If PETA got its way

Great Debates
41

[QUOTE=Charger]
On the farm where I grew up, I remember getting a long lecture when I accidentally startled a cow which then kicked at me and injured her leg. Actually, it was a lot more harsh than a “lecture,” I was yelled at for a long time. I was told to treat the cows with absolute respect because that kind of injury could permanently injure the leg, shortening the cow’s life, and rendering the meat from that area useless.

So, when I see that kind of footage, I think of how unprofessional they are behaving. It is wasteful. I liken it to a banker lighting cash on fire to keep warm, or because it’s so cool looking. So, the mistreatment of animals is financially unwise. Not only is animal abuse cruel, it’s a costly mistake.

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A better analogy would be to bankers piling up stacks of money in great proximity to one another instead of giving each bill room to breathe–which, of course, they do.

Look, very few farmers are going to go out of their way to cause suffering to animals when it’s not necessary, nobody’s claiming that. In your example, your startling the cow served no financial purpose.

But that’s not what we’re talking about. We’re talking about causing suffering to the animals in order to achieve financial gain–for example, crowding animals into pens much more closely than they’d naturally be in the wild, or confining sows in a single position from which they can’t move for weeks at a time. This type of action increases both suffering and profit, and it seems pretty uncontroversial to me that this is true.

And, again, the folks who are attacked with such undercover video don’t deny that it was made at their place. Don’t you think they’d do so if it were faked?

Daniel

42

[QUOTE=Left Hand of Dorkness]
We’re talking about causing suffering to the animals in order to achieve financial gain–for example, crowding animals into pens much more closely than they’d naturally be in the wild, or confining sows in a single position from which they can’t move for weeks at a time. This type of action increases both suffering and profit, and it seems pretty uncontroversial to me that this is true.
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Crowding animals leads to unhealthy animals, which causes profits to go down. Some places do not provide enough comforts for the animals, but the problem is how quickly the improvements pay off. They don’t want to spend a lot of money to make a gradual profit.

On our dairy farm, we had two fields worth of pasture area, as well as a bit of forest and a pond for the cows to roam about and cool off as needed. Our neighbor, on the other hand, had a small pasture not much larger than the barn which was sloppy and thick with manure. He was poor, and he stayed that way. He couldn’t afford to sacrifice the crop land, just to let the cows frolick. Our farm was much more profitable because we took animal comfort into consideration.

What bothers me is when all farms are painted with the same brush. If PETA were to visit our farm in the 80s and 90s (before the neighbor went bankrupt), their cameras would be pointed across the road the whole time, because it would have fit their agenda. Sadly, they could get footage from both and push the agenda that farms that invest in healthy animals are more profitable. Which has been my experience. It comes down to a quantity vs. quality debate. Large factory farms can probably churn out tons of poor quality product, but a more demanding consumer would seek out the finer product. Good cheese, as we know, comes from happy cows.

I would love to see PETA push for a more reasonable middle ground. They could establish a standard of how much space per animal is required, and that they are fed properly and receive enough exercise and medial attention. They could regularly inspect farms and slaughterhouses to see if they meet the standards. Then there could be a certified product that they sell. More people would be inclined to buy beef with a label indicating that the product came from Happy Animal Farms and were slaughtered at Cozy Cow Slaughterhouse.

[QUOTE=Left Hand of Dorkness]
And, again, the folks who are attacked with such undercover video don’t deny that it was made at their place. Don’t you think they’d do so if it were faked?
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I have not seen anyone deny or admit to those videos being faked. There have been some cases where employees were fired for being cruel to chickens, so at least some of the videos were real. I’m just saying that, having seen some of their extreme views on things, I wouldn’t put it past them to fake a video or two in the midst of some actual video. And you know they’d never show a farmer going out of his way to provide extra comfort to an animal, they only show the nastiest stuff and pass it off as daily routine. Where’s the footage of us staying up all night trying to get a cow to drink some water because she was sick?

