Animal Fight: Ag Advocates Square Off Against Animal Rights Activists

“The situation facing farm animals in this country is absolutely heartbreaking” says Nathan Runkle, in a video, which has the look and feel of a political attack ad, posted on the Mercy for Animals website. Runkel, the group’s executive director, speaks over an ominous, minor-key soundtrack while a video montage shows disturbing clips: a calf writhes on the ground, chickens go berserk inside tiny cages.

“Mercy for Animals is going head to head against multi-billion dollar industries,” continues Runkle, drawing a battle line in the sand. “And we’re winning.”

It’s the kind of work that earned Runkle a “Top 20 Activists Under 30 Award” from the vegan magazine VegNews. And it’s the kind of work that draws the full ire of the Center for Consumer Freedom, which works to “push back” against the “growing cabal of activists” that includes “animal rights misanthropes” who “claim to know ‘what’s best for you’” and are “eroding our basic freedoms” to choose what we eat.

There’s an increasingly hostile fight being waged in our country over the roles that farm animals should or shouldn’t play within our diets and economy.

Matt Rice, director of investigations for Mercy for Animals, characterizes the Center of Consumer Freedom as a front group for industries that profit from animal exploitation. On the other side is Emily Meredith, communications director for the Animal Agriculture Alliance, who decries “the misinformation and lies” animal rights groups spread about animal agriculture.

This is just one example of the increasingly hostile fight being waged in our country over the roles that farm animals should or shouldn’t play within our diets and economy. In the left corner: a collection of animal rights groups that argue for drastic changes to – or, sometimes, complete abolition of – animal agriculture. On the right: various organizations that view attacks on animal agriculture as attacks on our most basic freedoms, values and traditions.

And both sides are trying very hard to win the hearts and minds of young people.

“It seems to be becoming more contentious and polarized,” says Dr. Bailey Norwood, an agricultural economist at Oklahoma State University who studies public perceptions of animal welfare.

He attributes this souring of relations in part to the legislative victories won by animal rights groups over the last decade, like bans enacted on gestational crates for pigs in Florida, Arizona, Colorado and Oregon. In the eyes of various animal agriculture industries and their supporters, these gains elevated animal rights groups from an annoyance to a legitimate threat and have escalated the conflict between these groups competing for our sympathies and support.

Consider this staggering contradiction in the way these opposing interests characterize the landscape of agriculture in the United States.

Farm Forward, a small nonprofit group that works to “promote conscientious food choices [and] reduce farm animal suffering,” says that more than 99 percent of livestock that are raised and slaughtered in the U.S. come from “factory farms” ”“ a term that connotes coldhearted, mechanized efficiency. Simultaneously Meredith’s Animal Agriculture Alliance makes the point that more than 98 percent of American farms are “family farms,” those sun-dappled, Old MacDonald homesteads that made our country great.

(The “family farm” statistic is based on the USDA’s definition of one operating as a sole proprietorship, partnership or family corporation; Farm Forward derives its “factory farm” figure from the 2002 Census of Agriculture, also published by the USDA.)

“Certainly there’s a battle for hearts and minds here,” says Rice, of Mercy for Animals. “Consumers have a right to know where they food comes from and how animals on these factory farms are treated, so they can make informed choices.”

In Meredith’s eyes, the major change over the past couple of decades is that our society has become increasingly removed from the farm, and has an increasingly poor understanding of modern agriculture. Quaint red barns may have been replaced by big metal ones, but “core values [of American farming] remain unchanged,” she says.

“We’re talking about modern agriculture,” she continues. “It looks different, but that doesn’t mean that it’s bad. It doesn’t mean that farmers are out there abusing their animals or only out there after profits.”

(Like Runkle, Meredith has also been honored by her ideological allies, having just received Vance Publishing‘s “40 Under 40 in Agriculture” award for her advocacy and public outreach on behalf of agriculture.)

