What’s worse? Seeing animal and environmental advocates drawn into this dangerous game. Activists try to improve husbandry practices or promote supposedly sustainable animal farms because it’s an easier sell than the go-vegan-or-else approach; but many experienced and thoroughly practical gardeners consider dabbling in animal agribusiness reforms misguided.

In 1944, when just over two billion people occupied the planet and before the era of mass-scale industrial farming, Donald Watson and a few like-minded people founded The Vegan Society based on the opinion that the truly idyllic and sustainable animal farm didn’t exist in the early 1900s, and never will. Watson was a vegan-organic gardener — steering clear of animal manure, bonemeal and blood, and instead using compost for fertility. Why aren’t more animal and environmental advocates following this example?

In the 1970s, Peter Singer’s Animal Liberation (followed by Animal Factories, authored with Jim Mason in 1980) described large animal processing plants as horrifying places; but Singer has steadfastly maintained that breeding and killing can co-exist with the idea of treating animals fairly. In other words, Singer appears to believe that the animal factory, not animal farming per se, constitutes the ethical problem. Singer is often credited with propelling the animal-rights movement; but by framing advocacy as a challenge to factory farming, Singer interrupted vegan activism.

Today, major grocery chains are asking producers to be less like assembly lines and more like old times — then cashing in. Whole Foods Market claims “to assist and inspire ranchers and meat producers around the world to achieve a higher standard of animal welfare excellence while maintaining economic viability.” Peter Singer, together with an alarming number of animal-protection groups, endorsed Whole Foods’ Animal Compassion Foundation, which turned out to be quite lucrative in North America — and beyond. “Sausages made from humanely treated animals,” the Guardian Observer announced in early 2006, summing up the hype surrounding Whole Foods Market’s British debut.

Pig Business, aired on British television just this summer, is a much-heralded documentary by Tracy Worcester, who has worked on behalf of Friends of the Earth. Brimming with disturbing images (some of which were excised for the television audience), the film decries pig crates, rough handling, and cheap meat. Worcester points out that foreign pigflesh — from the US-based multinational Smithfield, for example — would fail British expectations of handling and housing standards. The film’s promoters laud small farms and local butchers. Agreeing is Zac Goldsmith, former editor of Ecologist magazine and now Conservative Parliamentary candidate for Richmond Park, London: “I think small farming in a localised economy is the answer.” Goldsmith cites Pig Business as helping to “address the unfairness of the system allowing local farmers to be out competed [sic] by cheap imports of much lower standard.”

“I think we all fundamentally like pigs, don’t we?” asks Tracy Worcester, who is married to Henry Somerset, Marquess of Worcester — heir of the Duke of Beaufort and a farmer. But is this factory-crit trend its own form of denial? Worcester will eat bacon, the Telegraph assures its readers — as long as it’s from “really, really happy pigs.”

Those pigs aren’t happy, dear readers; they’re dead. Meanwhile, all this idyllic farming of the affluent people, by the affluent people, for the affluent people pushes free-living animals out of once-thriving biocommunities to make room for the supposedly thrilled pigs. Moreover, animal agribusiness is notorious for its heavy use of fuel to transport crops and animals from place to place.

To get around that, our affluent role models give us the “locavore” trend — exhorting us to buy dairy, eggs, and animal flesh as well as vegetables from area farmers or hobby farms, and to eat roasts and quiches at restaurants with local sources. But even Forbes has run an opinion piece questioning these ideas, citing a study by Rich Pirog of the Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture that connects transport to just 11% of food’s carbon footprint. “No matter how you slice it,” the comment observes, “it takes more energy to bring meat, as opposed to plants, to the table. It takes 6 pounds of grain to make a pound of chicken and 10 to 16 pounds to make a pound of beef.”

The conclusion? “If you want to make a statement, ride your bike to the farmer’s market. If you want to reduce greenhouse gases, become a vegetarian.”

The word “vegan” would have been more straightforward, because egg companies use space and feed and are significant polluters; dairy cows, who live longer than beef cattle and are overfed to stay as productive as possible, are associated with high methane emissions and feed demand. If you really want to reduce greenhouse gases, become a vegan.

And support vegan-organic growers. They’re offering a new path for the human journey. They’re cultivating respect, shielding and celebrating the freedom that’s still possible for animals who live in local ecologies. They are genuine liberators, freeing the land from grazing and fodder production, taking no more water than necessary, avoiding pollution, and returning part of the harvest to other beings and to the land. They know much of global grain harvest is fed to domesticated animals, and that feed crops are invasive — planted where rainforests once flourished. They know financially well-off regions siphon vast quantities of grain unnecessarily from others, and that animal husbandry puts enormous pressure on the world’s water. They point to a way out of these problems.

Activists who prefer to pursue humane animal agribusiness say we must do something for animals suffering in factory farms right now. Some think vegan education is just too slow, or that a vegan humanity isn’t possible anyway. They sound like realists, so they’re pretty effective at making vegans sound marginal. But are they right?

Copernicus must have felt marginal in a society that generally assumed our planet was the central fixture in the cosmos. Relatively quickly in the course of history, humanity’s perspective was radically changed; likewise, the vegan movement offers a fresh perspective, and it’s poised to make human the supremacist view obsolete. Environmentalists have discovered how incorrect that old view is. Earthworms, bees and other supposedly insignificant beings are now understood as enormously influential in the biocommunity. Meanwhile, the vegan philosophy has posited that we cannot give animals some kind of moral rank; all are entitled to live on their own terms, bees and earthworms included.

We all have the wonderful potential to accept this philosophy today. Trying to get there in increments — say, by switching to “cage-free” eggs or supporting free-range concepts — means forgetting that Earth’s space is finite, that animals are displaced by commercial landscapes, that the spread of pasture-based farming uproots free-living beings and snuffs out their lives.

When the idea of human supremacy — and its corollary, the treatment of the world as our warehouse — is understood as a destructive myth, it will be replaced by a new paradigm. By learning to cook vegan dishes or to cultivate vegan-organic gardens, many people are preparing for that shift today. The social change could become apparent relatively quickly, and that’s good. By most predictions, we have little time to spare.

No doubt Bo will become a beloved part of White House life and lore. But as dogs are churned out by breeders, others face death for lack of shelter space. And Bo’s highly public story gratified human desires rather than the needs of dogs. Ten-year-old Malia Obama suffers from allergies, and the curly hair of Portuguese water dogs tends not to shed. But with just a little patience, the Obamas could have found a dog — one who wouldn’t exacerbate allergies — in one of the country’s many struggling shelters. In any case, why benefit a breeder for such a reason?

All the buzz about “Bo the Obamadog” adds up to good news for those who make a profit from treating animals as commodities throughout the world. David Frei of the Westminster Kennel Dog Show said: ‘I’m not surprised by the intense interest in the First Family’s pet. It’s something everyone can relate to.” The media also reported that Ted Kennedy bought three Portuguese water dogs from Bo’s breeder, and convinced the Obamas that such a puppy would be perfect for the White House. Just the kind of discourse that keeps breeders in business.

Meanwhile, people are working to change things in their communities. South Lake Tahoe, Nevada has just approved a ban on retailers of cats and dogs. According to Dawn Armstrong of the Lake Tahoe Humane Society & SPCA, the ordinance “may be the beginning of the end of the puppy mill industry.” It is at least a start. If it holds up to lawsuits, the ordinance will close a shop called Broc’s Puppies. Home-based breeders will escape the ban’s provisions, and be allowed to keep selling animals directly to buyers. Pressure should be exerted against these breeders as well; but the Obamas are making that argument a lot harder, by making pet-breeding look acceptable.

On the 14th of April, a cartoon ran in the Washington Post, created by Ann Telnaes, a Pulitzer Prize winner whose cartoons have been exhibited at the Library of Congress. It’s the image of a machinist holding a newspaper with the headline “Obama Puppy Debut.” With the other hand, the machinist starts up a crank attached to a mill that’s emitting dollar signs from its smokestack, and churning out assembly-line replicas of little Bo.

The head of the Humane Society of the United States used classic politic-speak to frame the puppy debut. Because Bo was bred for sale yet returned by the first owner, Bo is a “quasi-rescue dog,” said Wayne Pacelle.¹ “There are reputable breeders of these dogs,” said Pacelle, whose group’s website says: “Thanks, Mr. President, for giving a second-chance dog a forever home.”²

But Bo’s breeder, Martha Stern of Boyd, Texas, doesn’t consider Bo a rescued dog. All buyers sign contracts requiring them to return the dogs if they’re deemed unsuitable, Stern said. Hardly a rescue, this is just the standard course of business for breeders.

Quasi-advocacy shouldn’t be the last word on this. The Obamas and the general public need to learn more about breeding businesses, and have serious conversations about making living, feeling beings into commodities.

Breeder Talk

In Pennsylvania, Craig Rader owns a business called 21st Century Media. Rader also owns Watson, a Portuguese water dog — Bo’s father. Several times a year, Watson is used as a stud by breeder Julie Parker. That’s how Bo was conceived, and a dog named Penny (owned by Martha Stern) gave birth to Bo.

Here’s how Pittsburgh’s Post-Gazette tells the story:

“She was a real nice little bitch, very sweet,” said Parker, describing Penny. “We had no trouble.”

Ms. Parker already gets far more requests to breed Watson than she is able to accommodate, she said . . .

“He’s got a lot of the qualities that make the breed identifiable — a nice broad head, a lot of bone to him, a beautiful coat,” said Ms. Parker, who charges about $1,900 for Watson’s stud fee. “He brings a lot of things to the table for what you want to see in the next generation.”

Earlier this year, U.S. Sen. Ted Kennedy chose another product of the same Watson-Penny union for his new puppy, Cappy . . . At the suggestion of the Kennedy family, Bo was offered to the Obamas, who secretly met him earlier this year.

Most Researched Breed

Portuguese water dogs are members of “the most genetically studied breed in the world,” observes the Los Angeles Times. They are considered an easy sample to trace; all water dogs registered by the American Kennel Club derive from a small group, largely from two kennels, that came to the United States in the early 1950s.³ The breed’s notable size variation has led cancer researchers to use water dogs to look for genes affecting growth regulation.

Susan Becker, president of the Chicago-area Portuguese Water Dog Club, told the L.A. Times that intense genetic screening is part of the “philosophy of the breed”; so at dog shows blood is drawn from the dogs, and after death their bodies are often preserved for lab research.

When a Portuguese water dog belonging to soybean geneticist Gordon Lark died in the late 1990s, Lark longed for another water dog. Breeder Karen Miller sent the scientist a free puppy. There was one condition: Addison’s disease is relatively common in water dogs, and Miller wanted Lark to use the skills gained in plant research and apply them to Addison’s disease research, using the new puppy as a starting point. Knowing how heredity contributes to appearance, temperament and health would be useful for the dog-breeding business.

The project was undertaken by Gordon Lark and Kevin Chase at the University of Utah, and is now considered part of research that could benefit humans as well as dog breeders; President J.F. Kennedy suffered from Addison’s. Dog genome researcher Elaine A. Ostrander also points out the ways in which the studies can ensure we have dogs who race better, or even have a coat we might like:

It is certainly hoped that the disease-gene mapping will lead to the production of genetic tests and more thoughtful breeding programs associated with healthier, more long-lived dogs. It will be easier to select for particular physical traits such as body size or coat color, not only because we understand the underlying genetic pathways, but because genetic tests are likely to be made available as quickly as results are published . . .⁴

Scientists who study dog genetics have explained how the humans’ role in “unnatural selection” transformed wolves into toy dogs, and now predict DNA screens that will result in pets with virtually any desired trait an owner could want, as the New York Times has reported, including dogs who’ll “cock their heads endearingly” when they look at us. This sets the stage for intensified manipulations of human as well as non-human beings. “Free of most of the ethical concerns and practical difficulties associated with the practice of eugenics in humans,” the Times article states, “dog breeders are seizing on new genetic research to exert dominion over the canine gene pool.” Yet when a Doberman breeder can screen for von Willibrand disease, a bleeding condition that also affects humans, what are the ramifications for disability activists, many of whom understand the diversity of our genetic variations as ensuring strength and adaptability, activists who have worked to increase acceptance and accessibility rather than medical dominion over human genes?

Portuguese water dog breeder Karen Miller doesn’t yet know if the Obamas will donate samples from Bo to the genetic research cause, and plans to send Michelle Obama a T-shirt. But the questions for the Obamas are far more profound. The debate about “Bo the Obamadog” could, if it reaches its real potential, lead us to question the human fascination with manipulation, control, and dominance over all living beings.

