Cyndi's Two Cents

Animal welfare or PR game?

Commentary.

If animal rights activist groups truly cared about the welfare of farm animals they would do a lot of things differently.

There’s a television program that many of you have probably seen that places unwitting people in scenarios where their conscience is challenged.   Actors are used to set the stage while hidden cameras roll.  The premise of the program is to show viewers whether normal people will step in or mind their own business when put in situations that set the internal moral compass spinning.

The announcement and release in recent weeks of undercover videos taken on livestock and poultry farms in this country brings this television program to mind.  As a person of animal husbandry, the display of animal abuse I see on some of these videos sickens me to my very core.  In other cases, editing by the animal rights groups that shot the video makes handling and housing appear much worse than it truly is.

Any incident of mistreatment should have been reported immediately. Instead, in nearly every case where an activist group has planted an undercover “investigator” on a poultry or livestock farm, any discovery of mistreatment remains unreported until the group can build a public relations campaign around a video release.

If the animal rights groups that send out press releases would first take a minute to report bad behavior to supervisors or owners of the farm or to call local law enforcement, any real mistreatment could be dealt with swiftly and concisely.  Instead, they spend days, weeks and even months preparing for a big reveal.  A press release I received early last week from an animal rights groups encouraged me “To view the full report, video, b-roll and images, please visit our newsroom here. To view a white paper on the food and egg industry, please click here.”

In conclusion, that release states, “Please let me know if you have any questions or would like to speak with an expert in our farm animal protection department.”

Farm animal protection?  I think not.  If it truly about protecting farm animals, why did the undercover investigator do nothing to stop the abuse while it was happening?  If it really were about the animals, the whistleblower and his animal rights gang would not have dallied around and wasted time.  If it really were about the animals, it wouldn’t be about positioning and power and money for the anti-animal agriculture movement.

I have always believed, and still do, that those to whom the animals belong are those most likely to know what is best for those animals. We have a few bad actors on farms but we also have a few bad actors performing neurosurgery, building bridges, teaching kindergarten and stocking shelves at the local grocery store.

I believe a person who bears witness to an incident he or she perceives as criminal yet does not report it is a bad actor.