Category Archive: Meat

  1. Calling All Herbivores …

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    The New York Times recently posed a challenge to meat eaters: Defend eating animals. In typical Times fashion, the odds were stacked firmly against the forces of common sense and bacon grease: The judges included the godfather of the animal rights movement, Peter Singer; the “vegan before 6” (a.m.?) Mark Bittman; elitist Berkeley foodie Michael Pollan; and anti-meat writer Jonathan Safran Foer. Not exactly a jury of their peers.

    So, with the self-respecting omnivores smelling a vegetarian rat, the “defense of meat” was left to—drum roll, please—Ingrid Newkirk of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, among others, who said she’d only eat meat grown in a petri dish. (Don’t call it pink slime.) She didn’t say whether she’d retract comparing humanity to a “cancer” or whether she regretted funding arsonists, but perhaps the Times will have other essay contests yet.

    Of course, what the Times called “a powerful ethical critique” of omnivorous eating could better be called “nonsense.” The Times’ vegetarian public editor conceded that the essays were “pretty narrow” and acknowledged criticism from a former Stanford professor who reminded the urban elite that Inuit and grassland nomadic peoples need to eat meat to survive. And more simply, who really believes that animals are humanity’s equal? Certainly not the indigenous Americans who killed and ate them. Even PETA doesn’t seem to buy that line.

    Not to mention that those “cruelty-free” vegetables come from farms from which a myriad of insects and invasive rodents have been driven out or killed. (That goes for the “organic” farms, too.) And some writers now suggest that plants can even “talk” or “howl.”

    So, vegans, what separates “talking peas” from “food with a face”? We find this a very powerful critique, at least if you don’t think humans are “the biggest blight on the face of the earth.”

  2. Ex-PETA VP: Omnivores are Like Racists or Something

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    You might remember that People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (the ones they don’t kill, anyway) recently sued Sea World, claiming that the park’s famous performing whales were actually slaves. The Daily Show’s Wyatt Cenac made fun of PETA at the time for suggesting that animals were the moral equals of humans forced to toil against their will. However ridiculous the view that giving people greater moral standing than “sea kittens” is a sin akin to racism might be, it’s a key philosophical underpinning of the animal rights movement.

    In fact, there’s even a term for it: “speciesism.”

    Bruce Friedrich, a former PETA Vice President who now holds a senior position with Farm Sanctuary, promoted a film examining this so-called “speciesism” at the Huffington Post this week. He’s not an outlier in his view among animal rights activists: PETA’s Ingrid Newkirk has claimed “a rat is a pig is a dog is a boy,” and the head of the Humane Society of the United States (which gives just one percent of its budget to local pet shelters) told an animal rights philosopher that he became vegan after he realized he was being a “speciesist.”

    In the real world, the view that “speciesism” is some equivalent to racism or sexism is recognized as bunk. One biologist notes that it is impossible not to put humans before at least some animals:

    The vegan militia have forgotten that to get their cruelty free vegetables, the land has already been cleared, all competing species have been killed or driven out, those that remain are poisoned (even by organic farmers – they just use “certified organic” methods of pest control or even other animals like ladybugs). We put humans first every time we clear a field, dig a foundation, fence and spray our crops, and burn diesel to harvest and bring them to market.

    This isn’t the first time a scientist has noted that human survival depends necessarily on at least some animal death: One Oregon State University scientist even proposed that if the goal of a food system were to kill the fewest animals, omnivore eating might even be necessary. All those bunnies, voles, and insects you kick out of cropland, even with “organic” pesticides, add up. One Australian expert even thinks eating vegetarian might be “the worst possible thing you can do” if your goal is a “cruelty-free” diet. Hopefully that’ll be some food for thought next time Bruce Friedrich hits the salad bar.

  3. A Vegan Manifesto Wearing a Weight-Loss Halo

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    Neal Barnard, president of the deceptively named “Physicians Committee” for Responsible Medicine (PCRM), is hitting the road this month on a book tour to promote his 21-Day Weight Loss Kickstart program. The casual observer might think this is yet another hardcover to fill up the self-help section. But if you know a thing or two about PCRM (or weight loss, for that matter), you’ll quickly realize that – much like Barnard’s group – this book is not what it seems.

