normally

would not interact with each other.

Are we hypocrites?

I sort of think we are,

because we ignore the parts of wildlife trade

that we want to ignore because they serve our purpose,

and we cry out against the parts of wildlife trade

that we've decided are unacceptable.

The wildlife trade is pervasive, I mean, it's kind of everywhere,

and it's not just what we read about

in the headlines of the papers, ivory trade, rhino horn trade,

tigers being traded, pangolins being traded.

It's things that we sort of don't

even think about, and we are, in the West,

in the US, in Canada,

in Europe, in the UK, consumers of many of those products

that are internationally traded.

Forests contain value,

huge value in timber species, and so those arterial roads

that forge their way into the forests

mean that we have gone into the wild

in a way that is massively destructive

and carries with it enormous risk.

And back down that road

come the logs, but come the wildlife, comes the disease.

So it's now like a beating heart.

We are pumping blood into the forest,

and we are seeing the blood sucked out of it.

And here we are.

HIV and Ebola were carried by non-human primates, chimpanzees,

but because of the bushmeat trade,

and because of the logging industry,

that destroyed a lot of the natural habitat of these animals,

it brought humans really much closer to these animals.

And we suspect that it is that combination, the logging industry

and the bushmeat trade that caused the first HIV infection in a human.

And we suspect that's how we got Ebola.

When we destroy the natural habitats of animals,

we are increasing the opportunities for humans

to come into contact with species

that may carry infectious diseases

that we may not have encountered before.

The wildlife trade is destructive.

It's destructive to ecological habitats.

It's destructive to many species.

And it's destructive for us because it increases

our risk of infectious diseases.

We don't need it. That needs to end.

I think the problem is, one of the central problems

is that we are just consumers, consumers on a massive scale.

The sheer number of people and the fact they need to eat,

somewhere to sleep, and things in their house if they have a house.

And all of those things drive

the engine of consumption around the world.

And what we don't realize is

that that will be the cause of our own destruction.

Because we're not the planet's stewards,

we're the exploiters of the planet right now.

History has taught us, and what we see now

is teaching us that anywhere and any way that we treat animals

badly or unnaturally, it leads to problems.

Not only for the animals, but we'll say for us.

So tell me what that letter is.

So I am currently under investigation

by the Royal College of Veterinary Surgeons,

which means that I'm at risk

of having my license to practice revoked.

And why are you under investigation?

I publicly spoke about my experience within the pig industry.

So that's what you've done, you've just spoken about your experiences?

Yes, pretty much.

What their problem is with that

is that my comments could undermine the integrity

of the veterinary profession and damage the reputation.

And how does it feel receiving that letter?

I suppose quite shocked and quite scared because I don't,

I don't feel I did anything wrong as a vet,

and I feel like I was a very good vet.

It feels a little bit of an injustice,

since then I've kind of looked through previous cases

that have gone to court of vets and nurses under disciplinary action

and you've got actual pedophiles,

sex offenders, drunk drivers

who've caused death, theft of controlled drugs,

that sort of thing.

So to be lumped in with actual criminals

when I've purely given a few truthful opinions

of my own experience is quite challenging

to take, to be honest.

Like I told you, they won't talk to me.

That's why I'm talking to you now. They don't want to talk to me.

It is just ridiculous.

And I feel like if people knew before they got into the business

what they go through if they make a complaint

or were dissatisfied, what they would go through

to get an answer to something,

they wouldn't get into it.

Was there anything to do with this particular film

that was an impacting factor in all this?

Yes.

So the company cites Rudy's

allowing a film team to come into his barns

as a reason for termination.

He was terminated, not because he did anything wrong,

not because he violated anything in his contract,

it was for speaking out against the company.

I think the industry hopes that Rudy will

be a signal to other farmers,

you better shut up or you're going to get your contract canceled.

The industry works incredibly hard

to stop people from exposing its secrets.

