If things go on the way they have been lately, livestock farming is doomed.
Let me qualify that: The only hope of avoiding that doom is for the public to learn to think critically instead of emotionally about political and social problems.
A hundred years ago the majority of our population had to be farmers in order to keep our country supplied with food. Now that farms have become so efficient that they employ less than two percent of the U.S. population, most people remember only vaguely that even small-scale professional pet and livestock care is hard, dirty work and farms are dirty, smelly places. They remember just enough to be happy to keep far away from them.
The unfortunate consequence is that the public knows less and less about what farms are like, how farmers do things, and the reasons for doing them that way. When confronted with specific issues, they are shocked – shocked! – that farms are dirty and smelly and animals don’t always have the same cushy life there as the pets in their homes.
Animal rights organizations such as HSUS and PETA take advantage of public squeamishness to promote their goals. They don’t believe people should either eat meat or have pets. While demanding that everyone else be respectful of their philosophy, they do not reciprocate, but instead try to force their ideas on everyone else by stealth.
Animal rights organizations manipulate public ignorance with media blitzes full of false information demonizing specific practices. They promote and lie about proposed legislation that will harm animals, insisting that the proposals will protect animals. They don’t hesitate to lie; after all, it’s for our own “good”! The public believes the animal rights organizations when they claim to be the experts, because the organizations are making a lot of noise with the hundreds of millions of dollars that clueless pet lovers have donated to those “charities.” They shout down or drown out any protests from truly knowledgeable animal experts.
So the public cries, “Eeeeeew! That’s dirty/smelly/cruel -- no one should be allowed to do it!” The public thinks it’s all right to ban whatever “it” is without learning more or wondering why anyone would do it that way in the first place. And in many cases they should be asking if the practice in question even exists as described. So the animal rights organizations simply go down the list of the ways things are done (or rumored to be done), picking them off one by one, state by state, starting with the least common, least understood and, therefore, easiest to ban.
No one notices that if all the practices being badmouthed are banned in more and more places, the cumulative effect will be no more pets, no more farms, no more meat on the table.
That is how they banned foie gras in New Jersey, where there were no foie gras growers to explain that the technique simply follows the animal’s natural instinct to gorge every fall to store fat for the winter migration, or to show them how the geese, far from suffering, flock around the farmer begging to be fed first.
They banned chicken cages in California, well-known for its concentration of urban trend-setters who will jump on any bleeding-heart bandwagon. No one understood that the cages were the result of industry-financed research that determined chickens prefer being in a small, safe cage with a few friends over being crowded in a huge barn at the mercy of hundreds of thousands of strangers who attack each other and pull out feathers until many are pecked to death and most of the inhabitants are practically naked.
They banned bear hunting in New Jersey, where bears are breaking into homes and threatening people; tethering or chaining pets outside in several cities, where many neighborhoods now outlaw fences; dog breeding in an increasing number of cities, towns, and counties, though there is a shortage of purebred dogs.
That is why Florida became the first state with constitutional protection for pregnant pigs. There were only two pig farmers in Florida – now, of course, none. Ironically, every one of the five states that now ban pig gestation crates bans them only up to a week before farrowing but allows them during the final week, which is what most farmers did anyway, so it doesn’t even change anything.
There are better ways than new legislation to deal with most animal problems -- economic incentives, education, and enforcement of existing laws come to mind. All states and nearly all municipalities already have perfectly serviceable health, nuisance, and humane laws for animals. But you’d never know it to listen to the animal rights organizations.
Animal rights ideologues are attacking communities and states all over the US with coordinated bill proposals. This spring, twenty-four states had statewide bills introduced to limit pet breeding. Has any animal issue come up frequently in the news recently? The very fact that any animal-related practice is under attack in your area, especially if the publicity targets your emotions, should arouse your suspicions that there is another side to the story.
It has never been more clear that we must understand subjects before voting on them. Laws should be based on knowledge and fact, not knee-jerk emotional reactions. And just because someone says he is an authority on a subject doesn’t mean he is. The real authorities are not the parasites who feed off public ignorance to rake in charitable donations, but the ones who live with animals on a daily basis. They are the ones to listen to.
-Bonnie Chandler, September 2009
