“Animal rights activists are using an insurgent tactic,” Minneapolis-St. Paul’s Star Tribune proclaimed, “to protest how turkeys are processed.”
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.”
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.”
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.
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.
From a conversation with Priscilla Feral, January 29, 2008.
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.