1. Sharon Theimer, “Promises, Promises: Is Obama dog a rescue or not?,” AP, 13 Apr. 2009.
2. See Amelia Glynn’s “Tails of the City” blog entry “Obama Skirts First-Dog Adoption Issue,” 12 Apr. 2009, at SFGate.com. Glynn says perhaps Pacelle’s remarks are “not surprising” given that the Obamas will donate to the HSUS — but refers to a piece in the Chicago Sun-Times which says the donation went to “a humane society.” So the media weren’t exactly crystal clear on who gets the donation, leaving concerned readers to speculate.
3. See Elaine A. Ostrander, “Genetics and the Shape of Dogs,” American Scientist, Sep.-Oct. 2007.
4. Ibid.

We’ve constructed a system that treats everything and everyone on the planet as a person or as a piece of property. Water and seeds, trees and beaches: all for sale. Conscious animals too are classified as property, available for use by “persons” (including businesses). Only those legal persons have rights — socially created shields which oblige us to respect other people’s interests.

Which brings us back to animal-rights activists. People who are serious about nonhuman rights wish to discontinue the system that makes human interests the top priority and then controls all other beings for our uses and conveniences.

The animal-rights idea has been around a long time. Henry Salt, author of Animals’ Rights Considered in Relation to Social Progress (1892), asserted that the human habit of raising other animals in order to consume them is to inflict unnecessary harm on sentient beings. Salt, as well as Anna Kingsford (who graduated from medical school in Paris in 1880, unique in doing so without having experimented on a single animal), influenced Gandhi to decide it’s a moral duty “not to live upon fellow-animals.” And in 1944, the word “vegan” was coined to express the idea of conscientious objection to war against our fellows. The vegan peace declaration is a commitment to avoid the products of animal use, such as dairy items, flesh, eggs, and honey. By preferring melon slices or a plate of stuffed grape leaves, vegans erode the custom of animal breeding — a custom that, at the same time, uses habitat needed by animals who could live free.

In its broadest sense, veganism is the cultivation of a society that renounces domination and systematic killing. This is the core of animal-rights theory: the forthright claim that all conscious beings, human or not, should be allowed to live on their own terms, not the terms set down by those who seek to control and exploit others.

Plea From Planet Earth

Imagine the day the extraterrestrials pay us a visit. Being more capable and advanced than ourselves (get a load of that spaceship), but not having any way of hearing or understanding our words or cries, they debate whether to consume us, experiment on us, or wrap us up and carry us home as playthings. Our options end. They decide to enlist us in fulfilling their interests in food, research and entertainment. We’re frightened and appalled, even by the ones who only insist on doing it for our own good (stewardship, we Earthlings have called that). We like to decide what’s good for ourselves.

“Please, let us alone,” we beg. “Don’t split up our families to introduce us into your more advanced culture; don’t talk about how well you should care for us before using us up. Don’t try to mimic our natural habitat so we can live and reproduce when you display us. Don’t do it even if you know we’ll blow ourselves up or go extinct under the melting ice caps. Just go in peace.”

Could we ourselves heed that plea? Most people will call it impossible, saying we must be realistic; they’ll say patterns of domination and subjugation, and hierarchical ideas about species, are too ingrained in human thinking to be undone. Whether they are right or not, most people thereby perpetuate the power structures humanity has constructed. The first step to achieving change is conceiving it, and that’s what the vegan proposal has done. At its best, our movement inspires society to accept risk, to respect other beings even if that means accepting some level of danger, to ensure that we leave animals capable of living and moving freely in spaces to which they’ve naturally adapted, and to refuse to alienate them from those habitats.

Plain fairness challenges us to intervene in the cycle of breeding animals, and to stop sending domesticated cats, tropical birds, school-raised ducklings and other displaced animals into the world to fend for themselves in biocommunities that are ill-equipped to sustain or cope with them. To leave birds in their own forests rather than remove them and cage them as decorative or talkative pets, to let chimpanzees live in their natural territories rather expect them to have babies in zoos and language labs, to let bats and wolves and jaguars migrate without impediments, to respect turkeys’ natural lives rather than consider their slaughtered bodies essential to our holiday buffets; to leave fish in their waters, swimming free. The dignity of freedom, along with life itself, is at the core of what rights are meant to defend.

That doesn’t mean we ignore the dependent and domesticated — abandoned rabbits or feral cats or dogs in need of homes. Animal-rights theory challenges the cycle of making animals vulnerable and then coming to their rescue; yet it is not a pass to ignore the welfare of dependent animals who are already born. We are all members of humanity, the class we’ve constructed in order to bestow on ourselves the right to control all the others. Where we’ve endangered our fellow-animals and made them dependent, we have a collective responsibility to care for them today. So a caregiving ethic properly applies to cats, dogs, and other purpose-bred animals, while animal rights means preventing the cycle of control in the first place, preventing the destruction of communities of deer and coyotes, elk and wolves, wildcats, whales, bats and bees. This is why the strongest case for animal rights must be engaged with environmental advocacy.

In turn, animal-rights theory presents environmentalists with their strongest case. After all, a society that seriously considers animals’ claims to their habitat would refuse to let Mobil, Shell, and BP — or the Nature Conservancy, which has profited from drilling for natural gas in the habitat of highly endangered speckled grouse — ignore the interests of animals. Animal rights would change humanity’s way of doing business.

Tom Regan’s Case for Animal Rights (1983) urged: “With regard to wild animals, the general policy recommended by the rights view is: let them be!” These three little words go right to the core of the theory, and they free the spirit of activism. Regan’s three little words also highlight the need for a positively framed right for free-living beings to exist. If the rights proponent focuses simply on “abolition” — that is, on removing animals from the property category — there’s a danger of missing the positive need for free animals to procreate and experience their lives. We could stop bringing other animals into being for our purposes but ignore the loss of communities who enter the world for their own; and animal rights is a hollow idea if animals don’t survive to benefit from the concept. This means we’ll need to control our own numbers and learn to respect the environment not just for our health or aesthetic satisfaction, but because it’s home to other living beings.

Evolution of Animal-Rights Activism

One of my co-workers in the movement, Peter Wallerstein of Friends of Animals’ Marine Animal Rescue group, is an expert at assisting coast-dwelling animals who get caught in anglers’ gear. The idea is to free animals from dangers humans have caused (consistent with this mission, Wallerstein won’t eat fish), and quickly return them to their normal lives. To rescue is to exert control over a seal or a pelican, so Wallerstein believes interventions should be temporary: just long enough to enable the animals to return safely to their sea or skies, where they might flourish on their terms. In most cases, for Marine Animal Rescue, the interactions are brief — although some sea animals are found so debilitated they need long-term care; and unusual algal blooms, thought to be connected with warming oceans, cause domoic acid poisonings, which are often fatal to sea lions and seabirds.

Some others — spider monkeys, chimpanzees, gibbons, parrots, and various animals kept in human settings and then discarded, such as the ones who now live at our San Antonio sanctuary — need a caregiving ethic, and they need it for life. Primarily Primates offers its animals private space, and publicly challenges humanity’s feeling of entitlement to use other animals. And that, in turn, means confronting any business which breeds domesticated animals into existence, displacing habitat where free-living animals once thrived. So the evolution of our work now includes collaboration between the rescue and rehabilitation community and animal-rights theorists. We point out that advocates can and do care for the animals caught in our current system yet at the same time organize a new cultural reality, so that whole communities of animals won’t be driven from their lands and waters, selectively bred to meet our specifications, or in some way pressed into positions of needing refuge.

We know we’re asking questions that challenge many, many generations of our cultural patterns. In light of the tremendous responsibility we’ve accepted, what kind of rights should we seek?

Seen in its strongest and best light, the animal-rights proposal does not present a list of demands, but cultivates an attitude of respect. A willingness to live gently on the land and walk respectfully along the ocean without seeing either as a store of resources for us. A desire to allow natural plants to flourish for bees, to grow our crops with an appreciation for the animals who move beneath and over them. We need to learn, as much as possible, to let other animals be.

To respect the lives of seals means respecting the lives of fish and other animals in their waters. Respecting the lives of primates would necessarily mean respecting tree frogs in the forests that need us to put down our logging machinery. What other members of Earth’s biocommunity need from us is a robust movement to defend what natural places remain.

Once we agree in principle what animal rights should be and then implement it, cultivating a society that can outgrow its drive to kill and conquer, we then decide the best approach in specific situations. Some difficult questions will involve conflicts we might have caused or aggravated between living communities, given our outsized population and the ways we have already changed the face of the planet. The key will be mindfulness, so as to steadfastly avoid reinstating the primacy of humans over the other animal communities.

Because it defends the vital interests of our fellow-animals in viable habitats, the vegan declaration of peace presents the most serious challenge to those who deforest the land, commodify life, and pollute the earth, water, and atmosphere. As such, it’s not only a key to our becoming full moral actors on the ecological stage, but also needed for keeping that stage from falling apart. We cannot afford to surrender to the loss of whole biocommunities and the meltdown of major ice sheets; if we don’t change soon, our options will run out. Never has it been more important for vegan advocates to know just what we’re asking for, and be heard.

It’s absurd enough the Bureau claims a five-figure population of free-roaming horses and burros is too big — while ranchers, covetous of any blade of grass or drop of water these horses find, graze more than five million cows, buffalo, sheep and goats on public lands.¹

It’s shameful enough that the Bureau takes the horses and burros — animals the agency is responsible for protecting — away from the land to which they were born, and severs these animals’ own relationships. That it privatizes these horses and burros — more than 216,000 of them over the years — selling them at auctions and sale yards, or “adopting” them off — taking $125 per head, under current law, as the minimum adoption fee.

It’s disgraceful enough that the government even threatens to kill them.²

It’s nauseating enough that the government enables people to break free-living mustangs and turn them into lifestyle accessories through schemes such as the “Extreme Mustang Makeover” — a circus-like spectacle complete with hoops of fire, which is trumpeted by Mustang car maker Ford as though it were some kind of noble environmental activity.

And now, in one of the bitterest twists of all, these so-called American icons will not only be made to march at the forthcoming inaugural parade, but also used to guard the US borders. Instead of moving uncontrolled, these horses will be trained and enlisted to stop humans from moving uncontrolled.

I received a message from the National Public Outreach Specialist at the Bureau’s Wild Horse and Burro Program earlier this month telling me I ought to think it’s all awesome. Here’s the entire message:

—–Original Message—–
From: Bureau of Land Management Wildhorse and Burro [mailto:whb-news@Bureau of Land Management.gov]
Sent: December 17, 2008 2:45 PM
To: leehall@friendsofanimals.org
Subject: BUREAU OF LAND MANAGEMENT Wild Horse and Burro Program

Hello Lee Hall, J.D.,
I just wanted to share with everyone an article that is really awesome. Our Mustangs are going to be \”strutting their stuff\” at the inaugural parade in January. Some of you may know that the U.S. Border Patrol, both North and South, are using Mustangs as their choice of the best \”breed\” for the type of work; endurance, sure-footedness, sense of danger, etc. There is an article on the national wild horse and burro website regarding the parade. Please visit [tiny url]

I am not sure if you URL will work in this form of an e-mail, so, if not, please go to www.wildhorseandburro.Bureau of Land Management.gov. Then go to Newsletter and News (right navigation bar), click on Success Stories and you will find the article. It is the last one shown.

YEAH, for our Nation\’s Living Legends!

Thank you,
Janet Neal
National Public Outreach Specialist
Janet_Neal@Bureau of Land Management.gov

(775) 861-6614
——————–
To unsubscribe from this mailing list, please visit [tiny url]

These hapless horses are now involuntarily participating in the border militarization which has destroyed so many communities of free-living animals even as it has killed so many human beings. When migrants at the southern border die in the summer, it’s after first falling unconscious or succumbing to seizures and finally heart failure. The fluids from their defeated organs seep out onto the earth. In winter, they die on dunes and in canyons, shivering uncontrollably, losing their ability to grip, and then to think, to move at all; their pulses slow, their pupils dilate, their skin turns bluish and their breathing fails. Still, people come. They come when the need to feed their families overwhelms their fear of detention or death. Wild horses surely wouldn’t keep them away.

At the same time, border construction has disrupted the lives of the few remaining Sonoran pronghorn antelopes — beings who never got hung up on the dividing line between nations until a big fence was built on it. Road-building for patrols near the Tijuana Estuary disturbs coastal sage scrub birds. The habitat of mountain lions and black bears, Mexican spotted owls, and the elusive, solitary jaguars revered by ancient Aztecs and Mayans, is being irreparably torn and fragmented. Stadium lights and security equipment upsets nocturnal animals and those with natural radar. As Julia Whitty explains, the 700-mile border wall is, from an ecological perspective, severing the spine of the Americas “at the lumbar, paralyzing the lower continent.”³

The ecological balance of a hemisphere apparently does not strike much of our officialdom as awesome — or even noticeable. It would be nice to think change is going to come. But Barack Obama was one of the supporters of the law that, when signed by Bush in 2006, authorized the grotesque barrier. Wall proponents want the thing completed by the close of June 2009.

