# Posted by Keith Burgess-Jackson at 6:09 PM
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22 May 2006
Animal Rights in Germany
Here is the schedule for an upcoming conference on animal rights at
The University of Heidelberg. (Click "English" and then "Schedule.")
Note that my friend Mylan Engel (who informed me of the conference) is
on the list of speakers. Give 'em hell, Mylan! (I mean, persuade
hard!)
# Posted by Keith Burgess-Jackson at 4:23 PM
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11 May 2006
From the Mailbag
Hi Keith,
Here is a link to an excellent article on the Adam Durand/Wegmans
Chicken Factory trial, but I thought you might also be interested in a
segment of tonight's ABC "Primetime" story.
First some background, in case you haven't had a chance to read the
more detailed article. In 2004, three members of a NY-based group
called "Compassionate Consumers" entered Wegmans Egg Factory outside
of Rochester, NY, in the middle of the night to videotape the
conditions of the birds in the factory (after the company repeatedly
refused to give them a tour of the facility). Their intent was just to
document the conditions of the birds, but they found 11 birds that
were so near death that they needed immediate veterinary care. So,
they rescued these 11 birds. As a result, they were charged with
felony burglary. As a philosopher, a lawyer, and an animal advocate, I
thought the case might be of particular interest to you.
Tonight (Thursday, May 11 at 9:00 p.m. central time), ABC "Primetime"
will be running a story about Compassionate Consumers' investigation
into Wegmans egg farm and the documentary video that got Adam Durand,
Megan Cosgrove, and Melanie Ippolito arrested for trespassing and
rescuing 11 hens. It will be interesting to see how ABC depicts these
three compassionate consumers. Will they be portrayed as brave
compassionate heroes or animal rights wackos? Will Durand be the
villain or will Wegmans??? We'll see!
Best,
Mylan
# Posted by Keith Burgess-Jackson at 8:50 PM
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10 May 2006
Eating Right
The following is an excerpt from the book The Way We Eat: Why Our Food
Choices Matter
by Peter Singer and Jim Mason
Published by Rodale; May 2006; $25.95US/$34.95CAN; 1-57954-889-X
Copyright � 2006 Peter Singer and Jim Mason
Behind the Label: "Animal Care Certified" Eggs
The carton of Country Creek eggs that Jake Hillard picked up at
WalMart carried the name Moark Productions, one of America's largest
producers of eggs. It also bore a red seal saying Animal Care
Certified. We asked Jake if the seal signified anything to her. "Well,
it seemed to imply that they followed some standard of humane animal
care," she said. "I get the general impression that the chickens are
cared for better than by some companies, but I don't know by how
much."
Jake's vagueness about the Animal Care Certified seal wasn't
surprising. Most Americans know little about how their eggs are
produced. They don't know that American egg-producers typically keep
their hens in bare wire cages, often crammed eight or nine hens to a
cage so small that they never have room to stretch even one wing, let
along both. The space allocated per hen, in fact, is even less than
broiler chickens get, ranging from 48 to 72 square inches. Even the
higher of these figures is less than the size of a standard American
sheet of typing paper. In such crowded conditions, stressed hens tend
to peck each other--and the sharp beak of a hen can be a lethal weapon
when used relentlessly against weaker birds unable to escape. To
prevent this, producers routinely sear off the ends of the hens'
sensitive beaks with a hot blade--without an anesthetic.
As for the cages themselves, they are in long rows, sometimes stacked
three and four tiers high. That way, in a single building, tens of
thousands of hens can be fed, watered, and have their eggs collected
by machines. Artificial lighting is used to mimic the longest days of
summer, to induce the hens to lay the maximum number of eggs all year
round. A year of this leaves the hens debilitated, and they start to
lay fewer eggs. Many American producers then cut off their food and
starve them for as long as two weeks until they go into molt, which
means they lose their feathers and cease to lay eggs. Some die during
this period, and the survivors lose about 30 percent of their body
weight. They are then fed again, and their laying resumes for a few
more months before they are killed.
Although animal advocates have been describing these conditions since
the 1970s, until recently the American media have ignored them. That
is changing, and much of the credit for that change must go to Paul
Shapiro and Miyun Park, two young activists who at the time ran an
organization called Compassion Over Killing. Paul learned about
factory farms when he was 14 years old, and he started COK as a club
at his high school. The club outgrew high school and attracted
volunteers, among them Park, who became president a year later. The
two led fur protests, sit-ins, and plenty of in-your-face street
activism.