    To begin by judging the book by its orange cover, the program purports to “boost metabolism, lower cholesterol, and dramatically improve your health.” It does not mention that to achieve such lofty health goals, Barnard’s program mandates giving up milk, eggs, salmon, shrimp, chicken breast, pork, and dozens of other low-calorie lean protein sources that are part of the typical weight-loss canon. There’s also no credible evidence that a diet that contains meat and dairy poses any undue health risk, though it could lead to serious vitamin deficiencies.

    Sound like strange advice from a weight-loss doctor? That might be because he is not a registered nutritionist or bariatric surgeon but a psychiatrist by training.

    So why doesn’t Barnard come out and admit on the cover that this book is just another vegan manifesto wearing a veneer of health? It’s the same reason PCRM doesn’t openly advertise its past links to PETA and to FBI-designated domestic animal-rights terrorist groups: because that would expose the group’s true animal-rights agenda. (Barnard himself has been PETA’s medical advisor and president of the PETA Foundation. We bet that didn’t make it onto the book jacket, either.)

    And finally, we believe the majority of people picking up this book as a quick fix will be sorely disappointed in the results. Long-term weight management requires a total lifestyle approach – not a scientifically flimsy diet you only have to stick to for 21 days. And that is ultimately what makes this just another weight-loss gimmick that will line the bargain bin in a few months.

  4. Dr. Oz: Animal Rights Activist?

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    Daytime television’s self-promoting “YOU Doc” Dr. Mehmet Oz entertained us Wednesday with his assault on meat and dairy, offering up his talk show's couch to a vegan activist group that twists medical research to claim non-tofu proteins come with major health risks.

    In typical Oz fashion, he promised to tell his audience what they “need to avoid in order to avoid getting cancer and heart disease.” And who better to fill everybody in than Neal Barnard?

    Groan.

    Barnard, for the unfamiliar, is president of the PETA-linked “Physicians Committee” for Responsible Medicine (PCRM), which gets most of its funding from a single wealthy animal-rights activist in Florida. Barnard, who has called cheese “dairy crack” and tried to sue milk companies for causing “pain and suffering” to lactose intolerant Americans, predictably railed against non-PETA-approved diets.

    Oz promoted his guest’s agenda as “a different way of thinking about what you do in your day-to-day life.” Yes, we suppose that’s true. Barnard’s past claim that “to give a child animal products is a form of child abuse” is certainly, um… different. And Oz never told his audience that Barnard (a non-practicing psychiatrist) was once the president of the PETA Foundation—the organization that owns PETA’s office building and pays its salaries.

    Oz helpfully suggests, “Don’t call it a diet.” And he’s right. Barnard’s advice is animal-rights ideology on a plate.

    Eating nutrient-rich vegetables and fruits is a great idea, but so is eating nutrient-rich animal products. It’s difficult to swallow a stealthily masked, ideology-fueled prescription when it’s passed off as a cancer cure-all.

    Has the good doctor (Oz, not Barnard) been fooled or is he a willing accomplice?

  5. PETA Is Still Meatless, Clueless

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    People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) vice president Bruce Friedrich is well known for his advocacy of property destruction in order to bring about “animal liberation.” But we always assumed that he would have picked up a basic foundation in barnyard facts during his 14-year career at the animal rights group. Maybe we were too generous: Friedrich posted a “request for information” on a Google group for animal rights news Friday night asking for simple livestock statistics:

    Anyone have easily accessible info on how much water and food cattle consume on a daily basis, and how much excrement they produce?

    Gee—that’s odd. PETA has been doing a “shower protest” for years, claiming that it takes the equivalent of months of showers to equal the amount of water needed to make a pound of beef. Why isn’t Friedrich asking PETA’s research department instead of putting out a wide-reaching query on the internet?

    Here’s a more pertinent question: Does PETA even have this information at all? After all, PETA’s original shower protest claimed a pound of meat took the equivalent of one year’s worth of water. PETA cut that figure in half to six months in a subsequent protest. And according to real research groups even that’s a stretch: The Council for Agricultural Science and Technology determined it would take less than 18 ten-minute showers to consume the amount of water required to produce a pound of American beef. (That includes all the water consumed by cattle, plus everything involved in irrigating feed crops and processing the meat.)

    Is it any surprise that the VP of the craziest animal rights group in the world, and one of the leading “go veg” advocates on the planet, doesn’t know the most basic things about livestock farming? Since he seems to have his eye on advocating more radical measures—like “blowing stuff up and smashing windows”—perhaps he can’t be bothered by fundamental farm facts.