We ourselves may well be headed for extinction, because so many living beings with whom our physical lives are intertwined are disappearing from nature. If the trend, which walls and fences exacerbate, continues at the current rate, more than half of all plant and animal species will be gone by 2100. The unremitting spate of extinctions — even more than escalated climate change — is the most certain threat to human life on Earth.⁴ Notably, of those species recorded as recently extinct, more lived in the United States than anywhere else, followed by the United Republic of Tanzania, Uganda and Mauritius.

Wild Inspiration

“The wild mustang has been an inspiration for Ford Motor Company for decades.” So says a corporate press release. The wild mustang, described through a singular noun: an inspiration, a living legend, an icon of the West, a concept for car designers instead of a community of individual horses and burros with distinct characters, cohabitants of the land who know each others’ struggles. Human laws and customs treat other animals as a pool of potentially useful natural resources, scientific specimens, pets, food or entertainment. Unfettered ones are mist-like and unreal, fetishes or symbols of the past, mascots or marketing concepts. We’ve systematically obstructed our ability to perceive them as beings with their own interests and experiences.

Ford taps into the public notion that adoption into private ownership is a saving grace for horses struggling to survive. That rationale misses some critical points. First, a benefit is not conferred on these animals when we pull their territory out from under them and auction them off or otherwise put them into private hands.

About 200 years ago, three million wild horses roamed most of the North American continent, in evident harmony with the rest of the biocommunity.⁵ At the beginning of the 20th century, 2 million mustangs roamed free.⁶ Now, including those stored in government pens, there are merely a few tens of thousands. Alarmingly, and despite the limited numbers of genetically viable herds, the Bureau of Land Management and the Humane Society of the United States have collaborated in subjecting these animals to invasive experiments with the contraceptive porcine zona pellucida. The Bureau of Land Management claims that reducing and repressing the free-roaming equine population is necessary to maintain a natural and ecological balance between these animals and watersheds, vegetation, and ranches. The claim is result-oriented. Cattle ranches have no part in the natural and ecological balance.

The mission of the Bureau of Land Management is, in part, “to sustain the health and productivity of the public lands for the use and enjoyment of present and future generations.”⁷ But ranchers, for whose convenience the horses and burros are snatched from their habitat, are devastating public lands, usurping precious water and oxygen-giving trees. The United States — home to about 5% of the world’s population — generates approximately 24% of the world’s extra greenhouse gases.⁸ A major cause is animal agribusiness, responsible for large amounts of methane, a gas that packs more than 20 times the warming potential of carbon dioxide, and for 65% of human-related nitrous oxide, a gas with nearly 300 times CO2’s potency. And this business expands our population’s footprint by clearing forests solely to grow feed for animals bred to be killed.

And it’s all unnecessary. Thus, boycotting ranchers’ products and exerting pressure on the government to stop subsidies to animal agribusiness are genuine ways to help horses and burros. Depriving them of their freedom is not.

On Their Own Terms

The West is overpopulated, but not by horses. Where the land is not overtaken by concrete, only a few strongholds of dense forest and some ice peaks are free from the effects of animal agribusiness, which gradually destroys waterways, shelters and food for birds and other animals. But there are precedents for reversing the damage. Twenty years ago, land around the San Pedro River in southeastern Arizona, where the Bureau of Land Management had long granted grazing permits, had become a barren wasteland. On 1 January 1988, the Bureau instituted a moratorium on nearly all cattle grazing. Congress subsequently designated the San Pedro Riparian National Conservation Area a nature preserve of 58,000 acres. The river deepened, and fish reappeared. Native grasses and bushes thrive once more.⁹

The treatment of North American horses to date is, in contrast, anything but a success. More than a million wild horses once roamed Canada, but in the 1960s, after decades of continual shooting and slaughtering, only four small herds existed.¹⁰ By 1974, the Alberta herd had been reduced to about 1,000 — too small to maintain its genetic health. The other three herds, all in British Columbia, are now gone.¹¹

In 1971, Richard Nixon signed the Wild Free-Roaming Horses and Burros Act into US law. Responding to a public outcry over roundups, the law directed the Bureau of Land Management to protect the animals. Nevertheless, roundups were codified in the law. Lawmakers simply failed to consider these animals on their own terms. They described the equids as “living symbols of the historic and pioneer spirit of the West” — rhetoric befitting a made-for-television western of that time, when most people thought nature could be treated as though it existed for human purposes alone, and global warming was yet unheard of. The Act’s mission needs updating to match current human knowledge and an evolving environmental ethic.

Moreover, free-roaming horses and burros have their own interests. They should be entitled to genuine protection. No exemptions or permits should exist to sell or remove a wild free-roaming horse or burro from the public lands. Free-roaming equids should be just that: free from roundup, capture, sterilization, and deliberate harassment — and any obligation to defend politics and borders they have nothing to do with.

1. See Bureau of Land Management Public Lands Statistics, “Summary of the Authorized Use of Grazing District Lands” (FY 2004).
2. On 23 October 2008, Sally Spencer, Director of Marketing for Wild Horses and Burros, told Friends of Animals 30,000 horses are being stored in corrals, and their futures would be decided at an advisory meeting on 17 November 2008; options proposed included stepping up adoptions, selling the animals without limitation, killing them, or requesting more money for management purposes.
3. Julia Whitty, “Gone: Mass Extinction and the Hazards of Earth’s Vanishing Biodiversity,” Mother Jones, 25 Apr. 2007.
4. See ibid.
5. Robert Alison, “Last Roundup Feared for Canada’s Wild Horses,” Toronto Star, 15 Oct. 2005.
6. Deanne Stillman, “Wild Horses Aren’t Free,” Los Angeles Times, 2 Jun. 2008.
7. As stated on the Bureau of Land Management website, in the public release “BLM’s ‘Seeds of Success’ Program Aimed at Improving Health and Productivity of Public Lands” (24 Aug. 2007): “The Bureau’s multiple-use mission is to sustain the health and productivity of the public lands for the use and enjoyment of present and future generations.”
8. See generally U.S. Dept. of Energy, Energy Information Administration, “Emissions of Greenhouse Gases in the United States 2003,” Report #: DOE/EIA-0573 (2003) (released 13 Dec. 2004), at page 2 (“US Emissions in a Global Perspective”), following the Executive Summary.
9. David Kreuper et al., US Geological Service’s Forest and Rangeland Ecosystem Center, “Response of Vegetation and Breeding Birds to the Removal of Cattle on the San Pedro River, Arizona” (2003).
10. See “Last Roundup Feared for Canada’s Wild Horses,” note 5 (citing information from the Canadian Wild Horse Preservation Society).
11. See “Last Roundup Feared for Canada’s Wild Horses,” note 5. Additionally, some 300 free-roaming horses exist in relative privacy on Sable Island, off Nova Scotia. Before they were legally protected, they were subject to roundups and use as “pit ponies” in coal mines and for other purposes. The free-roaming population of about 150 horses on the islands of Chincoteague and Assateague off the eastern US coast are accessible by road to tourists, and horses from this population are rounded up yearly and auctioned off for fundraising purposes by the Chincoteague Volunteer Fire Company.

Amnesty International has expressed its alarm: What about the rights of the world’s many detained and degraded human beings?

And yet, is there any reason why basic rights to life and liberty should only be discussed with reference to humanity? Can’t we humans act decently — to human beings and others? Surely, respect should be nurtured in all its forms.

Then again, there’s good reason to look closely whenever rights are considered anew. Will the precedent reinforce or diminish what the human community looks for in basic rights?

Fifteen years ago, Paola Cavalieri and Peter Singer gathered together a collective of writers to propose basic rights for chimpanzees, gorillas, and orangutans in a book called The Great Ape Project.² The group promoting the Spanish proposal is connected with Singer’s international volunteer project, inspired by the book. Pedro Pozas Terrados, representing the branch in Spain, welcomed the “historic day in the struggle for animal rights and in defense of our evolutionary comrades” — emphasizing genetic similarities, as the group’s website does.³

Really, we could call any animals on this planet our evolutionary comrades; calculating the gene overlap seems awfully arbitrary. The key similarity is that other apes are conscious; they experience life.

Although genetic similarity is, I believe, the wrong argument (and one that can cut both ways, for scientists are quick to say that slight DNA differences can be significant), expanding our concepts of personhood and decommodifying conscious life is the right path to travel. How refreshing it will be to see our law respect any conscious beings beyond the ones who use lawn mowers and credit cards.

And taking the rights of apes seriously would be a boon to entire forest biocommunities that need us to stop breeding cattle and logging ancient forests and extracting everything we can get our drills into. The best possible outcome from the Spanish resolution would be the start of a robust movement to defend the planet’s untamed places. That would help apes and tree frogs alike, and they all should have the simple right to live as they will.

But is freedom what the Spanish proposal really seeks? Let’s ask now, while it’s still being worked on. Because unless it (a) ensures the phasing out of captivity and (b) protects habitat, Spain’s animal-rights victory will be illusory. Already it’s showing the hallmarks of illusion: While keeping apes for circuses and television spots will be forbidden under Spain’s penal code, keeping some 315 non-human apes in Spanish zoos will remain legal.

As USA Today described them, the resolutions “give great apes, such as chimpanzees and gorillas, the right to life, freedom from arbitrary captivity and protection from torture.”⁴ Who will decide what captivity is arbitrary? Will human law make zoos a component of “animal rights”? Granted, some zoo directors genuinely want to protect threatened communities of animals. But are we justified in making ourselves other animals’ masters and keepers when we say we’re helping them? What are we doing to release them from reliance on rescue?

Apes who are already captive, and cannot safely return to their lands, should not be exhibited, but should instead be offered private refuge at a sanctuary prepared to meet their needs, and advocate for their rights. In Spain, both the Centro Rainfer of Madrid and Catalonia’s Mona Foundation have been called sanctuaries, but both fall short of the mark. Rainfer engages in captive breeding of primates as well as language experiments⁵; Mona allows public viewing and cognitive research.⁶ To take rights seriously, the influential Homo sapiens of Spain have a responsibility to make the region safe for true refuges — places off-limits to cognitive testing and exhibiting.

Detainees

Challenges to the conception of primates as resources have became a recurring motif in Europe. Britain’s parliament rejected the use of non-human great apes in scientific experiments in 1997; Lord Williams of Mostyn called its end “a matter of morality.”⁷ Now, European advocates are lobbying to stop tests on great apes and any primates taken from their habitats, and to secure a timetable for ending the use of all primates throughout the European Union. And recently, Austrian activists approached the European Court of Human Rights in their quest to have Hiasl, a chimpanzee, declared a legal person.

Uprooted from western Africa for Baxter’s pharmaceutical testing a quarter-century ago, Hiasl now lives at a Vienna animal shelter. The case began when a group called the Association Against Animal Factories sought a court-appointed guardian to help keep support money in Hiasl’s own name and shield Hiasl from being sold. “It’s hard,” said a New York Times editorial, “to see the harm in that.”⁸

Right. Because that wouldn’t be a radical change at all. Martin Balluch, of the Association against Animal Factories, said about Hiasl: “We argue that he’s a person and he’s capable of owning something himself, as opposed to being owned, and that he can manage his money. This means he can start a court case against Baxter, which at the very least should mean his old age pension is secure.”

But a pension does not equal animal rights. Catharine MacKinnon notes the ways we “project human projects onto animals, to look for and find or not find ourselves in them”; whereas the key question for the animal-rights advocate is “what they want from us, if anything other than to be let alone, and what it will take to learn the answer.”⁹ Accordingly, creating non-human rights requires the political insight to identify, to the extent possible, the fundamental interests of the beings involved. This isn’t a matter of contriving palliative responses to the conditions that surround animals already made into objects of trade and study. Other primates don’t come into our society, willingly work, and then retire. Rights would shield them from being brought into our society at all.

Hiasl’s case and Spain’s rights proposal have been followed by reporters the world over. But only the USA continues the large-scale use of non-human apes. And the country that warehouses hundreds of apes for use in biomedical and cognitive experiments is in no hurry to extend justice to them.

The Chimpanzee Health Improvement, Maintenance and Protection (“CHIMP”) Act of 2000 moved some “surplus” chimpanzees out of US labs, thereby saving money for the government’s whole research enterprise.¹⁰ Although it accepts and codifies the human prerogative to experiment on chimpanzees, this law — and Louisiana-based Chimp Haven’s contract to house apes under it — was condoned by a coterie of U.S. anti-vivisection groups, including Peter Singer’s project. And any apes removed from labs under the law can be used again for “noninvasive behavioral studies” — as though it’s anything but invasive to keep a group of apes’ bodies, daily experiences, and relationships completely controlled by their human keepers.¹¹

Jane Goodall, author of the opening chapter in The Great Ape Project, testified before Congress in support of the CHIMP Act, calling the warehousing agreement a “sanctuary.” Michael Bilirakis, who chaired the hearing, noted that the National Institutes of Health didn’t want a law that would put chimpanzees completely off-limits to researchers.

