Movement Watch

• Inhumane Society
• World Wildlife Fund Suffering from Creativity Block
• PeTA: “Fur is Extremely Warm”
• Aggression, sexism, and — again — PeTA
• Trendy Consumers Keep Eating Animals, But “Get More Connected”
• Hardly Hog Heaven

Inhumane Society

“Laugh as these canine clowns present a show the whole family will enjoy,” exclaim the advertisements for Pet Fest America. In January, the Humane Society of the United States booked a 20,000-seat sports and entertainment arena in Washington, D.C. for the event.

Just when we thought animal advocates had begun to convince the public that human volunteers are the only circus performers we can all ethically support, along comes the Humane Society to peddle “four-legged acrobats” who perform “gravity-defying jumps.” The dogs have become stars in Canada and the U.S., says the promotion — indicating the stress of international travel that forms their lives, in addition to the crowds, noise and lights.^[1] Oddly enough, HSUS refers to Pet Fest America as “hours of fun and entertainment” for “everyone who cares about animals.”

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World Wildlife Fund Suffering from Creativity Block

The World Wildlife Fund (WWF) has called upon the New Zealand government to support a fledgling processing industry that turns the ubiquitous possum into coats, hats, wool socks, and meat for export.^[2] The proliferation of brush-tailed possums has a human cause: traders brought the animals from Australia in 1837. The possums consume everything from saplings to birds’ eggs. Government workers, who consume even more saplings and birds’ eggs, spend millions of dollars a year poisoning the possums. The WWF prefers the idea pushed by the New Zealand Nature Company, which would trap the possums and sell their pelts as Ecofur.

PeTA: “Fur is Extremely Warm”

People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PeTA) recently distributed cast-off fur coats to homeless people through Britain’s Liverpool YMCA. PeTA evidently made no attempt to work with established anti-fur groups or campaigners in the Liverpool area: one local group reported that, after activists spent many weeks in delicate negotiations, a hospice charity was about to establish a fur-free policy in its shops, but this initiative had been extinguished by the PeTA campaign.^[3]

PeTA representative Sean Gifford remarked to the media: “At the end of the day, fur is extremely warm and by doing this we can at least help people who need it.”^[4] The fur coats have white stripes painted on the arms. This is so that recipients would not be left “open to ridicule for wearing something so cruel”, explained another PeTA rep, who did not say whether the group thinks recipients would be open to ridicule for wearing furs with white stripes painted on the arms.

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Aggression, sexism, and — again — PeTA

People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, perhaps best known for arguing that they are not sexist, recently unveiled a campaign called “PeTA Dishes Up Treats for the Troops”. This involved sending a “boatload of delicious vegan cookies to our men and women in blue aboard the USS Truman, which left PETA’s home base, Norfolk, Virginia, in early December.” The package of treats is not sex-neutral, however: it includes, in the words of PeTA, “another ‘dish’: a PETA pin-up girl” — actually an adult woman who hopes to “turn the troops on to vegetarianism.”

PeTA’s web site announced that this campaign will make a big splash with sailors. Sailors have been implicated in particularly egregious incidents of sexual harassment in recent years. It shames the animal advocacy movement to see activists so completely miss the point that human beings are not “dishes” — any more than nonhuman beings are.

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Trendy Consumers Keep Eating Animals, But “Get More Connected”

Meat has begun to lose its aura of affluence. Bovine spongiform encephalopathy, foot-and-mouth disease, bizarre biotech “breakthroughs”, and the discovery that E. coli bacteria lives in most feedlot cattle — all this has sullied the meat industry’s image, and given once-content shoppers a bit of a shock. Believing the time is ripe for an international vegetarian movement, Friends of Animals launched a vegetarian campaign. At the same time, however, many humane charities have asked consumers merely to demand new production methods.

In 1994, Britain’s Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (RSPCA) developed guidelines for “Freedom Food” labels for meat and dairy products derived from animals reared according to society welfare standards. Pigs, for example, would have straw bedding before being slaughtered as Freedom Food.

The RSPCA-approved meat represents 18 million animals each year in Britain. Over 60 million approved eggs get snapped up each month by shoppers in 5,000 stores.

By 1999, the Canadian Federation of Humane Societies gave its support in principle to humane labels; a Canadian meat production Web site now urges “livestock producers who want to be around for the long term” to take note of the marketing importance of this trend.

John Youngman, a director of Canada’s Winnipeg Humane Society, says the plan will “harness the power of the caring consumer” as it “gives consumers a choice.” Robert Guilford, an organic producer in Manitoba, believes a humane label will encourage consumers to “get more connected” with the food they eat.^[5]

One of the preachers of caring and connected consumption in the United States is Michael Pollan, editor-at-large for Harper’s, and also a contributing writer to the New York Times Magazine. Pollan’s article “Power Steer” appeared in the New York Times in March of 2001.^[6]

Pollan notes that eating meat is “something I have always enjoyed doing” but that, given recent health and animal welfare concerns,

“If I was going to continue to eat red meat, then I owed it to myself, as well as to the animals, to take more responsibility for the invisible but crucial transaction between ourselves and the animals we eat. I’d try to own it, in other words. So this is the biography of my cow.”