Troubled by the knowledge that within a 100-mile radius of where they
lived millions of hens were suffering in cages, unseen by the people
who bought the eggs the hens laid, Shapiro and Park tried a different
tactic. In 2001 they began driving around rural Maryland locating egg
factory farms by day and entering them with video cameras by night.
Their videos show dead hens rotting in cages, hens with necks and feet
caught in the wire mesh, and hens who had fallen into the manure pit
beneath the batteries of cages. They also show COK members gently
holding sick and injured birds and taking them away to get veterinary
care. This was powerful stuff, and it won Park and Shapiro the
attention of writers at The Washington Post. The paper's expose opened
the door for a string of favorable stories about COK's open rescues in
The New York Times and other national media.
Throughout the media brouhaha, no COK members were ever charged with
trespassing or theft of birds, presumably because the egg companies
did not want to acknowledge that the videos had been taken in their
sheds. There was something different about this kind of animal welfare
activism, and it helped win the sympathy of the media. Shapiro
explains it like this: "We were regular people who were acting in the
only decent way that you could when faced with such egregious cruelty.
We weren't damaging property, we weren't hiding our identities. We
just simply went in there and videotaped ourselves providing aid to
sick and injured animals."
Once Shapiro and Park had opened up the issue, reporters had no
difficulty in finding credible experts who could attest to the
conditions inside the egg factories. McDonald's has called Dr. Temple
Grandin, a "preeminent animal behavior expert" and taken her advice on
animal welfare issues. About the egg industry; she was
characteristically plain spoken:
When I visited a large egg layer operation and saw old hens that
had reached the end of their productive life, I was horrified. Egg
layers bred for maximum egg production and the most efficient feed
conversion were nervous wrecks that had beaten off half their
feathers by constant flapping against the cage . . . The more I
learned about the egg industry the more disgusted I got. Some of
the practices that had become "normal" for this industry were overt
cruelty. Bad had become normal. Egg producers had become
desensitized to suffering.
United Egg Producers, the industry trade association representing most
of the country's egg production, was concerned about the bad publicity
the egg industry was getting. Its experts must also have been well
aware that the entire European Union--twenty-five nations, with a much
larger population of both humans and hens than the United States--was
in the process of phasing out the battery cage, insisting that all
hens have a place to perch, litter to scratch in, a nesting box to lay
their eggs in, and about twice the space that most U.S. hens are
granted. As for starving hens in order to force them to molt, that had
long been illegal in the European Union. But United Egg Producers
didn't recommend that its members follow Europe's example. It opted
for a few minor changes and plenty of spin. Egg producers who followed
a new set of voluntary guidelines would be allowed to stamp their egg
cartons with a colorful seal stating that the eggs were "Animal Care
Certified."
But the new guidelines were only a marginal improvement on the
existing situation. They allowed each hen 67 square inches of
space--by 2008. Dr. Joy Mench, professor of animal science at the
University of California, Davis, and a member of UEP's own Advisory
Committee, is on record as calling 80 inches a "meager" space
allowance that is "barely enough for the hen to turn around and not
enough for her to perform normal comfort behaviors." The UEP program
also permits producers to continue to sear off part of the beaks of
their chickens with a hot blade, without pain relief. A chicken's beak
is its major organ for interacting with the ground and for picking up
seeds or worms, and it is full of nerve endings. Professor Ian Duncan,
who holds a chair of animal welfare at the Department of Animal and
Poultry Science at the University of Guelph, Ontario, and has done
decades of research on the welfare of chickens, says that "beak
trimming leads to both chronic and acute pain." When asked on National
Public Radio what she thought about the procedure, UEP's advisor
Professor Joy Mench pointed out that for chickens, their beak is their
main way of exploring, touching, and feeling things. "So," the
interviewer asked, "cutting off the beak is a big deal, if you're a
hen?" Mench replied: "It's definitely a big deal."
At the time of Jake's egg purchase, the UEP "Animal Care Certified"
guidelines also permitted starving birds to make them molt. It doesn't
really take an expert to say that this is going to make them suffer.
In the National Public Radio interview, Mench didn't resort to
scientific jargon: "The bird is starved. Yes, the bird is starved. I
don't like to see hungry animals not being given food."