So given that you were told you're not allowed

to talk about these things, does that mean

that you will stop talking about them

and that you can't be a part of this film anymore?

No, I won't be silenced.

I've acted in accordance with the oath

I swore on entry to the profession.

So no amount of bullying or threats

will stop me from doing what is right,

particularly when there's another issue we haven't spoken about

that's infinitely more pressing than my career

and potentially much more devastating than a pandemic.

Are you comfortable and everything?

Brilliant, okay.

If we start off and you just tell me who you are

and what roles you have had in the past

and what you're doing now.

Professor Dame Sally Davies.

I'm the master of Trinity College and the special envoy

on antimicrobial resistance for the UK government.

Until this time last year, I was the chief medical officer for England

and the most senior medical advisor to the UK government.

And given your experience, what is it that worries you most

about where human health is heading?

It's really interesting, climate change is of the moment.

The younger generation have really taken it up,

and I am delighted because it matters.

But actually AMR will kill us before climate change.

And we need everyone to understand that.

AMR is a pandemic,

it's just a slow-growing one,

unlike COVID, which happened really fast.

What we're seeing is that bugs, whether they're bacteria,

viruses, parasites, fungi, are evolving to develop resistance

to the very medicines we use to treat them.

And unfortunately, the end result if this goes on

will be really dreadful.

And I've talked about the post-antibiotic apocalypse

where you'd see a lot longer stays in hospital,

much higher mortality,

and go back to the era before penicillin.

Antimicrobial resistance keeps me awake at night.

What this really looks like if we don't have effective

antibiotics in the future is taking your brother, your child.

your wife to hospital in their prime of life

and knowing as you arrive, there is nothing that can be done.

That's what this really means.

So antibiotic-resistant infections or antibiotic-resistant bacteria

evolve whenever we use antibiotics.

And so the main driving force is the overuse of antibiotics.

The other major factor, though, is poor hygiene,

poor water.

Lack of waste water treatment

in lower and middle-income countries is a major problem.

So those two things together, poor hygiene and high drug use,

is what fuels this whole crisis that we are in today.

Antibiotics have been a victim of their own success.

They've been so useful, so since 1928,

when Fleming discovered the first antibiotic and it got mass produced,

we've taken it for granted that these antibiotics

will always be there and we will always have a means

to treat an infection, which isn't the case anymore really.

There is a big issue when it comes to the overuse of antibiotics.

But the problem is, even if all doctors stopped

prescribing antibiotics,

the animal industry

are getting so many antibiotics

what we do makes very little difference.

For the past five to ten years, doctors have felt it is important

to reduce over-prescription of antibiotics.

This is important because we want to limit

the antibiotic resistance that we are seeing

in our patients.

What's more frustrating, I think to me and other doctors like me

who are aware of the risk, is that we have no control.

There is no monitoring.

There is no limitation currently

on antibiotic use in factory farms.

This is a box of kind of the remnants

of documents and conference notes, et cetera,

that I've kept from my years in the pig industry.

It is quite strange, coming out and sort of

really looking at this and looking at the sheer volume

of antibiotics that I was using and I used regularly.

Hundreds of tons worth of feed

with antibiotics added.

Most of the pigs

bred and slaughtered for meat

will at some point require antibiotics,

and mostly it's because of how we're keeping them

and what we're doing to them.

You can't cut off someone's teeth and tail

and put them into a really contaminated, cold environment

and expect them to not need some sort of help.

Antibiotics go hand in hand with factory farms.

These animals would not survive long enough to be productive,

to be able to produce the meat that the agribusiness

is counting on without antibiotics.

Studies have shown that we have seen antibiotic-resistant bacteria

in the animals in factory farms, in the workers who are working

in factory farms, in the meat that's being sold in the grocery stores.

In the soil, in the land, in the air downstream from factory farms,

we are finding antibiotic-resistant bacteria.