43

[QUOTE=Charger]
Crowding animals leads to unhealthy animals, which causes profits to go down.
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per animal. If the profit per animal goes down by 10%, but the total number of animals goes up by 20%, it may end up being in the farmer’s financial interest.

I agree with all of that; they very often do overstate their case or act as if all farms are as bad as the worst ones. That’s a very fair criticism of PETA.

I see no reason to believe that this is true, unfortunately; certainly good foie gras doesn’t come from happy geese, and I don’t know why miserable cows wouldn’t end up producing delectable cheese.

Then you should love to see their Burger King Campaign, in which they did almost exactly what you’d like to see:

(Granted, this is from PETA’s own website, which is hardly an unbiased source; I suspect that Burger King’s website denies their changes in policy had anything to do with the campaign).

What you’re looking for isn’t a PETA campaign–it’s American Humane campaign called Free Farmed. (There’s also something called Certified Humane, which looks legit on its surface, but I’m not familiar enough with them to say one way or the other).

Well, of course PETA’s not going to show a farmer doing the right thing–that should surprise nobody. They’re an advocacy organization, and they make no bones about how they’d like to stop the production of animal products entirely; of course they’re not going to go praising someone who produces a product that they reject.

However, while I wouldn’t necessarily put it past them to fake a video (I have very little faith in their integrity, having read highly misleading articles in their magazines as part of my previous job), I would be astonished if they faked a video and the targets of the video didn’t object. And if those targets objected, I can guarantee you that one of the astroturf organizations like www.activistcash.com (founded by a single lobbyist who also works to discredit Mothers Against Drunk Driving, in both cases on behalf of the restaurant industry) would be trumpeting it up and down to the media, and we all would have heard about it.

Daniel

44

[QUOTE=Marley23]
I could have sworn that Ingrid Newkirk (PETA President) is also opposed to all medical tests on animals. That’s just a wee bit extreme.
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I have to say that this is one area of animal usage that does make me a bit squeamish. When I was a newspaper reporter, journalists uncovered some pretty horrendous stuff. The worst I remember was inflicting gunshot wounds on live dogs to study how best to treat the wounds. IIRC, basset hounds were solicited under the pretense that the dogs would be adopted, but they were actually taken into a lab and shot, then “treated.”

Understand, that one instance (which we learned was ended and people were punished as a result of the reporting done by our colleague) has probably colored my perception of medical testing on animals.

I do remember way back in the early days, PETA first exposed some of the more egregious abuses of animals in testing – hairsprays being sprayed into the eyes of rabbits, stuff that was just stupid to do. But I have been dismayed by their increasing militancy and march toward insanity. I challenge anyone to provide the first scintilla of evidence that the world would be a better place if my Daisy dog didn’t exist.

45

[QUOTE=Sunrazor]
I have to say that this is one area of animal usage that does make me a bit squeamish. When I was a newspaper reporter, journalists uncovered some pretty horrendous stuff. The worst I remember was inflicting gunshot wounds on live dogs to study how best to treat the wounds. IIRC, basset hounds were solicited under the pretense that the dogs would be adopted, but they were actually taken into a lab and shot, then “treated.”
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You know, it was a similar set of experiments that changed my views about animal rights. I was working at a teaching hospital at the time, and when some paperwork passed through my hands about a series of medical ethics lectures, I asked my boss if I could attend the one about animal experimentation–I had turned down a couple of jobs there because I’d be doing paperwork on animal experiments, and I figured it’d do me good to hear the other side.

The physician giving the lecture worked on burns. That is, he set animals on fire, resulting in lethal third-degree burns to the animals, without anesthesia. It is hard to think of a more horrific type of experiment.

And he knew that, and that was one of the first things he said in the lecture. But he also said that, when he wasn’t doing research, he was working in the hospital’s burn unit, especially with children. Burn victims were flown in from all over the state to this unit, and sometimes they survived and sometimes they didn’t. His horrifying research, he said, might lead to treatments that would let more people survive burns–and that research would last for all time. One hundred rats burnt alive today might save tens of thousands of people in the future.

