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Thank you for all the accurate, thoughtful
work you do! I've been ordering from you for six years and will
continue to do so!
RS, Washington, DC, 11/25/02
Before Vegan Outreach, I had never found
a vegan organization whose statements I can wholly agree with,
and be proud to pass on to my friends and family. It is people
like you that make me proud to be a vegan and proud of the choices
I am making. Thank you for being an excellent role model and providing
a practical perspective on the vegan lifestyle.
MM, Saginaw, MI, 11/20/02
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"Opening this office is another step toward improving Tyson
Foods' ability to forecast and shape the many new challenges and
opportunities created since Tyson acquired the nation's largest beef
and pork company, IBP inc., last year."
Peter Singer, author of Animal
Liberation, and Michael Pollan, author of "An
Animal's Place," discuss animal rights, liberation, and
welfare. These two discussions are excellent clarifications of the
relevant positions, including Pollan's backstory.
"Witnessing how animals are treated and then slaughtered for
the food industry may make consumers think twice about the amount
of meat they eat, Harris said. Hessler said she wants people to think
about the ethics and principles involved in slaughtering animals
for the fast food industry. Despite these implications, the industry
can still attract consumers."
"Vegans may practice their animal-free diets and lifestyles
religiously, but they're not practicing a religion. At least not
in the eyes of California's courts."
"The rush to embrace a meat-free lifestyle seems to be over
- the rate at which Britons are climbing aboard the tofu wagon has
slowed. It is said that Madonna, for so long a loud and proud vegetarian,
has started to eat meat. It would seem that she is not alone. Now
that BSE, e coli and foot-and-mouth scares have eased, the rate at
which people are eschewing meat altogether has slowed."
"Food poisoning is becoming harder to treat with drugs like
Cipro because poultry producers are using a similar drug made by
Bayer Corp. to treat chickens for respiratory disease, federal officials
say. The U.S. Centers for Disease will report today that 19 percent
of Campylobacter food poisonings last year were caused by Cipro-resistant
bacteria, up 5 percent from 2000. And an upcoming report by a University
of Pennsylvania researcher indicates the rate of resistant infections
reached 40 percent in the Philadelphia area last year. 'It's really
an incredible disaster,' said Dr. Richard Michaels."
Excerpts:
A nine-month Dayton Daily News (part
1, part
2, part
3, Ill
farm, egg
farms) examination traced many problems on large farms to lax
standards, uneven enforcement and rules that vary from state to state.
The Daily News traveled to 11 states and the Netherlands, and compiled
a comprehensive database of megafarm regulations in every state.
The examination found:
• Megafarms are rapidly replacing small and midsized livestock
farms. Government statistics show megafarms grew 47 percent from
1982 to 1997, while small and midsized farms declined 25 percent.
Put another way, about 2,600 megafarms replaced 339,000 smaller farms.
• State after state is overhauling megafarm regulations, but
operators can still go years without facing inspections, must violate
rules repeatedly to risk harsh penalties and are exempt from many
environmental standards. Half the states don't require megafarms
to meet air-quality standards and just three states enforce limits
on toxic gas from large farms.
• Megafarms increasingly operate like factories yet skirt federal
government standards designed to protect the public and the environment
from industrial pollutants. A federal lawsuit in Kentucky seeks to
have 80 chicken houses regulated as industrial plants, claiming their
ammonia emissions pose a public health threat. Buckeye Egg reported
releasing 3.3 million pounds of ammonia in 2000, ranking it among
the state's top factories, power plants and other industrial sources.
• Pollution investigations linked to Ohio's livestock farms
are on the rise. Livestock farming was suspected in 306 investigations
since 1993, up 26 percent from the previous decade. In 2001 and 2002,
the state linked 76 incidents to livestock operations – more than
from any other source, including oil spills and sewage. An estimated
74,000 fish were killed in those incidents.