Goodall said sanctuaries don’t rule out “a small operation” and asserted that “the really cruel thing” would be moving them from a more spacious area into a small cage for testing.¹²

But the really cruel thing is how people made up an ostensibly humanitarian law to hold onto apes as research specimens. What can change the status quo now? Courts should be pressed to consider non-human primates as rightsholders. Meanwhile, the best we can do for them is to release them from the traps our laws have constructed for them. For example, a rulemaking that exempts primates from the federal Animal Welfare Act — based on the point that handling non-human primates for research and commerce is no more appropriate than handling ourselves that way — would bring us a step closer to ending our instrumental use of other conscious beings.

The lawmakers are now considering a Great Ape Protection Act, introduced in the House of Representatives in April. Its text cites the apes’ intelligence and susceptibility to psychological trauma, their genetic relationship to humans, and the expense of keeping them. If enacted, the law would effect a three-year phase-out of invasive research on any chimpanzee, bonobo, gorilla, orang-utan, or gibbon. Invasive research would include that which might cause injury, distress or fear — but not “close observation of natural or voluntary behavior” of an individual. This suggests that cognitive research, which researchers go to some lengths to portray as voluntary, will be condoned. This likelihood is underscored by the text’s references to the warehousing system established by the CHIMP Act — which does permit cognitive experiments. These laws fail to take apes’ core interests seriously. The objects of “non-invasive” studies are often isolated, and their space and time is never their own. When outside the confines of the lab, apes involved in language studies are walked on leads.¹³ What they’ll do with their days on this Earth, and the relationships that will be made or broken for them, will depend upon what funding becomes available, what diploma needs to be awarded, or what book needs to be written.

Let Untamed Beings Be

For too long, animals have been plucked out of their own spaces and stuck in labs, zoos, and roadside shows. And now, people are making labs and zoos out of the habitat itself.

The Great Ape Project hopes to involve Spanish communities with the Jane Goodall Institute in Africa.¹⁴ So what’s the Goodall Institute up to these days? In Uganda, together with the Walt Disney Company and USAID, the Goodall Institute markets forest-dwelling apes by “habituating” them for tourism. The Goodall habituation project is cited in promotional literature from an outfit called Magic Safaris, which also boasts of a rehabilitation site on Uganda’s Ngamba Island where chimpanzees are “fed four times a day and this is a spectacular moment for visitors. Good photo opportunities as well.”

Magic Safari explains that the process involves two years of manipulation. Once habituated, or trained to accept humans, the chimpanzees are subjected to “a continuous day-by-day focus. Problems can occur…” Evidently, not all of these individuals are thrilled to stop living on their terms and be turned into a moving zoo.

Gorillas face the similar intrusions. At a conference sponsored by the U.S. government, Rwanda’s minister of Trade and Industry spoke of gorillas (the Virunga Mountains are home to nearly half of the world’s 700 or so mountain gorillas) as a common resource of Uganda, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and Rwanda.¹⁵ There’s money in endangered species; tourism nets Rwanda millions of dollars each year.

Forest-dwelling chimpanzees have also been habituated for research. Some focuses on the effects of logging. But contrast the views expressed when, early this year, an isolated human tribe was reportedly spotted in Brazil. The director of Survival International said such tribes would “be made extinct” if loggers get their land, yet the integrity and privacy of the people is so respected that debate raged even over taking photos of “uncontacted” tribes to prove they exist to stop logging.

When a BBC journalist signed up for a tourist trip to make “first contact” with a West Papuan tribe, Survival’s director Stephen Corry objected, “Tourists could threaten these peoples, especially through the risk of bringing in disease.” If the filmed encounter was real, said Corry, “the tour operator and tourists should be ashamed of themselves.”

If animal rights are to have real meaning at all, no words get nearer to their core than the simple right to be let alone. That very concept arose in an 1890 Harvard Law Review article co-authored by the future Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis.¹⁶ Troubled by the distress caused by intrusive reporters, Samuel Warren and Louis Brandeis proposed a new tort: the invasion of privacy. Their aim was to shield the individual from “popular curiosity” and to respect the “inviolate personality” as “part of the more general right to the immunity of the person.”

Almost 40 years later, Justice Brandeis wrote that the Constitution’s framers conferred, against the government, “the right to be let alone — the most comprehensive of rights and the right most valued by civilized men.”¹⁷ And surely, at the core of non-human rights is the right to life, to liberty of movement, and to an inviolate personality — the right to be let alone. For other animals, the right’s significance shines with particular intensity. For them, enjoying the most comprehensive of rights would mean regaining the freedom from being subjected to our notions of civilization entirely.

The Way Ahead

The time is ripe for all primates’ rights. In 2005, a panel of 22 scientists, lawyers, and philosophers reported the results of an extended debate over the wisdom of inserting human stem cells into monkey brains, noting the team’s scientists weren’t sure how to ethically separate humans from other primates. And time is of the essence, with nearly half of all communities of primates at risk of extinction due to our hunting and clear-cutting, including for resource-guzzling animal agribusiness. Primates’ rights would project a clear message: Our “go forth and multiply” approach is desperately outdated.

Wesley J. Smith, a senior fellow at the Discovery Institute, warns that animal rights would “destroy the unique status of man and thus initiate a wholesale transformation of Western civilization.” Seems to me a wholesale transformation is just what’s needed. Only a paradigm shift will have us live in a manner reconcilable with ethics, and the undeniable reality that we are part of a biosphere.

So let’s do it. Let’s allow chimpanzees to live in their lands, rather expect them to have babies in zoos and language labs. Let’s teach our children a bird in the hand’s certainly not worth two in the bush. Let’s leave Chilean Sea Bass in the Chilean Sea. Let’s have peaceable cookbooks. And let’s be careful, as we go, to respect rights. For the world’s free-living beings, that would mean respecting their interest in simply being let alone.

* Lee Hall co-authored the article “From Property to Person: The Case of Evelyn Hart” (showing the constitutional arguments that could be presented in the U.S. court system in support of legal personhood for non-human apes), and also facilitates the project “Great Ape Standing and Personhood” (GRASP) as legal director for Friends of Animals.

1. See Martin Roberts, “Spanish Parliament to Extend Rights to Apes,” Reuters (25 Jun. 2008). For earlier news history, see Emilio de Benito, “El PSOE Propone el Fin de la ‘Esclavitud’ de los Grandes Simios,” El País (25 Apr. 2006).
2. Paola Cavalieri and Peter Singer, eds., The Great Ape Project (first printing 1993 by Fourth Estate, London). The book articulated a goal of obtaining a U.N. declaration welcoming apes into a “community of equals” with humans.
3. See “Sobre el PGS (About the Great Ape Project).” Pedro Pozas Terrados is quoted by Martin Roberts, “Spanish Parliament to Extend Rights to Apes (see note 1).
4. “Activists Pursue Basic Legal Rights for Great Apes,” USA Today (15 Jul. 2008). Emphasis mine.
5. See Boletín de la Asociación Primatológica Española, Vol. 9, No. 3 (Sep. 2002).
6. Research at Mona has included studies meant to help adjust primates to refuge life and studies that use them instrumentally and reinforce the image of humans atop an “evolutionary ladder.” According to Mona’s website (visited 23 Jul. 2008), “Because of their contact with humans, some of Mona’s chimps have leapt up the evolutionary ladder in terms of the skills they have, and so the results of this study could provide answers about the evolution human societies.”
7. For more on the legal history of this issue see Lee Hall and Anthony Jon Waters, “From Property to Person: The Case of Evelyn Hart,” Seton Hall Constitutional Law Journal (2000).
8. Adam Cohen, Editorial Observer: “What’s Next in the Law? The Unalienable Rights of Chimps,” New York Times (14 Jul. 2008).
9. Catharine A. MacKinnon, “A Feminist Fragment on Animal Rights,” in Animal Rights: Current Debates and New Directions, at 270 (Cass R. Sunstein & Martha C. Nussbaum eds., 2004).
10. Public Law 106-551 (HR 3514); applies to apes used in labs run for U.S. agencies. Chimp Haven (and any private entity which might be awarded a contract under the Act) must provide at least $1 for each $3 of federal funds needed to run the housing system. The law anticipates operating costs up to $30,000,000 annually. Maintaining a great ape in a research laboratory over a 5-year lifespan can cost between $300,000 and $500,000, compared to an approximate cost of $275,000 for care outside that setting, says the text of the proposed Great Ape Protection Act.
11. Singer’s Great Ape Project never opposed this. The group openly supported the bill and only expressed reservations when it was amended, as GAP wrote, “to allow chimpanzees to be removed from the retirement facility” — the same provision Goodall hoped to avoid, as described later in this essay. But at all times the law permitted some types of research, saved money for federal research projects using apes, and accepted the idea that only “surplus” apes were to be moved to the euphemistically termed “retirement” sites.
12. Although the statement is ambiguous, and could be read as endorsing operations for the health of chimpanzees, Goodall’s remark was made in answer to this question from hearing chair Michael Bilirakis: “Dr. Strandberg, from the NIH, is going to testify that the NIH can’t support this legislation because it would make the animals permanently unavailable for study or monitoring. Expand upon that. What is your feeling there? How strongly do you feel about their not being available for invasive research procedures?” Goodall’s immediate response began: “Well, I think the most important thing here is can they be left in the sanctuary and there are certain procedures, even over and above taking blood which could be carried out…” See Statement of Jane Goodall, Ph.D. CBE, Director of Science and Research for the Jane Goodall Institute, before the House of Representatives’ Committee on Commerce, Subcommittee on Health and Environment, hearing on H.R. 3514, Chimpanzee Health Improvement, Maintenance and Protection Act (18 May 2000). Transcript on file with author and available upon request.
13. See Russell Tuttle, Apes of the World (1986), at 202 (discussing the chimpanzees Roger Fouts used in language studies). See also Francine Patterson and Eugene Linden, The Education of Koko (1981); representative chapter (indicating a leash was needed after infancy for a gorilla in sign-language research) (link last visited 10 Aug. 2008). For a photo of Kanzi, a celebrated bonobo, out of the laboratory setting and held on a leash, see Sue Savage-Rumbaugh, et al., Apes, Language, and the Human Mind (1998), at 7, 33 (discussing the lead as a tool of necessity, but avoided as long as possible, “since the more freedom Kanzi had, the more he encountered and elected to talk about at the keyboard.”).
14. This involves educational collaborations with the Jane Goodall Institute in Congo-Brazzaville; see the March 2007 Spanish-language press release generated by the Great Ape Project in Spain.
15. Martin Tindiwensi, “Rwanda: United States to Support Mountain Gorilla Conservation,” The [Kigali] New Times (22 Jul. 2008).
16. Samuel Warren and Louis Brandeis, “The Right to Privacy,” Harvard Law Review (Vol. 4, No. 5; Dec. 1890).
17. Olmstead v. United States, 277 U.S. 438, 478 (1928) (Brandeis, J. dissenting; with reference to the Fourth Amendment).

Those who also eat eggs, cream and the like are, to be precise, ovo-lacto-vegetarians.

John Davis, historian for the International Vegetarian Union (the umbrella group of vegetarian societies worldwide), wrote in The Origins of the “Vegetarians” that the word “vegetarian” first appeared between 1838 and 1843, at the Ham House of Ham Common (understandably re-named Alcott House by 1843). The students at this English school, Davis reported, followed a completely plant-based diet, based on the British socialist principles of John Stuart Mill, and the ideas which Bronson Alcott taught in Boston.

Today, vegetarian groups vary in their definitions. Most vegetarians in India never cook with eggs.

But some linguistic capers are afoot. A few months ago, a company in New Delhi launched “low-cholesterol, vegetarian eggs.” In the U.S., the vegetarian-egg label has been spotted at the Trader Joe’s grocery chain. Depending on the target market, the term is used to communicate that the eggs are unfertilized, or that the hens who laid them weren’t fed animal products.

In India especially, the suggestion that certain eggs would be suitable for the vegetarian’s shopping list would change the accepted definition of vegetarian. And that’s just what some corporations would like. To them, India is an untapped market for eggs.

Selling Eggs in India

Skylark Hatcheries is one of India’s largest egg companies.¹ Humane Society International (an arm of the Humane Society of the United States), brought Skylark’s management stateside this summer to tour egg factories. Skylark Hatcheries director Surendra Singh said, “After visiting the HSI office and staff, my faith in this society increased.”