In Norwood’s view, this debate often occurs over the heads of an uninterested general public. According to the results of a 2007 survey he conducted, Americans rank animal welfare low on their lists of concerns, below food safety, farmers’ financial well-being, food prices and environmental issues. And while voting patterns might lead one to conclude that animal welfare is a high public priority ”“ a full 63 percent of Californians voted for Proposition 2, which outlawed extreme confinement of some farm animals ”“ public behavior doesn’t always follow suit. According to research by Dr. Jayson Lusk, a colleague of Norwood’s at Oklahoma State’s Department of Agricultural Economics, the market share of cage-free and organic eggs purchased in the San Francisco area in the year following Proposition 2’s passage hovered at just over 10 percent. This suggests a significant disconnect between the ideas about animal welfare that people support at the ballot box but not with their day-to-day grocery store decisions.

Nevertheless, young hearts and minds, representing the future of American consumption, are of particular interest to each side of this animal welfare war. After this summer’s Animal Rights National Convention in Alexandria, Va., the Animal Agriculture Alliance issued a press release announcing that animal rights groups are targeting high school and college students, who are vulnerable to animal rights propaganda because “they are even further separated from having any real knowledge of agriculture.”

“It is clear that the animal rights movement is gaining momentum,” continues a subsequent report by the Alliance (which sent representatives to the conference for intelligence-gathering purposes, echoing the efforts of animal rights groups to infiltrate and disseminate information about goings-on behind farm and processing plant doors.) “Unfortunately, activists are gaining ground by taking advantage of people who are uneducated about animal agriculture.”

‘The dialogue, even the extreme dialogue, is healthy. I don’t get alarmed at the extreme positions. I have confidence that as a society, we’re making intelligent decisions, and I’m excited about how much attention is being put on farm animal care.’

That matter of “gaining ground” is itself a confused one. Rice talks about “progress by leaps and bounds” in terms consumer awareness, corporate responsibility and authorities’ willingness to enforce various animal cruelty laws on the books. In terms of dietary choice, however, Gallup polls have found little change over the past decade. In 2012, 5 percent of people in one of its polls identified themselves as vegetarian, while 2 percent, most of whom said “no” to the vegetarian question, identified as vegan. In both 2001 and 1999, Gallup polls found that 6 percent of Americans identified as vegetarians (veganism wasn’t surveyed in these instances). Just 2.6 percent of respondents to Norwood’s 2007 survey identified as vegetarians, with an additional 1 percent identifying as vegans.

But the battle goes on.

It gets heated, it gets extreme, it gets shrill – and, according to Dr. Suzanne Millman, a professor of animal welfare at Iowa State’s College of Veterinary Medicine, it’s a good thing to have occurring, whether the rest of us are paying any attention or not.

“The dialogue, even the extreme dialogue, is healthy,” says Milliman. “I don’t get alarmed at the extreme positions. I have confidence that as a society, we’re making intelligent decisions, [and] I’m excited about how much attention is being put on farm animal care.”

While, up close, this debate can seem intractable, Millman continues, she views as part of a long, slow evolution of the standards we, collectively, set regarding animals and agriculture. She also notes that, even as this animal rights war drags on, the overall welfare of American farm animals has improved considerably over the past several decades.

And those fighting their bitter battles out on the fringes are also doing us a favor, in a sense, by addressing head-on some of the messiest, most difficult ethical problems of our food and farming system – ones that the non-caring public would otherwise tend to keep swept under the rug.

Returning to those fringes, though, there is actually one point of agreement between these animal rights and animal agriculture foes: they’re going to be keeping this up for quite a while.

“We’re seeing a major change in the past couple of decades in ways that animals are viewed and treated, but there’s still a long way to go,” says Rice.

Farmers have been so busy farming, Meredith notes, that they’ve found their story “being told by the activist groups, by the detractors.”

Now they’re playing catch-up, she says. She hopes that the tide is beginning to turn, that the great majority of Americans whose direct connection to food production ended several generations ago will begin to understand farming again. It’s no small task, she continues, and “there’s certainly a lot of work to be done.”