by Danielle
We’ve all heard it before. Whether it is phrased as a question or as a defense or as simply a statement of confusion, most animal activists have been faced with the issue of “humane” meat, milk and eggs.
“Isn’t cage-free better for the chickens?” asks your cousin, as visions of a few hens pecking about a spacious barnyard waft through his head.
“But I drink organic milk,” states your neighbor, a slight twinge of confusion in her cadence, when you suggest she purchase soy milk while you are out running errands together.
Here you have people who are really trying to be compassionate. They are spending some extra money to buy a product because they are led to believe it was produced in a way that was more humane to the animals involved. Clearly your cousin understands that battery cages equal cruelty to chickens. But he may not know what “cage-free” means to the company slapping such a label on their carton of eggs or to the government agency that approved use of those words on the label. He may not know that regardless of how hens are housed, their brothers were killed shortly after birth since the type of chicken raised for egg production isn’t good for meat production. (I hesitate to point out that male chickens don’t lay eggs…but you may need to remind your cousin of that.)
He’s is trying, and you have to give him some points for effort. Terms like “natural” and “free range” sound wholesome. And anything that pairs the words “humane” and “certified” must mean something to the animals, right? You explain to him that what he reads on the labels are marketing schemes and that the “humane” pork he eats may not have had access to the outside during the lifespan of the pig from which it came. All is not what it seems.
It is hard to know exactly what any given label means because the programs behind them are so convoluted, so you pull out a copy of Farm Sanctuary’s handy booklet, The Truth Behind the Labels: Farm Animal Welfare Standards and Labeling Practices (or, if you are having a virtual discussion with your cousin, you send him this link: http://www.farmsanctuary.org/issues/campaigns/truth_behind_labeling.html). Now your cousin can decipher for himself the confusing conglomeration of criteria used by the government, retail trade associations, agribusiness and third-party certifiers to promote meat, milk and eggs to consumers who are increasingly aware of farm animal welfare issues. In the end, he’ll likely find that much of the language used is misleading and that those “cage-free” eggs he’s been buying aren’t really in line with his values after all.
So share the report with him, and with all the people in your life. Don’t let them go on with a false sense of compassion.
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