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“If slaughter houses had glass
walls, everyone would be vegetarian.”
That’s how a solemn Paul McCartney,
the ex-Beatle, begins narration of a new video from People for
the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA). What follows is the
same sensationalism and fiction that livestock producers have
come to expect from the radical activist group.
Unfortunately, if you have no
reason to know otherwise, what follows is news, tragic news.
That’s why agriculture is so easy to attack.
The fruits of it are everywhere,
part of everybody’s daily existence. Yet there are relatively
few people left in society who know anything about how it works
or the producers who make it possible to purchase a bounty of
safe, affordable food within a couple of miles from home every
day of the week.
It’s even easier to attack animal
agriculture. In addition to the aforementioned, the uninformed
feel even more expert because so many of them own or have owned
a dog or a cat.
According to the latest U.S. Pet
Owners and Sourcebook from the American Veterinary Medical
Association (AVMA), 37.2% of all U.S. households own at least
one dog (43.02 million households); 32.4% own at least one cat
(37.46 million households). For the bean counters out there that
amounts to 72 million pet dogs and 82 million pet cats. Results
for both are 1% more in 2007 than the previous study conducted
in 2001.
These aren’t just pets, they’re
companions. In fact, according to AVMA, 49.7% of pet owners in
2006 considered their pets to be family members.
No wonder that the American Pet
Products Association estimates total pet industry expenditures
this year to be $45.4 billion. Spending was $28.5 billion in
2001.
Social Upheaval leaves People Searching
These attitudes and the amount of money people spend on
their pets have plenty to do with folks trying to ease their
anxieties.
It’s not much of a stretch to
compare the current, ongoing transition—from the industrial age
to that of information and service—with what occurred as the
U.S. emerged from the agrarian age toward the end of the 19th
century and stretched toward the industrial one.
Now as then, lots of preconceived
notions are being displaced by history. How people planned to
make a living, how they began their working lives providing for
their families is shifting in unimagined ways.
According to history, it was the
sense of loss and disenfranchisement accompanying these
realities at the beginning of the industrial revolution that
helped spawn the populist movement in this country.
Philosophy, political or
otherwise may seem a strange starting point on the journey to
begin understanding the mindset behind rabid anti-agriculture
activists, but it explains a lot.
Though lots of folks stretch the term populism like semantic
Silly Putty to fit whatever definition they have in mind, and
though open for debate, the term has specific history and origin
in the United States.
It goes back to the upheaval
caused during the aforementioned transformation from an agrarian
nation to industrial.
According to Stanley Schultz,
emeritus professor of history at the University of Wisconsin, in
an online lecture series, “Rural America underwent massive
transformations in the late-nineteenth century. In response,
farmers began a nationwide movement demanding a new kind of
politics. More and more people began to view the federal
government as a possible source of protection against the
ravages of industrial society. Farmers, however, were not the
only Americans who championed government power as a means to
assuage the problems that they perceived in society.”
That’s where the Grange began.
Actually called the National Grange of the Patrons of Husbandry,
the organization began in sparsely populated parts of the nation
as a place for agricultural producers to gather and socialize.
It wasn’t long before they were sharing their frustrations with
things like access to and the cost of grain storage, access to
credit and the cost of borrowing, issues similar to today. In
time, owners of small businesses, who had similar concerns,
began to join, too. Ultimately, the organization began working
politically to change the system.
These champions of what they
believed to be the common people formed various groups that
became known as the people’s parties or populists. They believed
the root for many of their frustrations grew from the business
elite, the folks industrializing the nation. Thus the populist
definition is always surrounded by an aura of us-against-them
and David-versus Goliath.
In the 1800’s, Schultz explains
the main criticism these folks levied were:
- The American legal system
placed too much emphasis on property rights
- Monopolies were an economic
and social evil
- Social Darwinism &
laissez-faire were bankrupt ideologies
- Industrial society had
turned individuals into economic commodities
- Wealth was unevenly
distributed
According to history, populists
weren’t socialists, per se, but they had a socialistic outlook.
For instance, they believed the government and its regulations
had a responsibility to take care of the working classes.
William Jennings Bryan became a
firebrand for what became known as populism. As a hopeful
presidential candidate at the 1896 Democratic National
Convention, arguing against the gold standard in his famous
Cross of Gold speech, Bryan is the one who said, “Burn down your
cities and leave our farms, and your cities will spring up again
as if by magic; but destroy our farms, and the grass will grow
in the streets of every city in the country.”
Knowing what’s Right
Dig deeper and the populist viewpoint described here aligns
closely with a philosophical school of thought that places more
weight on subjectivity and emotion—ideology—than reason and
fact.
In other words, despite what
logic and fact suggest, something is correct or incorrect
because enough folks believe it so.
You can argue that many of
today’s radical anti-agriculture activist groups mirror this
mindset, with an eye focused on a self-conceived utopia they
believe to be the will of the common people. Science and facts
be damned.
Consider these descriptions from
some of the organizations:
People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals—“PETA focuses its
attention on the four areas in which the largest numbers of
animals suffer the most intensely for the longest periods of
time: on factory farms, in laboratories, in the clothing trade,
and in the entertainment industry. We also work on a variety of
other issues, including the cruel killing of beavers, birds and
other “pests,” and the abuse of backyard dogs.”
The Sierra Club—“… like 1.3 million of your friends and
neighbors, you want: a safe and healthy community in which to
live; smart energy solutions to combat global warming; an
enduring legacy for America’s wild places…Since 1892, the Sierra
Club has been working to protect communities, wild places, and
the planet itself. We are the oldest, largest, and most
influential grassroots environmental organization in the United
States. And our founder, John Muir, appears on the back of the
California quarter.”
Humane Society of the United State—“ The Humane Society of the
United States is the nation’s largest and most effective animal
protection organization—backed by 11 million Americans, or one
in every 28. Established in 1954, The HSUS seeks a humane and
sustainable world for all animals—a world that will also benefit
people. We are America’s mainstream force against cruelty,
exploitation and neglect, as well as the most trusted voice
extolling the human-animal bond.
It’s difficult for the uninitiated to question, let alone argue
with such fuzzy-feeling logic. Beneath the surface, though,
thinking people quickly come to understand each of these groups
is pushing an anti-sustainable-agriculture agenda, an
anti-livestock agenda, or some other movement against something.
There’s no telling how many
members of such organizations understand what’s behind such
organizations. Of those who understand, there’s no telling how
many agree and believe. Those who are true believers, though,
believe they are correct and that mainstream agriculture is
wrong.
This is also true of
organizations within the industry battling to change how
agricultural business works, just like they did when populism
was born in this country.
These days, the battleground
includes such issues as operation size, industry concentration
and consolidation, the desire for more government regulation to
control markets, and the belief that locally grown organic
production is somehow more sustainable that mainstream
practices.
When it started in the 1800’s,
Schultz says it had to do with what he describes as the Agrarian
Myth: “This is the concept, popularized by Thomas Jefferson,
that the self-reliant yeoman farmer was the bedrock of American
society. The gulf between this ideal and the reality of
farming—falling income, and loss of profits to the
railroads—exasperated farmers. For this reason, many tried to
form organizations that would make the Agrarian myth a reality
at the end of the nineteenth century.
Arguably, that’s what some within
the industry are trying to accomplish yet today.
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