Finally, we shouldn't forget that the eggs that produce laying hens
also produce equal numbers of male chicks. Since male chicks don't lay
eggs, the egg industry doesn't want them. The broiler industry doesn't
want them either, for they are not bred to gain weight rapidly, as
broiler chickens are. Temple Grandin discovered what many hatcheries
do with them: "They were throwing live animals in the dumpster to get
rid of them. I was going, 'What? They were doing what?' Nobody would
throw a live calf in a dumpster. These people forgot this is a live
animal." The UEP guidelines don't require producers to avoid buying
from hatcheries that use this method of disposing of male chicks.
Certified What?
In 2002, when UEP announced that they would release a set of standards
for animal welfare, Paul Shapiro and Miyun Park were hopeful. "We were
naive enough," Shapiro says, "to think that they might voluntarily
reform. Then we read the guidelines and saw that they would permit
barren battery cages, beak searing, and forced molting through
starvation." Now Shapiro and Park were even more outraged than before:
"This was not just a case of animal cruelty, it had become a case of
consumer fraud," Shapiro says. So they decided to go back to some of
the egg farms where they had done their open rescues a year or so
before. "We knew what the conditions were like back then and now here
they are 'Animal Care Certified', so we thought, 'OK let's see if
there's been any change'. We found the conditions were exactly the
same. There is no noticeable difference between the photos of 2003 and
those of 2001."
In June 2003, COK filed petitions with the Better Business Bureau
objecting to UEP'S "Animal Care Certified" logo as false advertising.
After examining documents submitted by UEP and COK, the Better
Business Bureau ruled that the "Animal Care Certified" seal was
misleading and should be discontinued. The egg trade group appealed,
but the appeal board upheld the earlier ruling. More months passed,
and UEP made no changes in its "Animal Care Certified" program. In
August 2004, the Better Business Bureau determined that UEP was
failing to comply with its ruling and formally referred the matter to
the Federal Trade Commission for law enforcement action.
The pressure on the egg producers was mounting. In May 2005, UEP
announced that it was recommending that egg producers switch to a
molting process that does not involve starving hens and that this
recommendation would, from January 1, 2006, become a requirement of a
new animal care certification program. Producers should use a feed
with lower protein levels instead of taking away food entirely, UEP
now said. Then, in September 2005, after being "encouraged" by the
Federal Trade Commission to do more, the egg trade body announced it
was dropping the "animal care certified" logo and replacing it with
one saying "United Egg Producers Certified: Produced in compliance
with UEP animal husbandry guidelines." That may be literally accurate,
but many consumers will still assume it means good animal welfare,
when the truth is very far from that.
Reprinted from: The Way We Eat: Why Our Food Choices Matter by Peter
Singer and Jim Mason � 2006 Peter Singer and Jim Mason. Permission
granted by Rodale, Inc., Emmaus, PA 18098. Available wherever books
are sold or directly from the publisher by calling (800) 848-4735 or
visit their website at www.rodalestore.com.
Author
Peter Singer is a professor of bioethics at Princeton University's
Center for Human Values. He first became well known internationally
after the publication of Animal Liberation in 1975. In 2005, Time
magazine named him one of the world's 100 most influential people.
Jim Mason is the coauthor of Animal Factories (with Peter Singer) and
the author of An Unnatural Order: Why We Are Destroying the Planet and
Each Other, which John Robbins, author of the best-selling Diet for a
New America, calls "a wonderful and important book." He is also an
attorney and the fifth generation of a Missouri farming family.
# Posted by Keith Burgess-Jackson at 12:25 PM
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08 May 2006
Peaceful Prairie Sanctuary
See here for the latest news.
# Posted by Keith Burgess-Jackson at 4:38 PM
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Peter Singer
One of my readers sent a link to this story about Peter Singer.
# Posted by Keith Burgess-Jackson at 1:39 PM
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04 May 2006
From Today's New York Times
To the Editor:
Re "A Retirement Villa in the Desert for the Chattering Class of
Birds" (front page, April 29):
William Blake wrote, "A robin redbreast in a cage/Puts all Heaven in a
rage."
Though clearly the birds at the Oasis sanctuary are lucky to be there,
and lucky to be alive, I hope that reading about them will make people
rethink any idea of purchasing and condemning to a caged life an
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