PETA - HSUS

Producers Beware: A Look Inside the Animal Activists' Playbook

Mon, 12 Dec 2022 16:24:36 GMT

While the animal ag industry continues to strive to produce more, nutrient-dense pork, beef, poultry and dairy products using less resources, animal rights activists and extremist groups craft strategies and agendas to turn consumers away from these animal-based products.

The Animal Agriculture Alliance (AAA) has released its compilation of reports from five prominent animal rights extremist conferences held throughout the last year, including:
• Humane Society of the United States’ Taking Action for Animals (TAFA) Conference
• The Rancher Advocacy Program’s (RAP) Summit
• Animal Place’s Farmed Animal Conference E-Summit (FACES)
• Animal Legal Defense Fund’s (ALDF) Animal Law Symposium
• ALDF and the Center for Animal Law Studies’ Animal Law Conference

“Animal rights extremist organizations are becoming increasingly more persistent in attacking the animal agriculture community through various channels, including pressuring our restaurant, retail and foodservice customers, targeting the public with misleading emotional campaigns and using the legal system,” says Hannah Thompson-Weeman, president and CEO of AAA.

In compiling these conference reports, the animal agriculture community can be more informed of emerging tactics and can take steps to safeguard livelihoods from potential extremist threats, Thompson-Weeman adds.

The key takeaways and claims from this year’s conferences, compiled by AAA, include:
• Animal rights activists aim to advance the interest of animals through the legal system by utilizing “undercover videos” as evidence in court.
• Activists believe the marketing of plant-based products and promotion of animal rights needs to speak to the emotions of the consumer rather than the intellectual messaging that currently compares alternatives to meat, milk, poultry and eggs.
• Activists are pressuring elected officials to include animal rights in their political campaigns in order to bring their cause to the legislature.

Many activist voices were loud and clear about how they plan to convince consumers to change habits.

“I have been a vegan for almost 40 years, and my whole life has been around activism through food, and that’s really how I’ve tried to touch people—trying to reach their hearts through their stomachs,” says Miyoko Schinner, founder and CEO of Miyoko’s Creamery.

Targeting children in school was also a topic of discussion, as Monica Chen, executive director of the Factory Farming Awareness Coalition explains, “When we do our lessons, we target the audience’s emotions by creating a story about the suffering and destruction that factory farming causes, and students are now primed for us to help them connect the story of factory farming to the story of who they are.”

Undercover videos were highly praised, as Sharon Nunez, president of Animal Equality, says, "[Undercover] investigations are a foundational aspect of our work as we bring light to the darkness of factory farming.”

As producers look ahead to 2023, the importance of sharing the animal ag story will become increasingly important to combat misconceptions and ensure consumers understand the truth about how their food is raised.

The AAA shares more activist perspectives in the full release .

Read More:

What Animal Rights Activists are Saying About Ag: 2022

What Animal Rights Activists are Saying About Ag: 2022

Thu, 13 Oct 2022 12:30:29 GMT

The Animal Agriculture Alliance works hard to safeguard the future of animal agriculture and its value to society by monitoring the activity of animal rights extremists. Several groups recently convened annual conferences and events this summer, discussing new tactics and strategies they plan to use against animal agriculture to rally around their missions of “total animal liberation.” While animal rights proponents make up an incredibly small percentage of our population, they are loud and aggressive and can mislead consumers about the animal agriculture community’s commitment to animal welfare, sustainability, and other key topics.

So far this year, three conferences have been hosted – the Humane Society of the United States’ (HSUS) Taking Action for Animals (TAFA) conference, Rancher Advocacy Program’s (RAP) 4th Annual RAP Online Summit and the Farmed Animal Conference E-Summit (FACES). Key topics at these events included sustainability, public health, legislation and animal welfare. It can be hard to hear comments coming from those opposed to animal agriculture, but it is important to monitor their activity and stay vigilant in whatever tactics may be coming next.

The 2022 HSUS TAFA Conference was held in Washington, DC on July 16-17 and largely focused on the Big Cat Safety Act, however other sessions focused on legislative updates, specifically California’s Proposition 12, and campaigns targeting investor corporations. Here are a few quotes shared by speakers:

• “It is really a great idea to learn about your local elected officials, figure out who they are, establish relationships with them because it is often a little bit easier to pass legislation at the local level sometimes than it can be at the state or the federal level.”

• “Break through and garner attention on Capitol Hill. A compelling ‘undercover investigation’ and resulting media coverage can make all the difference.”

• “We buy shares in all the major publicly traded food companies in the country. As shareholders, we get a lot of power.”

• “Corporate campaigns are also efficient in that they are speedy. They are great ways to cause rapid sweeping change across an industry.”

