News
Responding to HSUS’ ‘retail activism’
How should the pork industry respond to the recent flurry of food company calls for the elimination of gestation stalls?
In an interview with Brownfield at World Pork Expo in Des Moines, communications professor Dr. Wes Jamison, who has studied the animal rights movement for the past 20 years, offered this advice to producers of pork—and other meat producers as well.
“The right approach for me would be to advise everyone out there in agriculture to come together in their various commodity groups and ask ourselves, ‘what are the absolute non-negotiables—not the ones that we want to defend—but the ones we must defend’,” Jamison says.
Jamison says there has to be clarity on which production procedures are “absolutely necessary for the permanent profitability of the pork industry.
“The ones that aren’t (necessary), then I think I would advise pork farmers to begin thinking through, with their commodity groups, ‘how do we transition, in the long haul, to profitability in other systems?”
But Jamison says negotiation with the Humane Society of the United States is out of the question.
“No, absolutely not—negotiating with animal rights activists is like Austria negotiating with Hitler,” he says. “I think everybody understands now that the animal welfare groups and rights groups want an end to all animal agriculture.
“What we don’t want to do is negotiate away our right to raise animals for human consumption,” Jamison adds.
Jamison is an associate professor of communications at Palm Beach Atlantic University in Florida. He has been a frequent speaker at ag and livestock meetings around the U.S. in recent years.
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I consider myself an equine welfare advocate, and as a pretty mainstream citizen, I am absolutely apaled at the allegations that lobbyists for Animal Agriculture, the Food, Beverage, and Alcohol Industry, the Dog Breeders Industry, and Hunting interests have managed to get put into the minds of some members of the animal agriculture committee. As I have said before, I spend much of my childhood on my grandparents dairy farm. They had all traditional farm animals other than horses. Most food was raised on the farm. I spent Saturday mornings at stock sales, but my grandparents kept me away from where the animals were being sold or, as i later learned slaughtered. I grew up surrounded by the most beautiful farm land you can imagine, participated in 4-H until I graduated from high school. My connection with horses has connected me the lands and the farming culture throughout my life. But I have also lived in a large city, earned a master’s degree, taught school, helped the handicapped, and so on.
I never knew a farmer whom I though had a thing to hide from a TV camera or visitors to his farm Many of the farms I remember were attached to the main road. I pass dozens and dozens of farms on my way to the horse barn, and I don’t see a single thing that would make me believe that farmers are still not the salt of the earth. Of course, I know from work in horse rescue that you don’t have to get far off the main road to find a problem if there is one, but usually those owners are going through some sort of crisis. Equine welfare and the groups that help support us are going more to the rescuing in place model to help people who want to keep their horses through hard times to be able to feed them and get affordable vet care if the people who apply for assistance genuinely want to keep their horses and are otherwise able to care for them.
None the less, HSUS is constantly vilified for not spending its money on shelters. If you pause for a moment and think about it, it makes more sense to prevent a problem such as grow out of bad practices than it does to spend all your resources on it after it happens. HSUS and ASPCA both make funding available to rescues for help with emergency and on-going situations.
But to get to the point about the character of farmers and people involved in agriculture, it has been painful to me to see that type of propaganda being repeated over and over again to the animal agriculture group by lobbyists who want you to believe that you need them. They have created a myth of the omnipotent HSUS that can take everything you own from you, stop people from eating meat, and prevent people from eating meat. VEGANS are the enemy seems to be the battle cry no matter how illogical this is. There are many people with advanced heart disease who have been forced to go on a strict VEGAN diet for health reasons. There are young girls who eat VEGAN diets because they believe they will be thinner and more attractive, but they haven’t given up fur or leather. See if you can recognize the fallacy of this argument.
There is nothing that the HSUS has advocated for farm animals that it not clearly discussed in Dr. Temple Grandin’s book “Animals Make Us Human”. In fact it was Dr. Grandin’s book, not the HSUS that made me aware of the problems within the poultry and pork industries as well as in the beef industry. She explains the issues and what animals need to have good lives far better than any animal welfare or animal rights groups.