  6. Darwin and Chicken Wings

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    As we saw on Wednesday, there’s plenty of anti-meat “news” flying around out there in desperate need of context. Thankfully, today we came across a welcome reprieve from the typical drumbeat that feeds the “go veg” propagandists at animal rights groups. What’s the big news? NPR reports that eating meat is what allowed early humans to, well, become modern people:

    Our earliest ancestors ate their food raw — fruit, leaves, maybe some nuts. When they ventured down onto land, they added things like underground tubers, roots and berries.

    It wasn't a very high-calorie diet, so to get the energy you needed, you had to eat a lot and have a big gut to digest it all. But having a big gut has its drawbacks.

    "You can't have a large brain and big guts at the same time," explains Leslie Aiello, an anthropologist and director of the Wenner-Gren Foundation in New York City, which funds research on evolution. Digestion, she says, was the energy-hog of our primate ancestor's body. The brain was the poor stepsister who got the leftovers. Until, that is, we discovered meat. …

    As we got more, our guts shrank because we didn't need a giant vegetable processor any more. Our bodies could spend more energy on other things like building a bigger brain. Sorry, vegetarians, but eating meat apparently made our ancestors smarter — smart enough to make better tools, which in turn led to other changes, says Aiello.

    So here’s an interesting mental exercise: If the animal-rights PETA activists built a time machine, would they stop early man from ever eating meat and becoming modern man? (Hmmm.) But anyway, it’s perfectly fine with us if the vegan activists at HSUS and PETA would prefer to "evolve" to a meatless diet, but they shouldn’t try to force the rest of us to follow suit. Meat has its place in today’s healthy diet—something that’s apparently been true for millions of years.

  7. East Meets West in PETA Gaffes

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    Many Americans are familiar with the various boundary-crossing media stunts of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), which often involve women in states of undress or animal-rights shock tactics aimed at children. So when we heard that PETA had decided to export its infamous stunts to the Middle East, we wondered what would go wrong first. According to the Daily News Egypt, the answer in Cairo was… well, just read this:

    A fistfight between two women broke out in Mohandessin Sunday, after two-dozen Egyptians scrambled to collect free vegetables given away by an animal rights group. […]

    The onlookers, many of whom seemed more interested in free chilies, eventually dashed to fill their bags from a large pile of peppers PETA had placed on the ground.

    The rush for chilies led to the scuffle between the two women, one of whom was knocked to the ground while both had their headscarves pulled off, angering several onlookers.

    “It is shameful that they put food on the ground for us, as if we were animals. They are disrespecting Egyptians,” screamed one man, who only went by the name Mahmoud.

    Did PETA at least win a few hearts and minds in the City of a Thousand Minarets? Not exactly:

    Mohamed Hassan, 32, gathered three crates of peppers to use for cooking in his small street-side restaurant.

    “Of course, I will not stop eating meat, however expensive it may be,” said Hassan. “But now I have a whole lot of peppers, which should last me at least three days.”

    At least no one was arrested in Egypt, although PETA can’t say the same in Jordan. PETA’s anti-meat message, of course, was lost in all the commotion. But the news isn’t all bad: Handing out free food is one of the few truly charitable things we’ve seen PETA do in years.

  8. PETA Washes Its Hands of Reality (Again)

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    Thursday is Earth Day, and People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) is using the opportunity to push its animal-rights agenda. Yesterday, PETA president Ingrid Newkirk penned an op-ed claiming that whenever we “consume meat, eggs or dairy foods, we contribute to ecological devastation.” (Not true.) And today in Birmingham, Alabama, scantily-dressed PETA fem-bots will hold an outdoor shower protest to allege that one pound of beef requires the same amount of water as six months’ worth of showers. (Also not true.)

    These animal-rights eco-talking points are like non-eroding garbage— they won’t go away, and they stink like crazy. One of Newkirk’s complaints is that meat contributes significantly to global warming. Not so in the United States. The EPA’s 2008 inventory of greenhouse gases found that the entire U.S. livestock industry accounts for less than 3 percent of greenhouse gas emissions. And in February a British study found that “going veg” could actually hurt the environment by forcing more land into cultivation and raising the risk of forests being bulldozed.