There is no doubt that the feeding

of animals in factory farms heavily, heavily contributes

to this ridiculous rise in antibiotic resistance.

So it was discovered if you fed

really low doses of antibiotics in animal feed,

that the animals would grow faster.

By 2006, the European Union

banned the use of antibiotics as growth promoters.

But this didn't resolve the problem because they were still available

for routine use on veterinary prescription.

And essentially antibiotic use, the misuse,

just continued on and there is no doubt whatsoever

that if we continue along that path,

we are heading for an antibiotic apocalypse.

Do you have any idea if the birds are being given anything?

Antibiotics...

I have no idea, all I know is what's on the feed ticket,

and that's fiber, protein, fat.

But they don't tell you nothing.

But you'll see the birds when they're 8 days old

and when they're 29 days old and you'll see the difference.

So there's got to be something.

I don't know what it is, never checked into it.

So you're saying that's not natural?

No, it's not natural.

More than 70% of the entire use of antibiotics worldwide

is being used in farm animals to prop up this disease-ridden system.

We have the new pandemic already emerging.

A pandemic of people dying every year because of antibiotic resistance,

because of the way that we've kept animals for all of these years.

What we see is a lot of people during a pandemic don't actually

die from the virus itself, but they die from the secondary

bacterial infections that follow.

And if we're going to continue to see

a rise in infectious diseases because the wildlife trade,

because of ecological, environmental destruction,

because of factory farming,

we need antibiotics.

Are those guidances sufficient

in terms of making sure that antibiotic use is safe?

They're called "guidances" because they were voluntary.

This isn't a regulation that the FDA is legislating.

This is a suggestion

to the companies that are selling the antibiotics.

"Hey, guys, maybe stop selling these things."

In the UK, the industry is quite good

at saying, "We're not the only ones to blame," or animal agriculture

isn't the only problem, and therefore ridding themselves

of blame entirely.

And I think

there'd be a lot of chatter around,

"Well we're making a conscious effort to reduce usage,"

but it's not quick enough.

Yes, over the last five years,

we've had a target to hit and we have dropped down.

But it's sort of gone like that.

So when we started monitoring,

it really dropped down as we realized what we were doing was ridiculous.

And then it got to a point

where the amount of antibiotics we are using now

is clearly what we need to keep these animals alive

in a system which is not good for those animals.

Short of knocking down half the farms

we have and starting again,

I don't think we're going to achieve a huge drop in usage.

What's really scary is that this issue

of this coming post-antibiotic era

is essentially being swept under the carpet.

Yes, some things are being done.

But you scroll back five years ago,

and half the world's antibiotics

were being fed to farm animals.

Now it's 70% or more.

Things are going in the wrong direction.

Continue as we are, then the prediction is

that ten million people a year

by the middle of this century could be dying

because we squandered antibiotics.

In some ways, you know, it sounds hyperbolic,

the end of medicine,

but without fixing the underlying problem,

the systemic problems that lead to the cycle of new drug,

followed by resistant bacteria,

new drug, resistant bacteria, new drug, resistant bacteria.

If we don't fix that system,

then eventually, we're going to just run out,

run out of ways to safely kill these pathogens,

and that's not a place we want to be in.

Yeah, I don't think the prospect

of the end of medicine is exaggerated at all.

I think it's perfectly feasible and it's been forecast.

I mean, it's clear that we're doing many, many things wrong,

which are a huge health risk.

And for some reason, our governments are still funding it.

So we asked the Department for Environment,

Food and Rural Affairs if they'd be part of this film

so we could ask a few questions.

But they've refused our request.

So as a politician, why do you think that is?

I think they wouldn't want to be pinned down.

So I think, my worry would be

that they've become more entrenched

in the old way of thinking

and didn't want to be put on the spot,

didn't want to be challenged.

So what is it you feel they don't want to talk about?

And do you think they accept that this is a real issue?