• At least 24 people in the Midwest have died from inhaling
hydrogen sulfide and methane from manure since the 1970s, including
fifth-generation Michigan dairy farmer Carl Theuerkauf and four members
of his family, who collapsed one by one in 1989 after breathing methane
gas from a manure pit. But the death toll from manure may be much
higher. Cryptosporidium, a microorganism found in animal waste, killed
104 people and sickened 403,000 others in Milwaukee in 1993 in an
outbreak some blamed on manure from nearby livestock farms. A local
health department and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
also suspected that manure caused seven miscarriages in a small farming
community in Indiana between 1991 and 1993 by contaminating wells.
• "Big Chicken" often equals less regulation. Twenty-three
states exempt dry-litter poultry operations – the bulk of their
chicken farms – from regulations that other megafarms must follow.
They include Iowa, the nation's top egg-producing state; North Carolina,
the top turkey-producing state; and Georgia and Arkansas, the top
two producers of meat chickens. The exemption rankles officials in
some neighboring states. Oklahoma and Arkansas are embroiled in a
border war about pollution run-off from tons of manure flowing from
chicken houses in Arkansas to scenic rivers in Oklahoma.
"Yes, we are getting cheap food, but we're being sold a bill
of goods," said Don Stull, professor of anthropology at the
University of Kansas. "If we look at the real costs – costs
to the environment, costs of the loss of the family farm and costs
to rural communities – what price are we really paying for that?"
"When Michael Pollan writes
about animals, an avalanche of mail follows. This time, hundreds
of readers applauded his advocacy of farms where animals first have
good lives and then have good deaths. But several couldn't help wondering
whether Pollan wasn't having his cow and eating it, too?"
I'd like to thank Michael Pollan for his intelligent
and respectful treatment of the animal rights issue. I particularly
enjoyed the arguments he jotted down as he read Peter Singer's Animal
Liberation, for I did the same thing when I first read the book
as a college sophomore. And while I have ultimately drawn different
conclusions than Pollan has (I could not in good conscience resume
eating meat), turning factory farms into the kind of animal-friendly
operations Pollan writes about would be a major advance.
Lisa Borders
Something truly exciting is happening in America. The
voters of Florida have just outlawed sow crates, which pig producers
throughout America use to confine pregnant sows so tightly that for
months at a time they cannot walk a single step or even turn around.
The magazine published Michael Pollan's powerful argument against
consuming animal products from factory farms. And several weeks ago,
in The Wall Street Journal, the executive editor of the conservative
Weekly Standard favorably reviewed Matthew Scully's Dominion,
a book by a former speechwriter for George W. Bush that says that
what we are doing to farm animals is simply without mercy. At last,
Americans from all sides of the political spectrum are beginning
to understand that to reduce animals to mere machines for producing
flesh, eggs and milk is ethically indefensible.
True, Pollan and I disagree about whether we should become vegetarian,
as I advocate, or confine our purchases of animal products to those
that are produced by farmers who allow their animals to live a decent
life and who kill them humanely. In another forum, it would be good
to explore these differences at length. But in the current American
context – in which the proportion of meat, eggs and milk that meets
Pollan's standard must be considerably less than 1 percent of the
total sold – these differences are minor. Hence, I gladly join him
in calling on Americans to boycott the other 99 percent of animal
products. What a vast universe of pain and suffering such a boycott
would prevent!
Peter Singer
As a PETA member for most of my life, I agree with
many of Pollan's conclusions and his efforts to change his own habits
and philosophy. It seems that all we can hope for is a society of
informed consumers who ''dare to look.''
Jennifer Healey
Pollan's thesis is thoughtful, and certainly our domesticated
animals would appreciate the reforms he suggests as a step in the
right direction. But in the end, his arguments are still not much
more than variations on the usual rationalizations made by those
far less compassionate. Perhaps Pollan's new dietary category ought
to be this: excusavore.
James Kerner, M.D.
Pollan's article was liberating. I think the reality
is that most of us do know what goes on in industrial meat-processing
plants but choose to ignore it. Mass witnessing of slaughter, through
the Internet or television, might change our attitudes.
Jonathan Spitz
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