Animal abuse
isn’t only a problem when people find out about it.
The First Amendment may be inconvenient to some people at times, but it’s still the law of the land. Case in point: so-called “ag-gag laws.”
These are laws in Idaho, Montana, Utah, North Dakota, Missouri,
Kansas, and Iowa that prohibit people from taking photos or videos of farms
without permission. They’re designed to prevent the exposure of cruelty to
animals on factory farms.
According to the proponents of such regulations, mistreating
animals is only a problem when people talk about it. Well, if the freedom of
expression that the First Amendment protects is now optional, here’s what I’d like
to get rid of: flimsy rhetoric intended to fool the public.
Efforts to hoodwink us all into tolerating animal abuse extends
beyond abused livestock.
For example, a representative of the Dallas Safari Club spoke on NPR recently to defend shooting endangered species like lions and elephants in Africa. Why is this a good practice, according to him?
Because African countries have no way to raise money to pay
for managing wildlife aside from the fees paid by big game hunters.
And it’s true that this is a revenue stream: Hunters often pay
thousands of dollars to kill these majestic animals. But tourists also pay big
bucks, and they only look at the animals — they don’t kill the creatures and
bring carcasses home as souvenirs.
Tourism is a major income generator in Africa, and one that
encourages governments to keep the animals alive.
A few years ago, I visited a beef feedlot in Texas where more
than 50,000 cattle lived among their own waste waiting to become steak.
While it wasn’t Old McDonald’s farm, there was nothing sadistic
taking place, like one might see in those video exposés from pork and chicken
operations. But it wasn’t just the cows producing bovine excrement.
A representative of the beef industry was on hand to answer my
questions. Yet instead of giving me straight answers, she compared the cows
leaving their mothers and coming to the feedlot to children going to
kindergarten.
Just like kids go to kindergarten and share germs, she said, the
cattle coming to the feedlot needed vaccines to prevent them from getting sick
once they all mingled together.
They might miss their mothers and their homes —
you know, like a child at summer camp — but they’d soon get over that.
Seriously?
The cattle surely missed living on the ranches they came from,
living cooped up in a crowded feedlot when they’re best suited for open
pastures. As for the problems with respiratory diseases the animals faced,
perhaps that had to do with the large amount of dust in the air, much of which
was dried manure.
While most mature U.S. cattle may lack the liberty they once had
to graze on grass, the freedom of speech is still guaranteed for human beings,
at least in Idaho. There, a judge just struck down the state’s ag-gag law on First Amendment
grounds.
If Big Ag wants activists to stop documenting animal cruelty,
then factory farm owners should stop practicing it.
OtherWords
columnist Jill Richardson is the author of Recipe for America: Why
Our Food System Is Broken and What We Can Do to Fix It. OtherWords.org.