Nitin Goel, corporate marketing manager for the Humane Society of the United States in India, also visited. “Around the world,” Goel opined in an HSUS press release, “the trend is away from outdated battery cage systems and toward a more humane and sustainable approach to producing eggs.”² This ignores the reality that eggs are not part of most traditional foods of India — the birthplace of ahimsa, a rule of conduct that bars the killing or injuring of conscious beings — and that the rapid trend in India to high-volume egg and chicken flesh production is recent; and none of these businesses, regardless of the approach to production, need be promoted at all.³

The National Egg Co-ordination Committee, founded in the early eighties to represent chicken farm owners in India, set out to raise the country’s annual per capita consumption from 19 eggs to about 150 by the end of the twentieth century.⁴ To this end they’ve pointed out that the eggs produced by their birds are unfertilized and should therefore qualify as vegetarian products.⁵ They’ve also downplayed cholesterol concerns and advertised egg protein as “second only to mother’s milk for human nutrition.” (It’s no surprise that the chickpeas, peas, lentils and rice that sustained centuries of traditional Indian cuisine contain complete sources of protein.)

“Do not eat eggs,” warned the Indian Vegetarian Congress when egg promoters turned up at a marathon in western India in 1987.⁶ You’d think animal protectionists could see it in their hearts to back that message. Or at least not thwart it. The Humane Society of the United States holds itself out as the “mainstream force against cruelty, exploitation and neglect.” You might think, then, that the HSUS would steer clear of promoting the eating of any eggs, especially amongst groups that historically haven’t touched them.

I’ll leave to your imagination — or to the excellent educators at HumaneMyth.org — a picture of what happens to the exhausted hens and the male chicks owned by these egg companies. And to the extent that any hens truly do receive more space, that’s space on the face of a finite Earth (read: habitat for other animals) bulldozed over by development and industry.⁷ It’s bizarre on several levels, then, to see animal advocates lavishing praise and international travel on an egg company.

But the Humane Society’s egg crusaders are on a roll. Just a few months before the Indian executives were flown to its offices, a release appeared from a competing group, the American Humane Association, which had certified cage-free and organic lines from Eggland’s Best, “America’s No. 1 branded egg,” as “produced humanely.”⁸ The release called this certification “a watershed moment for the growing humane animal certification movement.” The American Humane Association also pointed out that (in 1999) they developed the first such certification process in the United States.

American Humane promised marketing benefits to producers who would pick their label, and the release offered a platform for the CEO of Eggland’s Best to talk about “delivering the best tasting and most nutritious eggs to our consumers.”

After a few years of similar promotions in the United States, eggs from “cage-free” hens have become so popular that national shortages were reported by 2007.⁹

This year, the Humane Society of the United States issued a press release which “praised Kegg Farms today for being the first egg producer in India” to introduce the term “cage-free” on egg packages.¹⁰ An industry publication noted the “shower of praise” this company was getting for the new “cage-free” label¹¹; and the Humane Society even circulated its own picture with the caption “Cage-free hens at Kegg Farms,” showing a large collection of snow-white birds.

But look around a bit at the business publications, and you’ll learn more: “Kegg Farms’ genetically-bred chicken survives on waste, weighs more and gives more eggs than the normal village bird.”

That’s right. The vaunted Kegg company is noted for pressing chickens to turn out five times as many eggs in their “18-month cycle” as other birds, and ensuring they’re genetically bred to eat waste.

More Than a Diet

To the founders of the Vegetarian Society — both in England and in North America — vegetarianism was an ethical commitment. By the early 1900s, the Vegetarian Society’s Vegetarian Messenger expressly supported a diet free of eggs and dairy, listing both ethical and health objections to the use of these foods. The claim that products derived from chickens are “vegetarian” is incompatible with this history.

Animal advocates who see the use of birds as fundamentally unjust would simply withhold their support for such businesses. They could then ask others to similarly disengage from the industry, thereby cultivating a movement that respects traditions of dynamic nonviolence.

True animal advocacy supports and joins, rather than confounds, the vegetarian movement.

1. HSUS press release: “Indian Egg Industry Leaders Travel to USA to Explore Cage-Free Housing Systems for Hens” (10 Jun. 2008).
2. In the “Facts” section of same release, the HSUS states: “While cage-free does not mean cruelty-free, cage-free hens generally have 250 percent to 300 percent more space per bird and the hens are able to act more naturally than caged hens. Cage-free hens may not be able to go outside, but they are able to walk, spread their wings and lay their eggs in nests — all behaviors denied to hens confined in battery cages.” Tribe of Heart’s “Take the ‘Cage-Free’ Test” offers a sobering counterpoint.
3. For a description of vegetarian resistance to egg promotions in India, see Sanjoy Hazarika, “Campaign for Egg Eating Stirs Storm in India,” New York Times (27 Dec. 1987). The same promotional trend surrounds the bodies of chickens themselves. Spotting an emerging market, Tyson Foods Inc. this year acquired majority ownership of Godrej Foods Ltd., forming Godrej Tyson Foods, with annual sales to begin around $50 million and grow as the corporation expands. India has more than a billion people, and while the per capita consumption of chicken flesh is currently less than five pounds a year, its annual growth rate of more than 10 percent is among the world’s highest. See Tom Johnston, “Tyson Enters Joint Venture in India,” MeatingPlace.com (30 Jun. 2008; quoting Rick Greubel, international president for Tyson Foods).
4. “Campaign for Egg Eating Stirs Storm in India” (note 3; quoting the committee’s spokesperson, P. V. R. Murthy).
5. See ibid.
6. “Campaign for Egg Eating Stirs Storm in India” (note 3).
7. Underscoring this point is a recent study by Adrian Williams, PhD., senior research fellow at Cranfield University in Britain, indicating battery egg production has a 10% lower impact on global warming than conversion to all free-range egg production; converting to all organic egg production, the study predicts, would cause an increase of effects on global warming by 40%. This is because free-range and organic farms have more need for green space, food and energy than battery eggs.
8. The American Humane Association’s news release “Eggland’s Best To Receive Certification By American Humane Association” (8 Oct. 2007) was followed a week later by a similarly worded release in Food & Drink Quarterly.
9. Kim Severson, “Bringing Moos and Oinks Into the Food Debate,” International Herald Tribune (25 Jul. 2007).
10. HSI press release: “Kegg Farms Becomes First Indian Egg Producer to Label Eggs ‘Cage-Free’” (2 Apr. 2008) (visited 2 Jul. 2008). For more on the entanglement of animal-advocacy organizations with global animal agribusiness, see the Humane Myth Analysis of the Humane Society of the United States and its new ‘Humane Choice’ label.
11. The Poultry Site: “Indian Egg-layers Escape the Cage,” Poultry News (10 Apr. 2008) (visited 2 Jul. 2008).

The plan: An employee from an animal-advocacy group would go, as a stockholder, to the annual meeting of Hormel Foods Corp. in Austin, Minnesota. As in previous years, said the newspaper, the group was “imploring Hormel to adopt what it says is a less-cruel slaughter method as turkeys make their way to store shelves and kitchens around the world.”

The subject of this imploring, in a nutshell: The activist group wants Hormel to discontinue electrical stun baths and shift to the exclusive use of controlled-atmosphere killing. The latter method kills birds by putting them into a chamber containing nitrogen or argon, possibly mixed with CO2, to cut off their oxygen supply. The group has, in the past, offered to drop the shareholder resolution if Temple Grandin, a slaughter plant design expert, would be allowed to inspect Hormel’s sites to certify they were using a gas technique.

Shareholder resolutions gained popularity in activist circles when noted organizer Saul Alinsky (1909-1972) recommended them as tools to obtain change from within the corporate system. Alinsky was striving to lend a voice to marginalized communities and disenfranchised workers. Even if one accepts Alinsky’s advice in the context of workers’ rights, can this same recommendation be applied to a movement for animal rights?

Turkeys aren’t asking to be enfranchised into human society. Nor are animal-use industries suited to advance a social movement that’s inimical to their purpose.

Activists who see the use of birds as fundamentally unjust (rather than simply “cruel”) would be better advised to withhold their support for such businesses. They could then ask others to similarly disengage from the industry, thereby cultivating a movement of conscientious objection to the system that permits other animals to be systematically controlled, commodified, and killed. By the same token, the fair-trade movement stands on its own, asking us not to support companies whose raw materials involve child slavery; similarly, many people refuse to invest in the arms industry for reasons of conscience. Divestment was notably central in the struggle against South Africa’s apartheid system. As early as the 18th century, the Quakers resisted the slave trade by refusing to invest in any business linked to it, and they opened “free labor stores” whose customers could avoid related products.

Declining to support a purveyor of turkey flesh takes that kind of principled commitment and applies it to animal-rights activism. The principle says you can’t cultivate a movement by reducing advocates to consultants who propose and inspect the methods of exploitation and killing.

As long as animals are bought and sold, there will be a host of deplorable ways to house them, reproduce them, ship and finally kill them. And that opens the door for the development and promotion of “new and improved” ways of doing these things. Yes, stun baths are a hideous thing to contemplate; I wouldn’t want to be headed to one. And though I don’t pretend to speak for birds, I’m quite sure they wouldn’t either, and that they’d also feel frightened being loaded into a truck in which gas is delivered, or a chamber with other crates of birds, trapped, oxygen-starved, and dying. Those are just examples of the many things Hormel would do to a body. If we don’t need to consume the turkeys, why suggest any of this could somehow be an inspiring plan? Why use activists’ time and supporters’ hard-earned money this way — and on top of everything, call it animal-rights work? Insisting that birds be gassed to death reinforces the legal and social reality of the utter rightlessness of animals.

Shrewd executives are prepared to manage activism and co-opt its messages to enhance the company’s efficiency or reputation; and this, over time, can support corporate expansion. As a matter of fact, the activists publicly talk about gassing as cost-efficient for Hormel’s subsidiaries to adopt, thereby making it a “win-win situation for Hormel and animals.”¹

In its Shareholder Statement, published online for last year’s annual meeting, the animal- advocacy group describes controlled-atmosphere killing in unnervingly rosy language: “CAK is a huge win for the company! CAK is proven to increase meat yield, improve meat quality, lower energy costs, decrease worker turnover and injury rates, decrease carcass contamination, and much more! And the return on investment is undisputable.”²

Meanwhile, human population and economic trends are accelerating the global consumption of meat and dairy products, with devastating consequences to the environment and the global grain supply as well as to the animals themselves. The United Nations has not only acknowledged that animal agribusiness is responsible for more greenhouse gas emissions than the entire transport sector; it’s also predicted that by 2016 — just eight years from now — people in the developing countries will be eating 30 percent more beef, 50 percent more pig meat and 25 percent more birds.³ The Hormel shareholder resolution does nothing to challenge that consumption; on the contrary, such a proposal arguably serves to lend it legitimacy.

Conscientious Objection

Decades ago, the Vegan Society invented a sunflower logo to help people easily identify and support products and restaurants that meet the society’s principled standards. And just a few years ago the Vegan-Organic Network created a symbol to certify vegetable growers who work without pesticides, animal manure or blood. Representing the conviction that the only way to respect farm animals is to stop having them, these symbols are hallmarks of a truly radical approach to investing: a conscientious objection to turning sentient beings into commodities. As it happens, Tofurkey — an alternative to turkey slices, available throughout North America — carries the vegan sunflower logo.

But might there be situations in which activists could make effective use of stockholder actions without compromising principle or damaging the cause? I asked Priscilla Feral, whose organization I admire enough to work for. Priscilla described one scenario:

In the early nineties we did organize a shareholder resolution to keep a health-products company from acquiring dogs to use in sales demonstrations of surgical staples. The company didn’t use dogs or other animals as test specimens; that wasn’t its role, or an inherent part of its functioning. The company was going to buy the dogs and use them to teach and promote a novel sales technique, and our goal was to preclude their use of animals completely.

We kept bringing the resolution until someone brought up a regulation that barred minority resolutions which had been rejected a certain number of times. Meanwhile we raised hell for animals, and we obviously annoyed the corporation — I, the supposed insider, was arrested at the door of the company — and we raised awareness about vivisection. We weren’t imploring anybody to kill animals in a specific way, or use them according to certain standards. On the contrary, we sought to absolutely exclude the use of animals.

I’m standing for people who expect us to cultivate a movement, and that means relentlessly challenging the exploitation of animals. It’s a serious mistake to swap a commitment to justice for short-term, media-grabbing performances that pretend animals win even as they’re being slaughtered and consumed. That trivializes everything animal rights stands for. The animals win? The animals are betrayed twice — once by the profit system, and again by the non-profit system. Animal advocates can do better than that.⁴

And what of the ramifications of activist groups approving — as the Hormel resolution does — certain methods of husbandry and killing as painless and humane? Worldwide, this is a public-relations boon for an industry that’s become particularly vulnerable, in this time of climate change, to serious, root-level critique.