Animal agriculture is very influential in terms

of relationships with politicians and trying to influence

the political agenda.

They've moved from denying there's an issue at all

and thinking it's just the cranks that talk about this

to now there's an acknowledgment as an issue, so they play lip service

to the fact this is something that we recognize

we need to do something about.

I think we're now in that territory where it's,

it's how can we make them act,

now that they've had to acknowledge there's an issue?

When it comes to governments in America,

why aren't they doing more to address these issues?

When people elect someone,

they think they elected their Congressperson

or their state senator or their local elected.

They didn't realize that there's a hidden arm to politics

and decision-making in this country,

and it's those who are paid by large corporations

to lobby government and influence the decision.

The lives of voters are really put to the back burner.

And the lives of those lobbyists

and those special interests control

these important decisions that impact

our kitchen tables every day.

The fact that our governmental agencies are in bed, really

with big agribusinesses is a crime because rather than protecting us,

the people, our governmental agencies

are protecting agribusiness industries instead.

Government mantra is often about cheap food,

and that is why we have factory farming,

essentially to produce cheap meat for the masses.

But what that disguises is the true cost of that cheap meat.

What's happened is that for years,

the factory farm industry has had the government in its pockets.

It's had millions of pounds to throw at lobbying

and making sure that it gets its way.

So what's happened is factory farming

is now locked in to our food system.

The governor of South Dakota says she is trying

to help reopen the pork plant there,

the site of one of America's biggest outbreaks.

More than 800 cases

linked to that plant, many of them immigrants.

Matt Gutman now on the outbreak

and the dilemma many essential workers face.

It's frustrating because the very industries and the practices

that caused this issue are being treated as essential.

The workers are treated as essential workers,

and what that means is that they're

kind of being treated like disposable entities.

And we know that living near these places and working on these places

means you will be disproportionately affected,

not only by COVID-19 but other disease issues and health issues.

We see a wide variety of illnesses

in patients who live and work around factory farms.

One of the things that we notice with factory farms is a decrease

in air quality around them, and it's due to a few factors.

One of them is the risk of aerosolized endotoxins.

Another one is the chemicals that we're seeing,

so the pesticides, but also chemicals like ammonia

from the excrement and things like that.

And finally, we know there's a larger proportion of things

like Gram-negative bacteria or fecal bacteria

that are known to cause illness in humans.

One of my colleagues had a patient

who had a multidrug-resistant urinary tract infection.

Incredibly rare resistance pattern.

No real reason for this patient in particular

to have this type of infection, no risk factors.

Her only risk factor was when you Googled her address,

she lived within a mile of a factory farm.

I'm not a doctor. I'm not a scientist.

But I can tell you this as I'm flying over

those factory farms and I can smell,

sometimes I can smell that hog waste at 2,000 feet in the air,

my common sense tells me that this is a health risk, a health hazard.

We've got about 11 o'clock.

We see a pretty large hog...

Pigs in eastern North Carolina

are producing more fecal waste each and every day,

than is produced by all the people in the states of North Carolina,

California, New York, Texas,

New Hampshire and North Dakota.

And they're putting it in these huge ponds,

the cesspools that they call lagoons.

And when they fill up, they simply dump it on the ground

under the pretext of growing crops.

Runs into our rivers, fish begin to die,

the people get sick.

It's no secret why these farms,

not farms, why these factories are here.

It's money.

It's big money, and it's coming at the expense

of the people who live nearby.

It's the people who work in factory farms,

the people who live near factory farms,

are far more likely to be low income people of color.

This is in part because the industries

have a tendency to preferentially

place their farms in these communities

of disenfranchised populations.

We're being denied clean air, clean water,

and they don't even seem to care.

Majority of all these dirty industries,

CAFOs, whatever, landfills,

they're all located in communities of color.

Latino and Native American communities,

that's where they are.

But the owners are not black.

They're not Latino. They're not Native American.