I hadn’t really thought about it like that before. His lecture didn’t turn me into a major advocate for animal experimentation, but it removed me from the ranks of its opponents.

(Note that there’s a difference between medical research and cosmetic research or other nonmedical research; I’m all for getting rid of experiments on nonessential products).

Daniel

46

[QUOTE=Left Hand of Dorkness]
You know, it was a similar set of experiments that changed my views about animal rights. (snip) One hundred rats burnt alive today might save tens of thousands of people in the future. (snip)
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Um, I dunno. For purely irrational reasons, I’m not as horrified by burning rats as I am about shooting dogs. I should be, I guess. I set out poison to kill mice around our place (we live in the country) but I assume that the poison kills quickly and painlessly. Maybe it doesn’t, I don’t know.

I understand that testing on animals provides insight into treatment for humans, but for me it’s a slippery-slope kind of thing. If it’s OK to burn rats to death in the pursuit of medical treatment, what about cats? Dogs? Chimpanzees? We can get close to that line where we ask whether it’s acceptable to use the data gathered by the Nazis during their horrific experiments on people (assuming the data they collected was at some point useful.) And the argument gets really complex when it’s OK to experiment on live rats but not on stem cells from abandoned zygotes.

While I don’t necessarily agree with PETA’s positions, I can understand how they reach them.

47

[QUOTE=Sunrazor]
Um, I dunno. For purely irrational reasons, I’m not as horrified by burning rats as I am about shooting dogs. I should be, I guess. I set out poison to kill mice around our place (we live in the country) but I assume that the poison kills quickly and painlessly. Maybe it doesn’t, I don’t know.

I understand that testing on animals provides insight into treatment for humans, but for me it’s a slippery-slope kind of thing. If it’s OK to burn rats to death in the pursuit of medical treatment, what about cats? Dogs? Chimpanzees? We can get close to that line where we ask whether it’s acceptable to use the data gathered by the Nazis during their horrific experiments on people (assuming the data they collected was at some point useful.) And the argument gets really complex when it’s OK to experiment on live rats but not on stem cells from abandoned zygotes.

While I don’t necessarily agree with PETA’s positions, I can understand how they reach them.
[/QUOTE]
FWIW, here are my answers:
-Cats, dogs, chimpanzees: I dunno. I feel conflicted about it, and don’t feel qualified to take a position.
-Nazi experiments: assuming there is anything to learn from them, we should learn it. Refusing to learn it won’t stop a single death or mitigate anyone’s suffering.
-Zygotes: fuck yes we should experiment on stem cells from abandoned zygotes.

Slippery slope is generally a fallacy, and I think in this case it leads to one. There are some actions that we don’t accept (experimenting on unconsenting people to gain knowledge–which is different, of course, from using knowledge gained from experiments on unconsenting people), and some actions that we do accept (conducting harmless experiments on consenting people). Where we draw the line between those is unclear, but there’s no reason to suspect that allowing some of the gray-area experiments will necessarily lea to allowing them all, or to allowing the off-limits experiments.

Daniel

Daniel

48

[QUOTE=BluePitbull]
Who said that quote?
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I’m not certain. I first heard it from Rodney Anonymous, but he might have been passing it along.

49

[QUOTE=Left Hand of Dorkness]

Slippery slope is generally a fallacy, and I think in this case it leads to one. There are some actions that we don’t accept (experimenting on unconsenting people to gain knowledge–which is different, of course, from using knowledge gained from experiments on unconsenting people), and some actions that we do accept (conducting harmless experiments on consenting people). Where we draw the line between those is unclear, but there’s no reason to suspect that allowing some of the gray-area experiments will necessarily lea to allowing them all, or to allowing the off-limits experiments.
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We need to clarify that line. There needs to be public debate about it, it needs to not be subject to individual emotional responses, and it needs to be scientifically defensible. Then and only then will sympathy for PETA’s extremist views dry up.