It does look really delicious, though. (Thinkstock)
I fear we are becoming jaded. Animal rights groups have virtually given up pressing a vegetarian lifestyle onto meat eaters and instead these days pick the decidedly more narrow battle of convincing us to eat meat that’s raised responsibly, since those of us who aren’t vegetarian have convinced them we’re going to eat meat no matter what they say.
Moreover, as in the past activists are using the tactic of going undercover to infiltrate major food producers, but the damning evidence they procure just isn’t so shocking any longer. It’s horrific, sure, but you kind of have to make yourself think about it, imagine it more clearly than we had to a decade or two ago. Like I said, jaded.
Take a pair of recent articles (thanks for the links, LOML) that highlight acts by factory farm operations that constitute animal abuse. The first chronicles an expose by the Humane Society, which sent a volunteer in to work at a Virginia hog farm owned by Smithfield Foods, the company at whose feet the 2009 swine flu outbreak was laid. After working for a month at the plant, the volunteer had plenty of hours of secret video of breeding pigs kept almost completely immobile in crates their entire lives, made virtually into pig-producing machines. Yet the footage is far from damning: Smithfield said publicly that, two years after abandoning these gestation crates, they were using them again because abusing pigs in this manner helps the company’s bottom line.
Another article spotlights a study by the Cornucopia Institute, which evaluated the hen raising practices of 22 major “organic” egg producers. The group found that, sure, these producers are using organic feed and aren’t using hormones or antibiotics, but they’re stuffing as many as 85,000 chickens into a single henhouse. The “free range” and “cage free” labels come from the presence of a tiny porch built onto the chicken death houses. Admittedly, though, it’s kind of a relief to hear from that article that the hens are actually being fed organic feed and not given hormones and antibiotics and there’s no need to put quotes around organic after all.
The abuse heaped on these animals is undoubtedly egregious. The problem is the public has become apathetic and, as a result, this abuse has become normalized in agriculture. In a recession like this, with two wars going on, an America on the decline, a increasingly apparent plutocracy and in the middle of winter, no less, it’s difficult to even mustering up the drive to take a shower in the morning let alone to take action against poor living conditions for animals that will eventually be eaten.
And yet taking action in defense of animals is an easy leap toward self-esteem for anyone who’s looking to regain what’s been squeezed, beaten and worked out of us. And the Cornucopia Institute knows this, which is why they created an organic egg scorecard for you. And the Humane Society knows this too, which is why they released this video they shot at the hog farm. (Warning! Warning! Warning! This link leads to a footage that shows animal abuse, animal killings and dead animals.)
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Filed under: Stuff You Should Know Tagged: factory farming, food, Humane Society, Organic, Smithfield Foods, SYSK Best of 2011