So why aren't they in their neighborhoods?

We feel like it's intentional

that they site themselves in these communities,

and we call it environmental racism, putting stuff in some place

that you wouldn't put in your own community.

You don't want it near you,

so you just put it over here and put it on people

that you think can't fight back.

Every house along this street, you can count at least one person

in the household that had cancer.

A couple times, I started to go out with my dogs, it smelled so bad

I just didn't even try to go outside and play.

I don't think it's people of color just overlooked here,

they're overlooked everywhere.

They are at least likely to be represented

in any elected position.

And if they eventually do get someone elected

in a position, there aren't enough voices

to actually make a change.

These things is a constant war on black and brown people

in these communities, and we deserve to live free

from this type of constant aggression.

You start to see a trend of the same health problems.

You start to see respiratory issues,

you start to see high blood pressure in children.

When I think of my children, I think that's why I fight so hard,

because I do want my children to live in a world

where they don't have to think about environmental injustices.

People are dying from things they don't have to

just so somebody can make a profit.

Here we got to stay positive.

Evilness, fear and those kinds of things do nothing but destroy you.

We're going to get it done.

We've lost some great people that've worked

on this along the way, but God doesn't intend

for everybody to see the end product.

When it comes to factory farming,

we know we've got all of these issues.

Antimicrobial resistance, infectious disease,

racial injustice.

With all of this coming from factory farms,

does that mean that the solution is switching to free-range

and cage-free and small-scale farms?

In my experience of smaller farms, they're not really what I think

people imagine when they say,

"I only buy from a small family farm."

Some of the worst

disease concoctions I've seen have been on small farms

because they don't have the income

to afford comprehensive diagnostic testing,

perhaps preventative health care.

Part of the reason African Swine Fever

has ripped through China like it has

is because there were so many backyard farmers.

So in terms of disease surveillance and knowing what's going on

within an animal population, it's almost impossible

to regulate huge numbers of small farms,

and also deeply impractical.

If people do want free-range meat,

we'd have to have about twelve planets.

Clearing land for livestock grazing and feed cropping

is the number one driver of deforestation worldwide.

Feeding the current demand for animal products

with many smaller farms would increase that land use.

So whether we factory farm animals

or raise them in small farms, it's not sustainable.

If you look at the numbers, right,

human population is about 7.8 billion

and the population of animals that we kill

is about 80 billion a year,

meaning the Earth isn't just supporting us,

she's also supporting the animals we raise for food.

And our animals eat 7.3 billion tons of food.

So you deforest land to feed our animals, to feed us.

So animal exploitation is the number one reason

we are in an unsustainable situation.

So when we say we go back to small-scale farming,

we are basically saying the problem is not

we eat animal foods,

the problem is that the riffraff eat animal foods.

If you make poor people stop eating animals, there's plenty

for the rich to eat animal foods.

So it's a very classist, colonialist argument to make.

And I am just shocked that anyone would make it in this day and age.

We cannot feed the whole world the same diet we're eating

at the moment.

If we do carry on we're not going to have a planet left.

For instance, in this country, we use about a million hectares

of South American rainforest to feed our livestock.

So that's someone else's land.

And that's just the UK.

You're feeding those animals resources

that can be fed directly to people.

My concern is

with the desire to keep making meat,

where is the land going to come from?

Globally, we're very concerned about deforestation at the moment.

There's a lot of emphasis on

retaining our forest land to combat climate change.

And looking at the Amazon,

vast swathes are cleared for cattle grazing

and for livestock feed growing.

But when you look out at countryside like this,

we've already done it here, like most of Britain's forest land

has been cleared already for agriculture, and that's reflective.

across the globe.

Biodiversity itself

is a protective mechanism against the emergence of zoonotic diseases.

The more biodiversity you have generally, the less likely there is

to be a zoonotic emergence because the diversity of life,

the mosaic of species, prevents any one pathogen

from building up in large amounts.