• “According to the pork industry, once a pork chop hits the shelves in California, whatever cruelty that went into producing it is over. They say that for Californians, there is no such thing as a difference between an inhumanely raised and inhumanely created pork chop and a humanely created pork chop. Try telling that to the hundreds of thousands of Californians that voted for Prop 12.”

At the RAP Summit, held virtually on July 30, animal rights extremists and “reformed” farmers and ranchers came together to discuss converting livestock farms to plant-based alternatives. The conference focused on the “plant-based” agenda, as they hope to grow this vegan movement and end the “oppression” of the meat and dairy industry. Here are a few quotes shared by speakers:

• “Animal agriculture is absolutely destroying our planet. It is a leading cause of global warming, habitat destruction, wildlife extinction, human world hunger and preventable human disease, antibiotic resistance.”

• “Animals are just a prehistoric technology that we’ve been using for thousands of years as the only way we know how to make meat and milk and fish and so forth.”

• “In order to hit the tipping point, the plant-based tipping point, we have to make plant-based foods cheaper than even the heavily subsidized meat and dairy products.”

• “I believe that animal agriculture is a house of cards and if you could just take people of color and remove them and make it politically incorrect to eat meat or dairy - and that in the global majority, lactose intolerance is almost universal - we could collapse the system.”

• “I am absolutely just blown away by the fact that cows and pigs are not even indigenous to the Americas. The first cow came to the Americas on Columbus’s second voyage. The first pig came to the Americas in 1539 on the voyage of a Spanish conquistador. How do we get this message out to communities of color that we don’t want to support our own oppression?”

• “What we’re doing is trying to reach non-vegan eyeballs. And so, we try to attract them with fun and interesting compelling cooking shows, music videos, documentaries, talk shows, etc.”

The FACES conference, hosted virtually on September 16-19, has replaced the annual Animal Rights National, typically hosted by the Farm Animal Rights Movement (FARM). At this year’s FACES conference, the following key messages were shared by speakers:

• “Through our undercover investigations work, in which our investigators put themselves on the front lines, we expose the truth of conditions and cruelty that animals are forced to endure on farms across the country”

• “Animal agriculture is this goliath that is ravaging this planet and dragging down everyone who inhabits it in the process.”

• “It’s super important, especially educating people why it’s so important to change to a plant-based diet because that’s one of the easiest ways that you can help fight climate change.”

• “Our movement, it’s like a movement of walking trauma survivors right now, understandably because we’ve developed a traumatic response from basically being awake to the fact that we live in a mass traumatic event which is carnism. You know, this is an atrocity.”

As members of the animal agriculture community, these quotes can be frustrating to hear. I want to remind everyone of their responsibility to speak up and be an informed voice for animal agriculture and sharing our story. We need to come together to share positive messaging and bust some of these myths surrounding the pork community. Connect with the Alliance to learn more about our resources and opportunities for positive communication!

On Heels of WPX Cancellation, PETA Plans Billboard Near Iowa State Fairgrounds

Wed, 11 Nov 2020 04:53:46 GMT

When the National Pork Producers Council canceled the 2019 World Pork Expo out of an “ abundance of caution ” for animal health due to international cases of African swine fever, many hog producers breathed a small sigh of relief that animal health was taking priority. Now, another threat is coming to Des Moines.

PETA plans to place a billboard near the Iowa State Fairgrounds that says, “All Beings Bleed the Same.” The ad shows a concrete room with what is intended to be blood and pig carcasses. A man is poised to strike a pig—that has an illustration of a dog superimposed over the pig.

While the billboard is targeted to the U.S. audience, the ad campaign was created by PETA Germany and advertising agency DDB Prague, using images from animal rights photographer Tras los Muros.

“When it comes to feeling pain and fear, a pig is no different from a dog, a cat, or a human being,” says Ingrid Newkirk, PETA president, in a press release. “PETA’s billboard suggests that we must recognize that we’re all the same in all the ways that matter and that the kindest thing that we can do for pigs is keep them off our plates.”

The illustration of the dog over the pig is intended to illustrate that “pigs are routinely abused in horrific ways that would be illegal if the victims were dogs or cats,” the release says.

While the billboard will be missed by World Pork Expo’s huge influx of visitors, the presence will still be felt by the 1,400 exhibitors, including many 4-H and FFA students, who are entered for The Exposition live hog show, to be held on June 2-8. The event, normally held during Expo, is sponsored by National Swine Registry, Certified Pedigreed Swine and the American Berkshire Association. More than 4,600 pigs are expected to be at the event.

PETA - HSUS

Producers Beware: A Look Inside the Animal Activists' Playbook

What Animal Rights Activists are Saying About Ag: 2022

On Heels of WPX Cancellation, PETA Plans Billboard Near Iowa State Fairgrounds

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