In the book Alternative Health Practices for Livestock (Blackwell, 2006), editors Thomas F. Morris and Michael T. Keilty focus on ways farmers can deal with the controversy over whether animal agribusiness is environmentally sustainable. In the chapter “Economics of Niche Marketing in Alternative Livestock Farming,” Gary L. Valen describes alternatives to typical confinement systems — the low-cost, rounded-top and open-ended hoop barns, for example — as “a marketing strategy that draws attention from consumers with special interests” to support certain production methods.

For example, writes Valen, “Hoop barns are also endorsed by the Humane Society of the United States (HSUS) as ‘a humane and environmentally friendly methods [sic] of housing pigs’ (HSUS, 2001). This is a strong example of how alternative livestock farmers receive marketing assistance at no cost from national organizations that promote animal welfare, environmental sensitivity, and public health.”

And early this year, the environment editor for The Observer produced an article under the title “Veal Back on a Guilt-Free British Menu.” Veal, of course, is the flesh of calves, the offspring of dairy cows who, in turn, are forced to spend their lives pregnant, separated from their nursing young, then re-impregnated. The “guilt-free” version of this hellish existence means the calves receive some roughage and freedom of movement, and the higher level of iron in their blood casts a telltale pink hue on the cutlets these animals are destined to become.

The article’s subtitle reads, “After farming reforms, animal welfare lobbyists and top chefs are endorsing a once shunned dish.” Celebrity chef Gordon Ramsay is promoting the “rosé” veal. Wolfgang Puck has been praised by some advocates for avoiding “cruel veal” after making a similar switch. Puck has also announced new animal-husbandry standards based on input from the animal-advocacy sector –- an initiative which, filmmakers James LaVeck and Jenny Stein point out, “succeeds brilliantly at marketing Puck’s expensive products, among which veal is one of the top selling items.” Advocates for animals have transformed themselves into advertisers of guilt-free veal. Where did principles go?

Principles are traded away for massive investments into campaigns purporting to ameliorate the worst abuses of industry. This focus, to borrow Thoreau’s turn of phrase, has many activists hacking at the branches of the evil rather than striking at its root. To go to the root would uncover an uncomplicated truth: We need not buy what the Hormels, Pucks and Ramsays of the world are selling.

At some point, people must remember what advocacy really is. Our role is to show people what to strive for rather than what to settle for. As with any other centuries-old custom of subjugation, no one of us easily transcends the firmly ingrained habits associated with our domination of other animals. We’ve long entitled ourselves to treat the rest of the planet’s life as though it were purposefully made for us. But if we call ourselves animal-rights proponents, ours is the work of fundamentally transforming our relationship to the beings with whom we share this world. It is our work to cultivate, in ourselves and our society, a culture of nonviolence and respect — for those beings, and for the principles that give meaning to our time on Earth.

* Thanks to Julie Muir for discussions helpful to this writing.

1. “Controlled-atmosphere killing will spare turkeys from outrageous abuse, decrease worker injuries, and save the company money,” says Bruce Friedrich of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals. “It’s a win-win situation for Hormel and animals.” Press release, “PETA to Address Hormel Shareholders About Company’s Cruelty to Turkeys: Group Asks Stockholders to Support Proposal Seeking Less Cruel, More Profitable Slaughter System” (29 Jan. 2007). The Shareholder Statement included in this release says, “This technology is win-win for everyone — animals, plant employees, and especially Hormel and its shareholders.” It further states, “You should know that major customers of Hormel are beginning to question why the company is not looking into CAK — and they are asking us for the names of plants that can provide this slaughter method. Imagine the impact on our shares if we lose huge customers because of this.”
2. See “PETA to Address Hormel Shareholders About Company’s Cruelty to Turkeys: Group Asks Stockholders to Support Proposal Seeking Less Cruel, More Profitable Slaughter System” (ibid.).
3. Gwynne Dyer, “Biofuel Mania Ends Days of Cheap Food,” New Zealand Herald, 10 July 10, 2007.
4. From a conversation with Priscilla Feral, January 29, 2008.

Toy clones manufactured for children aged three and up, sold by Club Earth, a Rhode Island company. Photo by Lee Hall, who thanks Lisa M. Stanley for finding them.

The European Union is poised to follow along, clearing the way for international trade to accept clone-derived flesh and dairy products. The European Food Safety Authority has announced, “[A]ssuming that unhealthy clones are removed from entering the food chain, it is very unlikely that any difference exists in terms of food safety between food products originating from clones and their progeny compared with those derived from conventionally bred animals.”

What are these people thinking?

The FDA is pushing this plan at the behest of a few heads of companies who promise replicas of animals most likely to be transformed into prime beef and bacon, or prolific milk producers. The dairy industry, which is already so prolific that taxpayers must buy surplus milk, has not championed the idea. Expecting to benefit most from the approval are the actual clonemakers, like Texas-based ViaGen, Inc., which is backed by billionaire investor John Sperling.¹ ViaGen’s website boasts of cloning the “legendary barrel racing champion Scamper” and shows “calves cloned from Kung Fu, the mother of many famous rodeo bulls.”

The Federation of Animal Science Societies has run a PR campaign for cloning. “The entertainment industry has used the word ‘clone’ in a negative context,” said Jerry Baker, the group’s chief executive. “That’s a hard one for us to overcome, but we have to continue to try.”²

While nonhuman cloning has always been legal in the United States, a voluntary moratorium on the sales of clones’ milk and flesh has applied since 2001. A 2002 National Academy of Science report concluded that products derived from cloned animals do not “present a food safety concern,” and the FDA gave a tentative approval in 2003, but retreated after its advisory panel reported a lack of consensus.

But they’ve gone and done it now.

“Meat and milk from cattle, swine and goat clones is as safe to eat as the food we eat every day,” said Stephen Sundlof, the FDA’s head vet. Sounds like the vet from Hell. Clones die from respiratory, digestive, circulatory, nervous, muscular, skeletal and placental abnormalities. Cows die trying to bear grotesquely oversized calves. Piglets have been born without anuses and tails — a fatal condition. Far more cloning attempts fail than succeed.³ All beside the point, Sundlof says. “There is just not anything there that is conceivably hazardous to the public health.”

So there we have it: Cows, pigs and goats, our species has spoken. You’re cleared for cloning.⁴ Far be it for this government to have spent its time on actually helpful ideas, like cleaning up some of those toxic lagoons streaming from the many millions of farm animals already existing.

Rock Stars of the Barnyard

This month has seen the human cloning debate revived in light of some startling events. Not only did the CEO of a small California biotech company put DNA from his own skin into a human egg to begin the process of making human clones⁵; additionally, Britain’s Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority has just cleared the way for cow-human hybrid embryos to be created for disease research.⁶

The United Nations’ Declaration on Human Cloning asks member states to “prohibit all forms of human cloning inasmuch as they are incompatible with human dignity and the protection of human life.” The dignity of nonhuman life attracts far less notice. A widely cited series of polls carried out by the Pew Initiative on Food and Biotechnology reported that over 60 percent of U.S. consumers are uncomfortable with animal cloning, but only about 10 percent of those respondents saw the animals at the core of their discomfort.

The cloning companies dismiss their concerns with the most cavalier statements. “Cloning enhances animal wellbeing,” declares the Biotechnology Industry Organization; and Clonesafety.org, sponsored by cloning firms Cyagra, stART Licensing, and ViaGen, assures us: “In fact, clones are the ‘rock stars’ of the barnyard, and therefore are treated like royalty.”

With a strained informality, proponents speak of clones as later-born twins of their originals, and of cloning as merely expanding the reproduction technology available to farmers since the 1950s.

Early last year, when a calf of a cloned cow was born in Britain, Simon Gee of the breeder’s group Holstein UK said the calf, Dundee Paradise, resulted from “conventional breeding technology” and was “born as the majority of the 220,000 animals that we register in the U.K. every year are born — as a result of artificial insemination.”⁷

But the majority of those registered animals don’t come from embryos imported from U.S. labs, as Dundee Paradise did.

Still, if domination and control is at the core of cloning, then the basis of the problem is the public’s willingness to consume animals in the first place. If animals can be bred, born and viewed as food items, virtually any manipulation will, sooner or later, be allowed. At a fundamental level, that’s why statements from the Organic Consumers Association, or from any other well-meaning group that declines to question the commodification of animals, lack the power to stop this.

Cloners will even have the audacity to put on environmentalist airs. ViaGen, which currently charges $17,500 to clone a cow and $4,000 for a pig, and which, over the past few years, has provided more than 400 cloned animals to government scientists⁸, has also mused about one day offering pro bono services to stave off extinctions. But any serious bid to protect vulnerable groups of animals would confront habitat degradation and other causes of accelerated extinction. And scientists who plan to routinely clone for animal agribusiness are supporting the very industry that’s ruining habitats throughout the world.

Procedure Is Everything

Maryland Senator Barbara Mikulski accused the U.S. government of acting “recklessly”; but Mikulski’s concern was focused on a lack of labels to show which flesh and milk is which.⁹ The cloning companies said they could keep track of the animals.¹⁰ Kind of. “The progeny of clones aren’t clones, so there’s really nothing to track anyway,” ViaGen’s president has said.¹¹

The European Commission has vowed to consult consumers before its final ruling in May. British supermarket chains are rushing to voice their policies against stocking cloned products, but how they’d identify products from clones’ offspring is a mystery.

A group whose role actually allows ethics to be considered did officially weigh in. After several months (months!) of internal meetings, of discussions with experts, and of gathering public views through the Internet, the European Group on Ethics of science and new technologies presented its opinion to the EC.¹²

But the opinion of the ethics group speaks mainly of food safety. It wants “consumer rights and freedoms” respected even as it invokes the Amsterdam Treaty (which views animals as sentient beings) and the World Organisation for Animal Health’s “five freedoms” for animals: to behave normally and avoid malnutrition, fear, physical discomfort, injury and disease. Freedom from cloners didn’t make the list.

The ethics bureaucrats ask the Commission to say whether patents will apply, and to regulate it all through a “Code of Conduct on responsible farm animal breeding, including animal cloning.”

But a glimmer of hope remains, says the Daily Mail: The recently appointed environment secretary, Hilary Benn, is “a vegetarian who takes the suffering of farm animals particularly seriously.”¹³

Sort of. Benn duly pledged to “wholeheartedly support beef, pork and chicken farmers and the meat industry” after being named Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs last summer.”¹⁴

On the 19th of January, eight days after the European Food Safety Authority gave its preliminary nod to cloned groceries, I visited Benn’s website, entered “cloning” into the search field, and watched the result appear.

“Sorry, but you are looking for something that isn’t here.”

1. For related history see Renuka Rayasam, “FDA Ruling Could Boost Texas Biotech Firm,” U.S. News & World Report, December 28, 2006, explaining:

   Privately held ViaGen, started in 2001 and backed by billionaire investor John Sperling, hasn’t had the money troubles that have plagued rivals. The octogenarian Sperling founded the for-profit University of Phoenix in 1976, now part of the publicly traded Apollo Group. For almost 10 years, he has doled out money to back a number of projects, including a failed attempt to clone his dog Missy. Her picture now hangs in ViaGen’s office as inspiration.

2. As quoted by Karen Kaplan, “FDA Declares Cloned Meat, Milk Safe,” Los Angeles Times, January 16, 2008.
3. Moreover, experimenters test out the animal products from clones by forcing mice and other animals to ingest them. See Maggie Fox, “Cloned Animals Miserable, but Safe to Eat,” Herald Sun [Australia], January 16, 2008.
4. The U.S. Department of Agriculture “is encouraging the technology producers to maintain their voluntary moratorium on sending milk and meat from animal clones into the food supply during this transition time.” But suppliers aren’t expected to sell parts of cloned animals, who are seen as breeders. It’s the milk and meat from the cloned animals’ offspring that U.S. companies may now send into the retail market.
5. Delthia Ricks, “Scientists Make Human Embryo Clone,” Newsday [Long Island, NY], January 18, 2008, describing the project reported from the laboratories of Stemagen Corp.
6. Clive Cookson, “Go-ahead for Hybrid Embryo Work,” Financial Times, January 18, 2008, reporting on the approval made public the day before.
7. Similarly, Biotechnology Industry Organization chief Jim Greenwood has said, “Animal cloning is the latest step in a long history of reproductive tools for farmers and ranchers, and can effectively help livestock producers deliver what consumers want: high-quality, safe, abundant and nutritious foods in a conscientious and consistent manner.” BIO press release: “FDA Announces Safety of Food Products from Cloned Animals and Their Offspring,” December 28, 2006.
8. See Note 2.
9. “U.S. Authorities Approve Cloned Animal Foods,” Agence France-Presse, January 15, 2008.
10. See Andrew Pollack, “System to Track Cloned Animals Is Planned,” New York Times, December 19, 2007. ViaGen and Trans Ova Genetics of Iowa claim to have devised an electronic registry system to track cloned animals for a substantial fee.
11. See Note 2 above; quoting ViaGen’s Mark Walton.
12. In February 2007, following the FDA announcement concerning possible approval of products derived from cloned cattle, pigs and goats for the grocery market, European Commission president José Manuel Barroso requested the opinion. Press release: “European Group on Ethics adopts its opinion nr. 23 on ethical aspects of animal cloning for food supply,” January 16, 2008.
13. Sean Poulter, “EU Gives Green Light for Cloned Food to Go on Sale in U.K. shops,” Daily Mail, January 11, 2008; reporting on the European Food Safety Authority’s draft opinion.
14. “Vegetarian Benn Takes Charge of Environment,” Telegraph, June 29, 2007.