The anti-HSUS mongering is designed to make anyone who owns an animal afraid that HSUS might show up at the gate tomorrow with a trailer and haul your animal away. That is not the way it works. I can tell you from working with equine rescue that there is a process involved with the local animal control office acting as law enforcement agents for the government or local sheriffs any time an animal is seized. Conditions have to be very, very bad for a seizure to take place. The usual approach is for the animal control office to work with a rescue group to educate the owner on proper care. Usually there are a series of checks after the initial education to make sure that changes are being implemented or to cover other problems that may appear.
Caring for an animal requires commitment as well as knowledge. A lot of people buy an animal without either of these. If the commitment is there, the knowledge will follow.
There are some macho lobbyists out there effectively convincing law abiding animal owners who care for their animals very, very well that need to be afraid of Wayne Pacelle and the HSUS. This is such nonsense. The lobbyists need you. They need your support, and in order to get it they will bring out some of the most lame brained propaganda I have ever seen. I used to teach English for a number of years, and it was my responsibility to teach my students how to recognize propaganda techniques and logical fallacies so they could pass the reading and writing tests they were expected to master. I cringe when I read what is being sold to members of the agricultural community from lobbyists who do not have your best interests at heart. They have their best interests at heart because when you stop thinking you need them, they are out of a job. You will still have one.
No one cares whether Wayne Paccelle is a vegan or not. What could substantially decrease the consumption of meat is not what HSUS or PETA or any other group says, it is all about what people involved with animal agriculture do. Why not expend some of energy and money you are currently spending on a negative campaign about HSUS and focus on selling what you do well. I love visiting my home state fair every year and seeing all the buildings full of different aspects of the agriculture industry. I love going to watch 4-Hers exhibit their cows, goats, and sheep. Some years and I am lucky enough to catch the sheep shearing contest. Why not sell the pubic on what you are doing well, educate the public on some of the changes that have happened in agriculture over the last 20 or 30 years so that people who have a generational reference to old farming practices understand the challenges facing farmers today. I know some of them because I face them as a horse owner.
I have read Congressional testimony about many activities attributed to animal rights groups and the testimony with facts scarcely mentions the HSUS and only mentions PETA a few times, There are acronyms that I still don’t recognize, but the ALF and the ELF are the groups that get most of the attention. But I have yet to see the HSUS involved in an issue that is not a concern to at least some elements of the veterinary community and to people who own and love animals for the animals own sake. Please do not call us emotional because many of you would be out of business if we did not attach emotions to these animals and consider them part of the family. Animal cruelty is a concern to the public at large even if they do not own animals. And real animal cruelty has been linked for years with real diagnostic sociopathic and psychopathic personalities. It is a red flag to any nurse, teacher, or anyone working with a person’s health history.
People are concerned about animal welfare not because the HSUS has told us we should be concerned but because we humans have empathy, and people involved with animal rescues are the very ones who will give you the shirts off their backs if you need it. I am not telling you how to think. However, I am asking you to think and weigh each issue on its own merit. The public is not as isolated or as removed from the real world as some lobbyists would have you believe.
I am writing this as a way of bearing witness to my grandfather and farmers like him who felt the weight of being a farmer on his shoulders. He practiced good animal husbandry and conducted his business with integrity.
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Lost in all the animus about gestation crates, and a sow’s ‘right” to freely move about, are the “right to life” of the piglets. Crushed piglets should be seen as an animal health and welfare crisis, which all available means of prevention, including movement restraint of sows, should be employed to prevent. Hoist the activists on their own animal rights petard.
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Christie, you are selling a truckload of garbage there. Issues that the HSUS bring up lack merit because the HSUS should not be allowed to use the power that those issues can bring the HSUS. The HSUS has already perverted the course of justice in many cases and is now justifiably the subject of a RICO suit. I don’t think that Feld Entertainment is asking for enough.
