I get angry too-- VERY.
Because people who have never worked with or around animals count on PETA [or ‘news’ reports based on PETA press releases] for virtually all their information about animal agriculture.
it’s not more credible to automatically deny their reports than to automatically accept them. i don’t believe that the videos they make are forgeries. they do depict depravity and cruelty. i refuse to support that.
And these nice folks who’ve never milked a cow or trained a horse want to write the regs about how much room my animals need, how often they should be fed, at what temperature they need heated shelter…
i’ve never milked a cow but i can see that injecting them with rBST to make them produce more milk than nature intended is making them suffer. i can vouch for the pain of mastitis, which is what so many dairy cows suffer from as a result of over-producing milk. it also doesn’t take a knowlege of animal husbandry to see that when you artifically impregnate cows over and over more than nature intended, you will harm the cow. or that if you take a newborn away from almost any mammal that is designed to care for them, it will be incredibly distressing for them.
I don’t need PETA to tell me how to care for animals. I’ve given my entire working life to them, lost sleep, lost blood, broken bones, broken my heart more times than I can count on behalf of the animals in my care. I promise you, no one has suffered more on their behalf or shed more tears for any un-needed suffering.
likewise i don’t need dairy farmers to tell me that their cows don’t suffer when they have mastitis, are inseminated beyond the capacity of their bodies, and have their young taken away from them so that WE can have the milk that nature provided for that offspring.
But people need food. And grazing animals do the least harm to the natural world of any means of extracting calories for human use. Fewer chemicals are used, less soil is eroded, more diversity sustained. My ranch is home to animal species most of you will never see in the wild: Big horn sheep, gray wolf, mountain lion, grizzley bear-- they can’t, don’t exist in cultivated fields.
obviously you are a good steward of the land and animals that you keep. that’s awesome. i do not believe that grazing animals does the least harm to the environment based on what i’ve learned (and not from PETA), but in numbers of animals that the land can sustain, it’s reasonable. commendable too that you don’t automatically trap and shoot wild wolves and other predators - because many cattle ranchers do.
btw you are not producing any food that i need, so be careful about saying that beef is “necessary” – i’ve been swallowing that garbage all my life until i learned better (pun intended). so if you want to talk about propaganda, let’s also talk about what dairy, meat, and egg associations LIE to the public about.
But I’m the monster-- I eat meat, produce it for others. You may not feel that way, but PETA does, and yet you defend them and defend them, praise them for their alleged good deeds, and accept every claim they make as though it’s Gospel.
again, you automatically deny every claim they make. you are no better than people who automatically believe ever claim they make.
Because your pals at PETA know waaaaay more about these issues than someone whose worked in the business for 30 years. And nothing I can say will convince you otherwise: I have a vested interest, unlike those secular saints and their 17 million dollars a year in donations.
that’s like saying a person has to be a parent in order to identify child abuse.
and i’ll see your 17 million that peta gets and raise you the multi-BILLIONS made by factory farming. it seems like you don’t realize what kind of goliath these animal activists are taking on.
Use them as a ‘means to an end’ to expose the evils of agriculture? Yeah, that’s what the German aristocrats had in mind for the Nazis: use them to get rid of the communists, then kick them out. Great plan, there.
see i don’t get this. if someone says that factory farms are like concentration camps for animals (and they ARE), we get in trouble for saying agribusiness is like nazis. but then they say that peta is like nazis.
Overstatement? Nothing I can say about PETA is close to as bad as what they are already saying about me. They’d take my animals, if they could. I’d rather they took my life. Those are the stakes, for me: my life, versus the emotional well being of the chickens you champion.
real farming, as it was some 50-60 years ago is not the complaint. but there are two serious sins driving factory farming (again if that doesn’t describe you, then don’t go into the defensive crouch):
corporations are greedy and americans are gluttonous. corporations and the people who drive their business do not care what effect their products and consumption of them does to the rest of the world. it’s all about “me” -
MY choice to eat meat, as much as
i want, and
i don’t think
i should have to pay much for it.
and to that i say, ok… but those who want that should have to be responsible for it. whether i eat meat or not, i am susceptible to the antibiotic-resistant bacteria and viruses that are being created by factory farming. i need to drink the water and breathe air too so let’s keep the billions of tons of animal poop and noxious fumes out of those things. and away from my tomatoes, peppers, spinach, and tahini. i think that’s fair enough, don’t you?
But every time nutrition comes up, your favorite villian isn’t corn syrup, it’s the Big Mac.
And not because it contains high frutose corn syrup.
oh but you’re wrong. corn syrup is my arch nemesis
i check sodium and processed sugar… all of these things.
)
“no better than a Nazi”. (So that part was no surprise to me!!