Pollan bought a calf. Specifically, the calf who walked up to Pollan and made eye contact. Pollan’s son, after seeing a photograph, wanted to name the calf “Night”, but Pollan refused, and an his article repeatedly refers to the calf as Number 534. Pollan chronicles the growth of the calf from nursing, through the wrenching separation from his distraught mother, to a regimen of unnatural foods, hormones, and pharmaceutical products designed to induce slaughter weight by 14 to 16 months of age.

If antibiotics were banned from cattle feed, Pollan learns, death rates would increase, causing the price of beef to rise. To let the cows walk on grass would take too long — even if there were enough grass.

Hormones banned in the European Union circulate in the U.S. Measurable hormone residues lurk in meat; some scientists believe they cause premature maturation in children. Synthetic growth hormones flow from feedlots downstream, where, writes Michael Pollan, scientists have found deformed fish.

But Pollan wants to have a cow and eat it too. “Staring at No. 534,” writes Pollan, “I could picture the white lines of the butcher’s chart dissecting his black hide: rump roast, flank steak, standing rib, brisket.”

Temple Grandin, an assistant professor of animal science at Colorado State, impresses Pollan as “one of the most influential people in the United States cattle industry.” Grandin “has devoted herself to making cattle slaughter less stressful and therefore more humane by designing an ingenious series of cattle restraints, chutes, ramps and stunning systems.” Professor Grandin, notes Pollan, is autistic, “a condition she says has allowed her to see the world from the cow’s point of view.” Last we heard, no one was selling and eating autistic people, but never mind. Industry has embraced Grandin’s work because it pays. Less stress means less adrenaline toughening the animal’s flesh.

Concern for humane slaughter, when it comes down to it, is concern with the bottom line. Unfortunately, the advocacy community often plays right into the industry’s hands. Farm Sanctuary, an animal protection group, recently chastised Chef’s Diner in Montour Falls, New York, claiming that the restaurant’s competitors had pledged to sell only the purportedly more humane “pink” veal. Gene Bauston of Farm Sanctuary said: “Ideally, it would be great if they were outdoors on a pasture, but we’re just asking for a basic degree of freedom.”^[7]

Bauston’s request is not only timid: it is also meaningless. Either the eating of meat will be accepted or rejected, but it cannot be regulated according to concerns having nothing to do with the quest for profit. Freedom will be allowed by the industry to the extent that freedom will be paid for by the meat-eater.

The few companies who do provide upscale, so-called humanely-raised meat, do so not out of concern for calves, cows, or other animals, but because they predict a growing niche market for the end product. Much like an airline selling first class-tickets at premium prices, the Freedom Food tradition caters to the interests of people who can afford the high price of avoiding some of the health hazards created in factory-farmed animals. As the human population continues to rise, and as access to precious land, fossil fuel, and water becomes concentrated in fewer hands, the wealthy will enjoy the results of organic, disease-free production. Michael Pollan will be one of the elite few. Those of more modest means will get the hormones, drugs, and diseased flesh.

Hardly Hog Heaven

This past November saw the passage of the Florida Animal Cruelty Act, a prohibition (subject to certain exceptions that include confinement for testing purposes) of the confinement of pregnant pigs in such a way that they are unable to turn freely.

Florida’s ballot stated:

“Inhumane treatment of animals is a concern of Florida citizens. To prevent cruelty to certain animals and as recommended by The Humane Society of the United States, the people of the State of Florida hereby limit the cruel and inhumane confinement of pigs during pregnancy as provided herein.”

The Humane Society of the United States and Farm Sanctuary advertised the amendment campaign as a major victory. “For the first time ever,” announced Farm Sanctuary’s press release, “a cruel farming practice has been banned in the United States.”^[8] But the release avoided some important realities. First, this provision does not take effect for six years, so it has not affected any confined individuals. Second, the amendment will affect a grand total of two farms in Florida, assuming it holds up for the six years until it is scheduled to take effect.^[9] Third, and most important, the phasing out of crates was accepted as a benefit to the producers. Ed Pajor, an assistant professor of animal welfare at Purdue University, who has studied data on sows’ litter sizes, said the crate issue is important partly because stress during handling can diminish meat quality.^[10] Thus, the ballot issue tracks current business trends.

Yet Farm Sanctuary and the Humane Society of the United States each ploughed hundreds of thousands of dollars into the ballot campaign. A Florida group active in the campaign, Floridians for Humane Farms, was steered by Pam Huizenga, child of billionaire Wayne Huizenga of Fort Lauderdale.^[11] Nanci Alexander of Boca Raton donated $75,000 to the cause.^[12] All told, the campaigners reported raising more than $1.5 million. This caused a St. Petersburg (Florida) Times reporter to ask: “Why spend so much money on a measure that affects less than 2,000 sows rather than other measures, such as neutering cats and dogs?”^[13]

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Footnotes