Blogversation Series - Animal Advocacy Strategies - Christine Morrissey's Statement

Christine Morrissey, Director of East Bay Animal Advocates: “Clanking big-rigs barrel past Sunshine Donuts in Livingston, California, carrying 4,500 feces-caked chickens to the Foster Farms processing plant one block to the left. The Livingston plant kills nearly 600,000 chickens daily. It’s the largest slaughterhouse in the world. Maintaining a campaign website entitled FosterFacts.net, we slammed Foster Farms on its poor treatment of chickens, resulting in lively corporate outreach efforts and penetrating false advertising complaints.”

Gary:

I realize this is somewhat tangential to the discussion, but I wanted to praise East Bay Animal Advocates (EBAA) for their revealing and incriminating investigations of the animal agriculture industry. I've referred to their work many times in my blog. I particularly would urge readers to check out their investigation of a free-range turkey operation . It shows turkeys living and dying in horrible conditions.

I met Christine briefly at the last Taking Action for Animals conference. If memory serves - which I think it does in this case - she informed me that the turkey facility in question, Diestel Turkey Ranch, was a supplier to Whole Foods Market, and that EBAA shared their findings with Whole Foods, but that Whole Foods continued to get turkeys from Diestel. Just one more indication of the harshness and resistance to reform of the animal exploitation and killing business. As bad as the Diestel situation is, non-"free-range" is even worse, though.

EBAA's long-running Foster Farms campaign illustrates some of the strengths and fallibilities of welfare reform strategies. For the last two and a half years, EBAA has done a superb job of documenting the horrid conditions and putrid lies of Foster Farms - a "poultry processing" company that, according to EBAA's web site , kills five million chickens a week. As best I can tell, EBAA's outreach to the public and to the business community has been outstanding. Yet Foster Farms - possibly with help from government agencies that seem thoroughly uninterested in animal welfare - has stonewalled every activist attempt at reform.

At the same time, EBAA's footage of animal suffering at Foster Farms, and its reporting of the company's callous attitude toward both the animals and humans it exploits, has no doubt opened many people's eyes to the violence of large-scale animal agriculture, impelled them to sympathize with the animals' interests, and made them think about the moral consequences of their food choices. These are all fairly common precursors to becoming vegetarian (or at least reducing meat intake) and developing support for animal rights.

Notwithstanding that small organizations can only do so much and are usually strapped for resources, my respectful request would be to add vegan solutions to the web sites. Leverage the outrage and sadness that viewers to the sites (and followers of campaigns) may experience, and let them know about ways they can eliminate their contribution to virtually all the cruelties and suffering - and untimely death - in chicken operations. And turkey operations. And rabbit meat farms . And so on. The additional information wouldn't have to be anything elaborate; perhaps just some links to vegan substitute products, recipes, and cookbooks.

Sorry to drift off-topic again; I just wanted to mention that I very much liked the latest EBAA blog entry EBAA blog entry [link](February 4), which discusses the challenges of conveying the plght of animals in the media.

Kim:

Thanks Gary for insight into the activities of EBAA. I wasn't personally familiar with their work and this helped highlight their efforts.

I know that if I lived anywhere near the never ending truck processions to murder, as Christine described, I would find it difficult to ignore the immediate, immense suffering. I think this really highlights the element that makes it difficult to forgo attempts at welfare reform, while focusing only on vegan advocacy. It's a natural human impulse to want to stop suffering as it's occurring. And I don't think there is any way to disable that human drive in most people, in exchange for what might appear to be a more logical course of action.

I've always felt that even if welfare reform campaigns don't result in complete elimination of suffering, or even significant changes for a large percentage of animals, they serve to illuminate the facts that most compassionate people will then have trouble ignoring. Welfare campaigns, at the very least, serve to bring the truth into the light. An effective undercover investigation, for instance, that manages to hit major media outlets, reaches a lot more people in a very short amount of time than individual efforts to promote veganism. I see the campaigns as a reinforcement of what we do on the ground, so to speak, providing validity to our in-person education efforts. If they saw it on the evening news, it tends to click when confronted with an actual activist offering the same information.

I agree with you, Gary, that any welfare campaign needs to incorporate vegan advocacy to be truly effective. The logical extension of "welfare" is veganism, after all.