THE MYTH OF “COMPASSIONATE MEAT”:
TRYING TO STOMP OUT THE ANIMAL RIGHTS MOVEMENT
Find out what’s really going on with the meat industry’s “humane meat” PR frenzy and how they get activists to sell out. Read filmmaker and activist James LaVeck’s INVASION OF THE MOVEMENT SNATCHERS. Scarier than a Stephen King novel.
(This article was originally published in 2006 but, unfortunately, applies more than ever today.)
Here are two excerpts:
…the MBD PR firm grew out of a successful campaign to neutralize a massive boycott of the Nestlé corporation. In the late ’70s, Nestlé was attempting to persuade millions of [so-called] third world women to use synthetic infant formula instead of breast-feeding their babies. “In activist lore,” note [social activists] Stauber and Rampton, “this boycott is touted as a major victory, but in the corporate world it is understood that industry really won the day by pulling the rug out from the campaign. By making selective concessions to the activists, Nestlé succeeded in negotiating an end to the boycott. Later, activists were dismayed to discover that its infant formula marketing practices are continuing with only token changes. [So-called] Third world children continue to die, but today their plight receives little attention, and activists have found that a boycott, once terminated, is not easily turned back on.
Translate this to the animal movement, and the call for a boycott is, very simply, vegan advocacy. When we switch from asking people to eliminate or reduce their consumption of animal products, to publicly endorsing “humane” animal products, are we not, in effect, calling off our own boycott? Think about it. “A boycott, once terminated, is not easily turned back on.”
and…
Let us not forget, there is a reason why human rights groups do not develop or endorse “humane” methods of torturing and executing political prisoners, and why children’s rights advocates do not collaborate with the international pornography industry to develop standards and special labeling for films that make “compassionate” use of runaway teens. To do such things is to introduce moral ambiguity into situations where the boundaries between right and wrong must never be allowed to blur. To be the agent of such blurring is to become complicit oneself in the violence and abuse.
Let us be clear. When we endorse the consumption of any kind of animal product, we’re not only encouraging an act we ourselves know to be immoral—not only blurring the line between right and wrong—we’re also willfully ignoring animal agriculture’s massive contribution to global warming, world hunger, chronic disease, worker abuse, desertification and [so-called] third world poverty… Let us freely share with everyone the best truth we have, and let us do so with the courage, altruism and integrity of the unapologetic idealists who have come before us—those whose historic words and deeds have redefined the limits of human potential.
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COMING SOON!
Peaceable Kingdom: The Journey Home
directed by Jenney Stein
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