So as we reduce biodiversity,

we increase the chances of zoonotic emergence.

So it's a lose-lose situation for the human race

if we're going to continue down this road.

And I'm happy to say that you're going to see

the first shot done right here, right now.

In the current pandemic,

we're at a place where we are now looking for answers,

vaccines, treatments, how to get people off ventilators,

on ventilators.

I still think we're missing the point.

90% of the people who have died from COVID-19

have had at least one underlying disease.

That's a lifestyle illness, diabetes, high blood pressure.

So rather than just mopping up with drugs and treatment,

why don't we get to the fundamental root cause?

We know that animal products,

again, not just meat, but dairy, fish, eggs,

all of these have been linked to increased rates of heart disease,

type 2 diabetes, stroke, Alzheimer's, some forms of cancer.

COVID-19 did not create the crisis of chronic diseases.

For far too long, we have been attempting

to push these diseases under the proverbial rug.

But COVID-19 sort of forced us to move that rug

and show what's under there.

And the chronic diseases

affect the deaths and hospitalizations of COVID-19.

Our top killers are mostly lifestyle-related,

and much of that is related to the consumption

of saturated fat, animal protein and of course, these animal products.

I feel like my career

is dedicated to cleaning up the mess

that factory farming and animal agriculture

is causing with these major public health problems.

If we think that there may be tens of thousands

of potential COVID-19-like viruses out there,

that given the opportunity,

could cause an epidemic or pandemic in people,

we can't go out and develop vaccines

to all of those tens of thousands of viruses

and treatments for every one of them and so on.

We have to have general principles we can learn from,

such as what are the risk behaviors?

I feel bad. I've got a great grandson being born

as I'm talking to you right now,

my granddaughter is in the hospital giving birth.

And I don't think that that boy Parker

is going to have much of a life.

There's no guarantee

that we're going to be able as humans to live from this planet forever.

And then the way we're going, personally, I don't think we will.

There's enough left for me in my lifetime.

There's enough left.

And there's enough left for my daughter and my son.

But is there enough left for my granddaughter Amy,

and for Parker, who's coming in this world today?

I don't think so.

It's very hard to communicate the scale of what we're facing.

But I'm going to try and speak into my own experiences

of direct involvement in practices which are not only drawing us

closer to the climate emergency, but are creating human pandemics,

global health crises, and bringing us ever closer to a man-made disaster.

Here, are you surprised by the amount of comments you've got online?

Not especially.

It was never going to be good,

coming out of a multi-billion pound industry

and completely sort of denouncing all their practices.

As a vet that's done a particular job for 4 years,

if I'm saying, "I did this, and this is what happened,"

like I'm not making that up.

I think it's quite frustrating.

It would have been very easy to stay

in a relatively well-paid job, getting flown around the world,

wined and dined by pharmaceutical companies, like doing a secure job,

and just carried on.

But I didn't feel it was the right thing to do.

So how are you making money?

You don't have to talk about this.

- How are you making... - Not.

Basically, I'm not.

I'm doing this because I feel I need to.

I don't quite know how to work it out financially, but...

Yeah.

What will you do,

or is there a plan of how to eventually make money?

No, I think...

I don't know.

So what would your solution be?

Gosh.

I'll try not to get too political.

Can I just say we should be vegan?

Solve the problem straight off.

If everybody on the planet was vegan, we could release,

well billions of hectares of land for wildlife basically,

because we wouldn't need that land

to grow food to feed animals to feed us

because that's the most inefficient way of growing food.

If we just ate what we grew, then there would be

plentiful supplies of food on the planet,

not just for the eight billion people that we are racing towards now,

but for many, many billions more.

This planet could be much more sustainable

if we didn't eat meat and we didn't eat animal products.

It's contentious to say that,

but that's where the science tells us

we have to go if we're going to survive

on this planet as a human race.

We've been here on this farm now for 33 years.