But we humans don’t like anyone else getting the upper hand, claw or fang. Wherever our industry advances, predators are conquered, pushed to marginal lands, kept behind fences, domesticated, used by the elite as lifestyle accessories, paraded down streets and on stages.

Ruth Gordon, as Maude Chardin in the delightful film Harold and Maude, observed in 1971, “Zoos are full, prisons are overflowing; oh my, how the world still dearly loves a cage.” Gordon has since passed away. Cages, and the world’s love for them, remain.

And yet, polls taken today do show most of the public opposing animal circuses — at least in Britain, and at least when it comes to non-domesticated animals.

Fewer than 50 such animals are still owned by four British circuses, including seven tigers and five lions, five zebras, several camels, llamas, crocodiles and snakes, a kangaroo and an elephant called Anne. Only the Great British Circus still uses lions and tigers. The owner insists they enjoy a good life, despite their cramped quarters.

“Circus animals have a very mentally and physically stimulating day,” says lion trainer Martin Lacey. “Rather like police dogs and police horses who at the end of the day go back to their stable or kennel because that’s all they require.”³

The Animal Welfare Act of 2006 was expected to pave the way for a ban on non-domesticated animals in circuses by 2008 — if scientific evidence would prove animals in British circuses were suffering. But an international panel of experts concluded there’s no proof they suffer more than other captive animals. The panel took captivity for granted, although captivity is what’s fundamentally wrong with the way we treat circus animals. It’s what’s fundamentally wrong with the way we treat the others as well.

Some campaigners hope to see circuses subjected to the Zoo Licensing Act, because many British circuses will fall short of zoo standards and go out of business. But such a strategy suggests that zoos provide an acceptable quality of life to animals who should have been allowed to stay in their habitats to experience freedom.

Tatiana’s Last Day

Underscoring the wrong done by zoos is the recent death of a young Siberian tiger known as Tatiana, who broke out of confinement in California’s San Francisco Zoo, killed a person, and was shot.

The zoo’s director of animal care and conservation, Robert Jenkins, could not explain the 300-pound cat’s escape, for the enclosure involves high walls and a moat.⁴ But near closing time, just outside the enclosure, the young tiger caught and killed one young human being. A zoo employee dialed 911. When a group of four police officers arrived, the cat was reportedly attacking another youth about 300 yards away, in front of the Terrace Café. The police confronted the cat, and fired their handguns.

The media paused for a moment, as though in shock. Then came the stories about how unusual the attack was: The dead zoo customer, and two others who were attacked in the same incident, must have been drunk. An unidentified source said they carried slingshots. The fence was lower than the standard height. The zoo management had previous problems. And so forth — essentially painting the picture that the tragedy belonged to this zoo, not all zoos.

Advocates walked into the same trap. A San Francisco media outlet quoted Elliot Katz, who presides over California-based In Defense of Animals (IDA), as saying this particular zoo has a history of provoking the cats and inducing them to growl for audiences in “public feeding spectacles.”⁵

Sounding like a PR advisor to zoos, Katz said the public feeding should end, and zoos must adopt the mindset of a “haven” or “sanctuary” that places the quality of life of the animals above public entertainment and exploitation.

In the same article, Fred Rabidoux, a Unitarian Universalist minister in San Francisco, was far clearer.

“Why are we subjecting these animals to such unnatural conditions?” asked Rabidoux. “The right thing to do is to respect the right of each animal to live its life in surroundings that nature put it in.”

And in one of the most powerful demonstrations we’ve seen, performer Patti Smith, in a New Year’s concert the close of 2007 in New York City, aptly called the zoo a prison and the described the tiger’s death as the spilling of God’s blood.

Siberian tigers are classified as endangered. Tatiana was shipped to San Francisco from the Denver Zoo a few years ago, with zoo officials planning to get Tatiana to mate.⁶ A year ago Tatiana had seized and bitten the arm of a keeper. Clearly, Tatiana’s own plans differed from those who claimed power over this individual. This was one of the world’s free souls. For that, they killed her.

Meet Your Keeper

Can zoos be justified? It’s fashionable today for zoos to claim they preserve animals — treating living beings rather like museum specimens. Now, the tacky website of the Great British Circus boasts a gene bank for camels.

Some zoo professionals do care about protecting real habitats; but many think zoos suitably replace the areas where animals would be naturally born. Animals are individuals, and although preservation of their communities is important, what good is that if they and their mates, whom they do not choose, and their offspring, who are imposed upon them, can only live behind chain-linked and electrified fences, or in a touring spectacle?

We ourselves may well be headed for extinction, because so many animals with whom our physical lives are intertwined are disappearing from nature. If the trend carries on at the current rate, more than half of all plant and animal species will be gone by 2100. This unremitting spate of extinctions — even more than escalated climate change — is the most certain threat to human life on Earth.⁷

What if we found our time was up, and, while contemplating our pending extinction, some of us got a call from a species of people from another planet, interested in whisking us off and conserving us? If we accepted, there’d be no Earth’s nature for us, ever again. To be conserved we’d be brought to another planet, kept behind a fence, fed, and occasionally moved between sites to be bred.

Deal?

1. See Donna Hart and Robert Sussman: Man the Hunted: Primates, Predators and Human Evolution (Westview Press, 2005).
2. Tigers killed 612 people in the Sundarbans delta of India and Bangladesh between 1975 and 1985. Donna Hart, “Humans as Prey,” Chronicle of Higher Education (Vol. 52, Issue 33, 21 Apr. 2006), at B10.
3. Gillian Hargreaves, “What’s the Future for Circus Animals?” BBC News Magazine (7 Dec. 2007).
4. Jordan Robertson, “Zoo a Crime Scene After Tiger Attack,” Associated Press (26 Dec. 2007).
5. John Han, “Animal Rights Group Calls for Change in Zoo Policy,” Fog City Journal (4 Jan. 2008).
6. “Zoo a Crime Scene After Tiger Attack” (note 4 above).
7. See Julia Whitty, “Gone: Mass Extinction and the Hazards of Earth’s Vanishing Biodiversity,” Mother Jones (25 Apr. 2007).

In reality, California has no commercial veal industry, and the measure comes down to the size of confinement areas for laying hens and pregnant pigs — who will still be expected to lay eggs and give birth and, when worn out, go to slaughter. Still, the proposal might sound benign enough — if one puts aside the additional endorsements of several animal ranchers.

The campaign website shows a denim-clad tot in the fresh air, feeding a friendly pig. The scene radiates idealized concepts of animal farms and family values. It’s a formula campaigners have used before: Last November, for example, saw the culmination of a campaign that poured hundreds of thousands of dollars into Arizona’s Proposition 204, telling the media a “degree of space” for animals to turn in their pens is “all we’re asking for.”¹ The Arizona Humane Society’s CEO publicly recommended that shoppers order from Niman Ranch, a pricey, California-based meat market that boasts online shopping and hundreds of family hog farmers.² Proposition 204 passed; should it survive its seven-year phase-out period, it will mandate a new minimum pen size for pregnant pigs in Arizona. And Bill Niman, founder and chair of Niman Ranch, is now an endorser in the California proposal.

The Humane Society of the United States, spearheading the California campaign, promotes it as the first U.S. proposal to phase out battery cages for egg-laying birds. But what does this mean? Processed foods made with liquid or powdered egg ingredients from outside the state will still be readily available. Meanwhile, in-state producers of eggs in their shells would be selling at premium prices. The Humane Society assures farmers: “There are no close substitutes for eggs, and, as a result, consumers continue to purchase virtually the same number of eggs, even as prices increase.” The Humane Society further suggests that groups of producers could “pass increased costs on to consumers without a loss in profits” and that shoppers, in turn, would increase their yearly spending on eggs anywhere from 65 cents to $8.78.³

Now I fully understand that, contrary to the overblown warnings of corporate front groups, conventional anti-cruelty societies don’t exist to take a stand against commercial enterprises that breed, use, buy and sell animals. But this campaign openly dismisses the very point it claims to promote: reformed conditions. Its fact sheets include this note from the Humane Society: “Consumer perception of animal welfare is likely to be an important factor in producers’ choice of housing systems. For instance, although furnished cages have some welfare advantages over non-cage systems, consumers do not recognize a larger, modified cage as a significant improvement over conventional battery cages.”⁴

In other words, the campaign doesn’t necessarily assume “cage-free” is better for birds than modified cages; but it promotes the cage-free plan anyway. It’s an easier sell: “Eggs from hens confined in furnished cages,” states the Humane Society’s report, “do not enjoy the market premium of cage-free eggs.”⁵ So, in the interest of claiming a victory, the campaign perversely relies on an optimistic profit forecast for the purveyors of laying hens and their eggs. Today’s conventional humane movement, we see, has become so controlled by strategy that it can raise hundreds of thousands of dollars from people who support a campaign based on words whose actual meaning may be unknown to them.⁶

Compassionate Carnivores

The California ballot measure would — if not overridden by state or federal law by its effective date of 2015 — also place pregnant pigs in something larger than seven-by-two-foot gestation crates. In the same pattern as the egg reports, the Californians for Humane Farms website includes documents covering such points as the profit potential of pregnant pigs with somewhat more space. The modification, says the Humane Society, could reduce farmers’ building investment costs, improve pigs’ bone and muscle growth, reduce stillbirths, and augment the “productivity” of pigs still more by inducing earlier pregnancies.⁷

Here again, activists note that the modification could lead to a market premium, citing a poll that indicates most Iowa consumers would “buy pork products from food companies whose suppliers raise and process their hogs only under humane and environmentally sound conditions.”⁸ In short: Space will be allowed by the ranchers to the extent that space will be paid for by the customers.

And what of those “environmentally sound conditions”? From an environmental perspective, expanding the space taken up for animal agribusiness makes little sense. And it doesn’t address the substantial emissions of methane, nitrous oxide, and other dangerous effects of the industry. A vegan living in the United States will generate about a ton and a half less greenhouse gas this year than an omnivore consuming the same amount of calories. There’s a key message there. Yet across the planet, animal agribusiness is on the rise; and at its behest, forests, indigenous cultures, and free-living animals are all pushed aside.

On top of this comes a new trend in the affluent world known as compassionate carnivorism, one of whose leading stars is Michael Pollan, a former executive editor for Harper’s, and a contributing writer for the New York Times Magazine. Pollan became interested in the topic because of health and animal-welfare concerns, and wrote, “If I was going to continue to eat red meat, then I owed it to myself, as well as to the animals, to take more responsibility for the invisible but crucial transaction between ourselves and the animals we eat. I’d try to own it, in other words.”⁹

Pollan bought a calf. And Pollan chronicled the growth of the calf from nursing until the end of it all, at 14 months of age.

“Staring at No. 534,” wrote Pollan, “I could picture the white lines of the butcher’s chart dissecting his black hide: rump roast, flank steak, standing rib, brisket.”

Dr. Temple Grandin, an animal scientist at Colorado State University, has impressed Pollan as “one of the most influential people in the United States cattle industry.” Grandin “has devoted herself to making cattle slaughter less stressful and therefore more humane by designing an ingenious series of cattle restraints, chutes, ramps and stunning systems.” Grandin is also cited in the fact sheets prepared by the Humane Society and linked to the Californians for Humane Farms’ website.

Time magazine tells us “more consumers across the country are buying meat labelled as coming from humanely raised animals” and that activists, in turn, want a “federal law to end cruelty to farm animals.”¹⁰ But federal law can’t do that; nor can state ballots. As the human population continues to rise, as biofuels compete with agricultural land, as energy and water become concentrated in fewer hands, mass production will be the norm, in California and everywhere else. Only a select few will have the opportunity to trace what Pollan euphemistically calls “the invisible but crucial transaction between ourselves and the animals we eat.”