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Christie:
Do you know that…
1. HSUS’s Director of Animal Cruelty Policy is J.P. Goodwin, a high school dropout with a long arrest record for illegal raids of farms and retailers selling fur. He is a former Animal Liberation Front spokesman with a conviction for economic sabotage. Pacelle hired him in 1997. Google “J.P. Goodwin No Compromise,” and “J.P. Goodwin Wilkes County Massacre” and report back with a response. HSUS’s New York lobbyist, Patrick Kwan, wrote of his admiration for ALF. He is a former Animal Defense League member with a long arrest record for direct action activism.
2. I admire Temple Grandin a lot. Check the index of “Animals Make Us Human” for HSUS. She has nothing positive to say about their adversarial tactics and the unintended consequences of their horse slaughter llegislative efforts. HSUS likes to drop her name because it makes them appear more mainstream and she does support a ban on gestation crates. Grandin is far more involved with other groups, especially the American Humane Association and is not a fan of HSUS’s 5-step humane certification program.
3. Google “Humane Farming Association Rotten Egg Bill.” I am an HFA supporter and agree with them. Do you? The rotten bill failed, by the way.
4. Google “Denisa Malott lawsuit,” “Baltimore horses rescued, abandoned,” and “Dan Christenson lawsuit.” Read about “HSUS’s Faux Swat Team” and link to the hour long radio interview with two former HSUS emergency responders who quit rather than impersonate law enforcement and exploit animals for publicity and fundraising. The entire Emergency Response Team quit in 2009. Wayne Pacelle defended Scotlund’s “cowboy ways,” but was forced to fire him after various lawsuits were filed.
5. Look at HSUS’s IRS forms, available in seconds at “990 Finder.” Go to the list of 2010 grants and see the pathetic $500-$2,000 given to horse rescues – and only after they formally applied. Check the USDA inspection reports for Black Beauty Ranch and see the poor conditions the horses and other creatures live in, despite a massive bank account to care for them. HSUS and the Fund for Animals – separately – raise enough money for the Black Beauty Ranch to afford individual condos for every animal.
6. The Charity Watch C minus rated ASPCA is more generous with shelters than the D rated HSUS, but still deserves to be called cheap. HSUS defends it’s selfishness by claiming to be focusing on the big picture, but that translates to lobbying for legislation. Did you know that tax-exempt charities are bot allowed to engage in more than a very small amount of lobbying? They exceed the limits by a 1,000 miles. And most of their legislation is poorly crafted and fails to address the problems.
7. Google “Nathan Winograd HSUS.” He’s their most articulate critic and the driving force behind the No-Kill Sheltering movement. He is a vegan and animal rights activist, but he is way more progressive than HSUS, which opposes the important shelter legislation he works on. So does the ASPCA. I’ve met Winograd and he is definitely not involved with the meat industry, breeding community or any hunting advocates. And an enormous number of other HSUS critics are members of the animal welfare community.
HSUS is very good at spinning the truth about what they do and what they have accomplished. They lie a lot. They fool a lot of intelligent people. You are welcome to disagree with my comments, but they are easily verifiable.
>>“No, absolutely not—negotiating with animal rights activists is like Austria negotiating with Hitler,” he says. “I think everybody understands now that the animal welfare groups and rights groups want an end to all animal agriculture.<<
First sentence is a jarring but pretty accurate in comparison. Second sentence lumps animal welfare with animal rights, and that's incorrect. The animal rights groups do want to end all animal agriculture. They are cagey and masquerade themselves as animal welfare groups, the difference being in core philosophy. Animal welfare is NOT animal rights, but many animal welfare individuals and groups have been tainted in judgment by and are being use by the deceitful propaganda mill BIG LIES of the animal rights movement (using incremental strategy to reduce and eliminate as much as society will allow the use of animals). The thing is, for the AR movement "true believers" (which includes Pacelle and the other top brass of the H$U$), "the end justifies the means" and in pursuit of the final goal, "collateral damage" in animals and humans in acceptable–BECAUSE the AR movement is sociopathic (i.e., anti-societal) at its foundation. When more people really get that (including our legislators–at least those who are not bought by the AR movement), the H$U$ and others like it will lose their power to deceive most of the public.