By Carter Bundy
OK, I swear I’m not stalking Heath’s other columnists. Really. Not that I didn’t love Mike Swickard’s last article on no-kill shelters. I did.
But Heath can tell you I’ve been planning on doing an animal-food article for a few weeks, and hopefully the two complement each other and help raise awareness of the broad variety of animal issues we can do something about.
Table talk
Two dinners in the last year have made me think about animal cruelty in our food chain far more than I ever had before. Just before my 40th birthday, I had dinner with some animal-advocacy friends.
As with many 40 year olds — or at least men — I was thinking of some zany way of changing my life, and they nearly had me going vegetarian that night.
Then I realized I’d starve to death if my choices were kelp and spinach.
What I did agree with, though, is that the conditions under which our animals are raised and killed are atrocious. The stories were terrible for cattle, pigs and chicken alike — painfully long killing processes, tiny areas of confinement during their awful lives, mutilation of animals to keep them under greater control in the small areas, high rates of disease from the close proximity, and no time outside to enjoy the sun and grass.
Here’s one example of the kind of unnecessary, brutal torture of animals that goes on in the chicken industry (from PETA’s Web site):
“Currently, chickens killed for O’Charley’s are dumped onto conveyors and hung upside-down by their legs in metal shackles — often causing broken bones — and their heads are run through electrified baths that give them painful shocks without rendering them insensible to pain. The birds are still conscious when their throats are cut, and many are scalded to death in defeathering tanks.”
If there were no alternate ways of killing animals as part of a large-scale food operation, I’d have to weigh the benefits of widely available, inexpensive, nutritious chicken food against the cruelty to chickens. Fortunately, none of us, including O’Charley’s, has to make that decision.
According to PETA (with whom I otherwise have some significant disagreements), Burger King, Wendy’s and other restaurants now give preference to suppliers who use Controlled Atmosphere Killing (CAK). In CAK, the chickens are “put to sleep” by replacing oxygen with inert and painless gases like argon and nitrogen, and PETA calls the death quick and painless, with lower risk of contamination and disease.
But how does a casual consumer find out things like this unless you’re doing research for a column? Even my animal-activist friends didn’t tell me that I should go to Wendy’s or Burger King if I’m looking for fast-food chicken.
Ironically, another dinner
Last week, I had dinner in
We had some outstanding organic, local lamb. Of course, it was a great opportunity to follow up on my questions about cruelty-free labeling. She mentioned that an autistic woman had developed an impressive set of standards for care of animals from birth to slaughter.
The woman was Dr. Temple Grandin, who is most famous for writing “Animals in Translation.” Dr. Grandin is autistic and is also a professor of animal science at
Turns out, she’s become one of the world’s foremost authorities in designing stockyards, corrals, races, chutes, loading ramps, restraining systems and standards for handling, transport and slaughter of animals.
Her work is so well respected that she has become a consultant for, of all companies, McDonald’s, and according to many has single-handedly caused a significant change in the treatment of animals raised for food all over the world. It’s a testament to the power of large companies to change behavior for the better using market forces.
But my question remained: Is there any standard I could rely on as a consumer to try to make cruelty-free food a higher percentage of my diet? The short answer: no.
Where’s the beef?
Anti-government folks will argue that the market should be allowed to determine whether the food we eat is killed by cruel and unnecessary torture of animals or by more humane methods.
That’s a valid political philosophy, and the same people may even have a good, substantive point in that, for the time being, cruelty to animals is not a top priority for most Americans.
But even anti-regulation free-marketeers have to acknowledge that the market doesn’t work without accurate information. Hopefully they wouldn’t object to simple consumer information.
A worthy goal for 2009
So as a modest first-step proposal, I’d offer this: If you want free markets to be able to balance animal cruelty against inexpensive meats, then at least establish a USDA category for cruelty-free products, similar to “organic” labels the USDA approves.
The USDA already inspects meat and processing plants anyhow, and private companies list the results of the inspections (including whether the food qualifies as “organic”). So we’re not talking about a significant additional cost to consumers or taxpayers.
According to New Mexican Heather Ferguson of Animal Protection Voters, the USDA actually started a process for labeling foods “Animal Care.” But the standards were so vague that the program has been shelved by lawsuits for now.
Our new
Good for business
The bad publicity from incidents like the downer cows in
Even if efforts to rewrite our laws fall short or take years, our federal legislators ought to quickly embrace some higher voluntary standard that would help consumers and the market choose cruelty-free foods if they want.
And if
Match those higher voluntary standards with an easy consumer label, and everyone wins — consumers, business and animals. And I won’t need a Corvette.
Bundy is the political and legislative director for AFSCME in