Lobbyist tells farmers to fight abuse claims
Posted on Friday, November 30, 2007
Farmers and ranchers need to confront animal-welfare activists head on, said Steve Kopperud, a senior vice president at Policy Directions Inc., a Washington, D. C.-based lobbying firm. “We have a ke back the debate,” Kopperud told cattle producers Thursday during Arkansas Farm Bureau’s convention at the Peabody Little Rock hotel.
“The American public does not buy the logic of a farmer abusing an animal,” he said.
“The most credible spokesperson for farm-animal production is a farmer,” said Kopperud, who is active with the Farm Animal Welfare Coalition and the Animal Agriculture Alliance, industry organizations dedicated to spreading the story of U. S. livestock and poultry producers.
These producers need to organize in groups that transcend the various species they raise, he said.
“If it walks, bleats, clucks, we kill it and we eat it, it has to be part of the alliance. We have to stop talking so much about product and start talking a lot about producer,” Kopperud said. “We cannot afford to retreat.” Animal agriculture’s “greatest threat,” Kopperud said, is Wayne Pacelle, president and chief executive officer of The Humane Society of the United States. The 10-million-member nonprofit, which was founded in 1954, has a budget of about $ 130 million. The group’s goal is to put animal agriculture out of business, Kopperud said.
Pacelle, speaking by phone from his office in Washington, disagreed.
The Humane Society, which is broadly involved in animal protection, seeks to “minimize pain and distress” involved in the production, transport and slaughter of farm animals, he said.
“To us it’s not about animal rights, it’s about human responsibility. These animals are killed for human consumption, and the least we can do is give them a decent life and not subject them to torment and privation that causes them enormous distress,” Pacelle said.
“We’re particularly concerned about three production practices,” he said, the crating of young calves raised for veal production, the confinement of breeding sows in gestation crates and the use of battery cages to house egg-laying hens.
Kopperud said farmers and ranchers need to draw a “line in the sand: This is how far we will go, we will go no farther because when I cross that line I have no appreciable benefit to the animal and I start hurting producers.” The Humane Society has filed a federal lawsuit in San Francisco regarding the exclusion of poultry from coverage under the Humane Methods of Slaughter Act, Pacelle said.
“Poultry represents about 97 percent of all animals slaughtered for food in the United States,” totaling annually more than 9 billion birds, mostly chickens, he said. About 105 million pigs are slaughtered annually as well as about 35 million cattle, Pacelle said. “The Humane Methods of Slaughter Act doesn’t give the animals a cushy life, it simply says that, before they’re slaughtered, they are to be rendered insensible to pain,” Pacelle said.
Kopperud said the exclusion of farm animals from special federal regulations makes sense.
“We are critical to everybody’s quality of life, and we have no record of abuse or neglect that is sufficient to warrant federal intervention in what we do and how well we do it,” he said.
“Everyone in the animal-rights movement likes to quote Mahatma Gandhi: ‘Society shall be judged by the way it treats its animals.’ That’s swell. I think we’re fine,” Kopperud said.
The Humane Society also has run two successful ballot initiatives regarding farm-animal welfare, Pacelle said. In 2002, Florida voters approved an initiative to phase out gestation crates, and, in 2006, Arizona voters elected to phase out gestation and veal crates, he said.
A current Humane Society initiative in California would phase out crates and cages, Pacelle said.
In 2007, The Humane Society helped to pass a record 82 new state laws to protect animals, he said.
“I think it’s a measure of the public’s receptivity to the idea of protecting animals from needless cruelty,” Pacelle said.
Animal-welfare activists are calling for livestock and poultry producers to retreat from such technological advances as hormones, antibiotics and cages, Kopperud said.
“There is no one who dumps an unnecessary technology faster than a producer. Yet, we are being almost ordered by retailers to walk away from those efficiencies, the very efficiencies that made us as good as we are today,” he said.
FEEDBACK:
Something to say about this topic? Submit a Letter to the Editor online