The only way to stop oppressing farm animals is to stop having them. For Californians, the activism should be less about what goes into the ballot box, and more about what goes into the bakeware.

* Lee Hall co-authored (with Priscilla Feral) the cookbook Dining With Friends: The Art of North American Vegan Cuisine, available from Friends of Animals, which Lee serves as legal director. The book contains easy-to-follow recipes for breads, soups and dips, salads and raw delights, and main courses, and desserts as eggless as they are timeless.

1. Howard Fischer (Capitol Media Services), “Prop. 204 Foe: Non-Farmers Don’t Understand,” Arizona Daily Star (23 Oct. 2006), quoting Cheryl Naumann, CEO of the Arizona Humane Society.
2. Ibid., again quoting Cheryl Naumann of the Arizona Humane Society.
3. “An HSUS Report: The Economics of Adopting Alternative Production Systems to Battery Cages” (as visited at the Californians for Humane Farms website on 12 Nov. 2007; internal citations omitted).
4. “An HSUS Report: The Economics of Adopting Alternative Production Systems to Battery Cages” (see note 3 above).
5. According to the HSUS report, consumers will pay “an average of between 17- to 60-percent more for eggs from non-cage systems.” Ibid.
6. The Humane Society’s report also cites a 2004 Golin/Harris poll for the United Egg Producers, in which most people surveyed said they’d pay extra for eggs with an “Animal Care Certified” label — even “without any information about what the label actually meant.” See “The Economics of Adopting Alternative Production Systems to Battery Cages” (note 3 above).
7. “An HSUS Report: The Economics of Adopting Alternative Production Systems to Gestation Crates” (as visited at the Californians for Humane Farms website on 12 Nov. 2007; internal citations omitted).
8. Ibid., citing a 2003 Hill Research Consultants poll for the Humane Society of the United States.
9. Michael Pollan, “Power Steer,” New York Times Magazine (31 Mar. 2002).
10. Margot Roosevelt, “Campaign ‘06: Treating Pigs Better in Arizona,” Time (6 Nov. 2006).

Harrogate Spa, a bottled water company, says it will sell its water in lighter bottles to save plastic — avoiding the issue that we might reconsider our love for water in plastic altogether. Boeing is taking orders for what some call “green aircraft,” as though we could keep flying while the profit-driven aircraft industry solves, or at least ameliorates, the ecological damage.

Ranchers, too, are learning public relations techniques.

We know animal agribusiness plays a major role in global warming, and the resultant refugee emergencies and mass extinctions. Surely this means animal advocates are approaching their heyday as political leaders for our time. After all, who better suited to advise a concerned public on shifting our culture away from its current reliance on meat and dairy products?

Alas. Mainstream advocates aren’t taking the cue. On the contrary, they’ve made themselves a party to a new and ominous form of greenwashing. Allowing supposedly kinder, gentler animal farms to appear attractive, they have invented a new PR trend. One words fits: hogwashing.¹

British and U.S. pig breeders are phasing out their smallest crates as they wrap their bacon and sausages in packaging that tells us how decent they are; and Waitrose, one of Britain’s major grocery chains, touts its milk as benefiting wildlife.² Whole Foods Market boasts of concocting a non-profit “Animal Compassion Foundation” — and now presents sales of animal flesh as tantamount to a charitable undertaking, with the endorsement, no less, of 17 animal-advocacy groups. Similarly, advocates are promoting the use of “cage-free” eggs (a technically undefined term, usually meaning “expensive”) everywhere from the Google corporation to your local school. The eggs are so popular now that there’s reportedly a national shortage.

Ice cream maker Ben and Jerry’s drew plenty of hype as the first major food manufacturer to announce it would (in a few years, anyway) use only “cage-free” eggs. At the same time, many chicken farmers say that popularizing the cage-free idea will likely mean crowding thousands of hens on shed floors, possibly leading to hunger, even cannibalism. Advocates may prefer to picture a victorious step to animal nirvana; yet all the while, plenty of animal-friendly companies produce desserts with no eggs — and, for that matter, no milk. The last thing such ethics-based firms need is competition from pious dairy vendors endorsed by animal advocates.

Then there’s Niman Ranch. This outfit exhorts us to “[s]erve with pride the world’s finest natural beef, pork and lamb” and had the audacity to show up and speak at a gathering called “Taking Action for Animals 2007.” Billed as the largest national conference of the animal-protection movement, Taking Action exemplified the trend to restyle agribusinesses as animal-welfare societies when “approved” purveyors of animal flesh held the microphone. A charitable organization called the Animal Welfare Institute evidently paid $10,000 to present this infomercial.³

In short, hogwashing offers the customer a chance to eat animals and advocate for them in the same bite. It need not mean people are eating less of the older, unholier products. Unsure if this trend is boosting the industry? Consider this: Wolfgang Puck’s branding consultant introduced the celebrity chef to the president of the world’s wealthiest animal charity.⁴ The branding expert, who formerly ran Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia, saw animal husbandry as the key to a profile boost for Puck. Within a year, Puck unveiled a new handling plan for the animals who will wind up braised with a side of sautéed Spätzle.

Ultimate Betrayal

Viewing animals as commodities, even well-handled commodities, isn’t animal protection. The ultimate betrayal of an animal is especially stark after the being has been treated almost like a pet (like the animals at Niman Ranch, who, we’re told, are walked into slaughter by someone who knew them by name).⁵ To take animals’ interests seriously is to opt out of animal agribusiness.

When animal advocates acquire too much “maturation and sophistication” for that, they’re praised by the mainstream media for gaining “influence”⁶ — praised, that is, for accepting their culture’s corporate values so well. “Instead of telling it like it is, we’re learning to present things in a more moderate way,” one farm rescue activist told the New York Times. So only foie gras is off-limits (for now; an award-winning “ethical” foie gras is on the way). Every other animal product, it seems, is acceptable, under the “mature” advocates’ guidance. Even veal can pass these days — yes, there’s an uncrated version of little dead cows, as Wolfgang Puck was quick to ascertain, and activists now praise Puck for renouncing cruel veal producers.

Granted, “telling it like it is” won’t give you instant popularity. For the authoritative remark on that, the New York Times quotes the CEO of a cattle ranchers’ group who declares that people opposing meat are “so off the wall” no one pays attention to them. Unfortunately, when mainstream advocacy groups seek wealth and easy public acceptance at the expense of core values, they too consider anyone committed to those values as inconvenient.

Here, then, is an inconvenient truth: While some advocates play footsie with wealthy steakhouse owners, ice cream vendors and ranchers, the annihilation of the world’s free animals — caused largely by the dairies and ranches of the world — runs out of control. Wouldn’t a true animal-protection movement consistently support work that attempts to conserve water and wilderness and avoid boosting that which deforests and pollutes it? Another popular animal protection group has called Burger King’s “preferential option to chicken plants that slaughter animals in a controlled atmosphere” (that means slaughterhouses that contain gas chambers) “praiseworthy.” Gee. Wouldn’t a true animal-protection movement promote, say, juice bars?

Ah, but roughly 97% of the potential donors to animal charities eat chickens.⁷ Thus, few organized groups choose to risk their growth potential as the world’s forests are cut down for animal farms and animal feed. It’s easier for the heads of charities to maintain that a return to something like the old family farm will restore an “ethic” to our relationship with the planet and its life. And that’s how Niman Ranch managed to style itself as “taking action for animals.”

Setting a Precedent

Environmentalists rightly warn that the chemicals and pathogens which plague mechanized farms can also contaminate soil, water, animal products, and our own bodies. But ecological problems aren’t limited to high-volume producers. A cow on a pasture is still a cow, needing plenty of water and food — and somewhere to eliminate it all. All forms of animal agribusiness demand large quantities of fossil fuels and generate a potent mix of greenhouse gases. The free-range movement just spreads it around more. Nevertheless, some who are vegetarian for reasons of conscience or politics are “beginning to take that activism and shift it towards eating sustainable meat,” Reuters recently declared, quoting a chef who avoided meat for 20 years but now thinks the “grass-fed movement is the new vegetarianism.”

Such bizarre statements can easily find their way into print, given our culture’s traditional willingness to maintain our life-or-death authority over other animals. The least convenient truth of all? We must question our own authority if we would heal our relationship with our planet. We must learn reverence for life before life as we know it is gone.

Our present course is expected to extinguish half of all plant and animal species by 2100, according to biologist Edward O. Wilson. Even as you read this, free-living animals are being wiped out for companies such as Niman Ranch, Wolfgang’s Steakhouse, and Whole Foods Market. Their habitat will be converted to hold living commodities, scheduled to die in a place where human workers are driven to perform dozens of soulless acts throughout the hours of their days.

And now that biofuels, along with animal feed, vie for space with food crops, we’re headed for a serious food shortage. This crisis will be exacerbated as the effects of climate change hinder crop growth, leading to riots and political instability. Given all this, what kind of precedent do activists in well-off regions set? Imagine what the planet would look like if everybody ate as much meat and dairy as North Americans.

Indeed, within just nine years, people in developing economies will expectedly eat 30% more cowflesh, 50% more pig meat and 25% more domesticated birds. Hogflesh and animal fats in general make up a quarter of the average caloric intake in China, compared to just 6% two decades ago.⁸ China’s now the world’s third dairy producer, and that’s a population that has long considered dairy products distasteful. Although research has linked the switch to a Western diet with heightened breast cancer risk, Xinran, author of What the Chinese Don’t Eat, says the “dairification” of China may involve admiration for Western customs. Even India, with its substantial vegetarian population, has seen chicken consumption nearly double since 2000. What appears to market analysts as an economic-development success story is actually a strain on our grain crops, Newsweek has acknowledged, because seven kilograms of feed go into every kilogram of cattle flesh.

We the people of the already affluent world, who have been able to make time for activism, ought to provide rational advocacy models, in which the point is not to accept animal use. Excellent models are available, from community gardens and co-operative vegan-organic farming projects to educational and culinary fairs exemplified by the tremendously popular London Vegan Festival.

Last year, the University of Chicago News Office announced the work of assistant professors Gidon Eshel and Pamela Martin — work that the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization soon accepted as a key study — with the headline “Vegan Diets Healthier for Planet, People Than Meat Diets.” These researchers have shown how vegans spare the atmosphere about a ton and a half of greenhouse gases per person per year, compared to omnivores eating the same number of calories. The university press office distributed its release accompanied by photos of the two scientists preparing fruit and vegetable salads on a kitchen-style countertop amidst their bookshelves — offering an inspiration to others to put conscientious culinary interests right in the middle of their work and thinking. Notably, Eshel was once a cattle farmer, but now cultivates an organic vegetable farm. Everyday activism like this will start people thinking that the fertile plains of North America, and the rain forests to the South, should be reclaimed from the feedlots and the vast monocultures of corn and soybean feed crops. As demand wanes and ranches are phased out, the pressure we exert on populations of free-living horses and burros, elk and bison, and the big carnivores too, will begin to ebb, while we cultivate something we’ve long missed: a feeling of living harmoniously with the rest of our biocommunity.

How tragic if we fail to see the opportunity. How tragic if the up-and-coming activists of China and elsewhere come to see animal advocacy as purporting to treat commodified cows humanely. Worldwide, the space used by six-point-six billion humans is vastly expanded as animals are bred into existence to be food. There is nothing sustainable, let alone kind, about it. So let us stop fantasizing and get to the point. What animal agribusiness is selling, we don’t need.

1. James LaVeck, in “Compassion for Sale?” (Satya, September 2006), defined “hogwashing” as “the practice of generating the public appearance of having compassion for animals while continuing to kill millions of them for profit.”
2. Stonyfield Farm has partnered with various non-profits, beginning with Jane Goodall. Using packaging that described African habitats and animals, the company assured children they could be “planet protectors” by caring for the environment — presumably, in part, through Stonyfields’s dairy products.
3. According to the website of “Taking Action for Animals 2007, the largest national conference of the animal protection movement,” sponsors of $10,000 and above received the “[o]pportunity to organize one event or conference session” as well as two “premium exhibit spaces at Conference.”
4. See Kim Severson, “Bringing Oinks and Moos Into the Food Debate,” New York Times and International Herald Tribune, July 25, 2007.
5. Nicolette Hahn Niman, Taking Action for Animals, Washington, D.C. (July 2007) (audio on file with author).
6. See “Bringing Oinks and Moos Into the Food Debate” (note 4 above).
7. A series of surveys by the US-based Vegetarian Resource Group shows between two and three percent of respondents consistently avoid eating flesh products, and about 1.4 percent of the total population is vegan, avoiding all animal products, including eggs and dairy.
8. “Revenge of the Pork,” China Economic Review, July 2007.