    As for PETA’s shower claim, this loony logic is water soluble. PETA used to claim that one pound of beef took a whole year’s worth of shower water—before quietly changing its claim to “six months.” But even this revised figure is still a gross miscalculation. According to a 1999 estimate from the Council for Agricultural Science and Technology, a group made up of actual agriculture scientists, it would take fewer than 18 ten-minute showers to consume the amount of water required to produce a pound of lean American beef. (That includes all the water consumed by cattle, and the water used to irrigate feed crops and process the meat.)

    We couldn’t resist raining on PETA’s parade, so we’re telling the media today that PETA’s Earth Day antics are all wet. Here’s what our Director of Research said in a press release:

    If these PETA protesters are only showering 18 times every 6 months, I guess a Birmingham intersection is as good a place as any to catch up. We've always said that PETA stinks, but now we know why.

    One good way to protect the planet this Earth Day is to encourage meat producers across the globe to catch up to American efficiency standards. Another way is to stop buying what PETA is selling.

  9. PETA Behaving Badly

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    Another organization has caved to PETA pressure because of a mistaken belief that the radical group really cares about animals. The Neumann University Alumni Association says it will stop distributing discounted tickets to the Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Circus in response to PETA’s latest protest. The alumni association was offering discounted admission to the February 27 show in Philadelphia.

    In a February 1 letter, PETA said Neumann University (a Franciscan-affiliated school) would betray its Catholic values by continuing to support the event. (We wonder where PETA’s concern for values is when it mixes naked women and religious imagery.) As happens all too often, university officials cried “uncle” without looking carefully at PETA’s credibility. And the truth is out there: For puppies and kittens, PETA is the proverbial Grim Reaper.

    This so-called animal “rights” group killed 95 percent of the pets in its care in 2008, according to records PETA itself filed with the Virginia state government. Out of the 2,216 animals PETA took during 2008, it managed to find homes for a mere seven animals – despite an annual budget of $32 million.

    What’s the reason for PETA’s hypocrisy? Money. It’s easier and cheaper to run media campaigns berating circuses than to actually roll up a sleeve or two and save cats and dogs. The last thing PETA wants to do is actually take care of animals. That’s expensive. (But it’s also “ethical.”)

    PETA will, however, use advertising dollars to shamelessly exploit human tragedy. In Great Britain, the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) just banned PETA from displaying an ad with a photograph of a baby killer. PETA was trying to link animal abuse with infanticide.

    Thankfully, more and more people are catching on to PETA’s hypocrisy and rejecting its message. Just look at these 14-year-girls in Punxsutawney on Tuesday. For all the effort PETA spends targeting kids, it may be all for naught.

  10. Is PETA Going for the Gold in Terrorism?

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    People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) is well-known for its assaults on common decency, but its latest move in Canada may have significantly backfired. PETA took responsibility for an attack yesterday on Canadian Fisheries Minister Gail Shea, in which a protester smeared her face with a tofu “cream” pie with the accuracy of an Olympic marksman. Now, Member of Parliament Gerry Byrne is calling for PETA’s attack to be investigated as a potential act of terrorism:

    When someone actually coaches or conducts criminal behavior to impose a political agenda on each and every other citizen of Canada, that does seem to me to meet the test of a terrorist organization. I am calling on the Government of Canada to actually investigate whether or not this organization, PETA, is acting as a terrorist organization under the test that exists under Canadian law.

    Our friends up north can find a precedent from our own government. As we’ve pointed out, this “Facility Security Profile” questionnaire from the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service describes PETA as a “Terrorist Threat,” listing it alongside notorious domestic terrorist groups like the Animal Liberation Front, Earth Liberation Front, and Stop Huntingdon Animal Cruelty. (See Page 4. While the USDA removed the form from its website after we started spreading the word, you can find a PDF copy preserved here.)
    We revealed back in 2002 that PETA gave $1,500 to the Earth Liberation Front. PETA, naturally, had a wide range of shifting explanations for this “grant.” And that’s not even getting into the group’s $70,000+ gift to convicted arsonist Rodney Coronado, along with other eyebrow-raising “donations.”
    Yes, yes. We know it was “just” a tofu dessert (if there really is such a thing). But the fact that a PETA wingnut can get close enough to a Canadian cabinet official to assault her (and the PETA activist was charged with assault) should give the Mounties some serious pause.
    A 2003 New Yorker  profile notes that “officially, PETA does not engage in violence, but its leaders wholeheartedly defend and encourage guerrilla groups like the Animal Liberation Front.” The sooner governments start recognizing this reality, the faster the projectiles stop flying toward government officials.