I've been farming organically for over 45.

We grow a whole range of vegetables and some fruit.

Everything's grown without the use of any animal inputs.

So we don't use animal manure, any slaughterhouse waste

or any products from animals whatsoever.

We're using just the land we have for our production.

We get very good yields, we get very high quality produce.

So what would you say to somebody

who said there's no way of feeding everybody

without using animal inputs?

Well, that again is something we've proved to be completely wrong.

I mean, our production is actually per acre

far higher than most other farms would be.

We don't depend on somebody else's land

to support that potato.

So actually our production is very much higher.

Our footprint compared with a farm

producing livestock is incredibly tiny.

So the question really should be

can we afford not to farm in this way

rather than can we afford to?

Because this is a much more productive way of producing food.

We do need to take back control of our health.

The good news is that this is possible.

I have a plant-based diet,

and I have that because it's the healthiest diet to have.

Most studies will tell us that by having a totally plant-based diet,

low in fat, low in sugar, reduced amount of salt,

it indicates you have a healthier lifestyle.

Your diet becomes more nutrient-dense

rather than calorie-dense,

and that is good for everybody.

This will not be the last pandemic.

I believe that if we take this seriously and get to the root cause,

we have a chance of really staving off so many illnesses in the future.

We tell our children, you have to eat meat,

or you won't get enough protein, which is an outright lie.

We tell them you have to drink milk or you won't get enough calcium.

This is an outright lie.

So when we build an entire civilization

on lies, it is unsustainable,

because sustainability is about

getting into alignment with the truth.

All that is true is sustainable.

Lies are not sustainable.

One of my mentors, Archbishop Desmond Tutu,

stated that we spend a lifetime pulling people out of the river.

No one goes upstream to prevent them from falling in in the first place.

Right now, we're dealing with sick care

instead of health care.

If we go upstream

and teach young people about healthy foods

and how to consume them, how to grow them,

if we switch from waiting for people to get ill,

and go to preventing them from getting ill,

if we go upstream, by doing so, we'll live a more healthy lifestyle.

It's not about living forever.

It's about having the quality of life while you are alive.

We can't wait for our governments

to do the right thing because I guarantee

we are going to be waiting for a long, long time.

So what each of us can do in the meantime

is really take a hard look at what we eat.

Ultimately, what's good for animals is good for us.

When we treat animals with kindness and respect, we also benefit.

There is just no downside

to having this increased empathy and to treating animals better.

There is no downside to that.

There's only upsides to that.

There's only benefits, not only for the animals, but also for us.

Despite everything I just talked about with you today,

I actually am optimistic about the future,

and maybe it's a bit of a Pollyannaish attitude.

I don't know. Or maybe I'm just a sucker,

but I am optimistic because I do believe

that empathy is an integral part of who we are as a species

and that that will continue to grow.

And with that recognition, I do believe that our behaviors

will change for the better.

We know that our use of animals

undeniably contributes to the climate and ecological emergency.

It's undeniably inhumane for animals and for people.

We know we'll see the end of medicine

as we know it within our lifetimes

if we don't all take responsibility to change.

I mean, it was awful.

It was really, really horrible stuff going on and really horrible things

that I had to be involved in.

And I think perhaps if I hadn't

gone on and shared that

hoping I can make some positive change,

then it would just be carried with me the rest of my life.

Everything will stay the same if nobody speaks out.

Change is inevitable, but transformation is intentional.

Transformation is something we choose to do

because we are uncomfortable with the status quo.

And we say we can do something about this.

We can make this change happen.

So getting to a sustainable civilization

is getting to a civilization aligned with the truth,

that is aligned with morality.

We have to transform ourselves

if we want to transform the world.

I meant to say, I don't know if this is what you were asking,

but when you were asking what worries me day to day,

I meant to say that currently,

our complete lack of faith in science is worrying me.

Okay, so I'll add that.