Economies of Shame

History is replete with examples of industries that have thrived in spite of – nay, because of – lax economic and social policies and moral and environmental irresponsibility. Chemical companies like Union Carbide in India, clothing companies like Fruit of the Loom with factories in Central America, and energy companies like Enron in this country that gouged consumers with price increases while enjoying record profits, are just three examples. Land O’ Lakes subsidiary Moark, with its practice of cruelly confining four or more chickens into small battery cages not even big enough for a single hen to spread its wings, is yet another.

Economies of scale represent the cost advantages to companies when they expand. By virtually all measures, such economies have been very kind to large agribusiness interests in the United States like Moark, which posted these financial figures for the current year:

• Six month sales of $320 million, compared to $231 million for the first half of 2007 (an increase of 39%);
• Earnings of $11 million during the second quarter, compared to $2.7 million for the same quarter last year (an increase of 307%);
• And pretax earnings that are more than six times higher than the same period in 2007.

Land O’ Lakes officials attribute “strong markets” to the improved earnings, with retail egg prices over the first six months averaging $1.43 per dozen, versus $1.01 per dozen in for the same period in 2007 (an increase of 42%).

Strong markets?? Clearly, mega-sized agribusinesses like Moark don’t trade in the same markets as the rest of us. While we all struggle to make ends meet, giant agribusiness concerns are charging historically high prices and reaping the rewards in the form of record profits. Trouble is, these profits come at the expense of millions of animals that are laying the golden eggs. And they want to blame the proponents of Proposition 2, who seek to end the barbaric confinement practices of companies like Moark, for rising egg prices. Come again?

Proposition 2 is a modest measure on the November ballot in California that seeks to phase out extreme confinement practices like those used by opposition-funder Moark. It’s simple: calves raised for veal, breeding pigs, and egg-laying hens should be given enough room to stand up, turn around, or extend their limbs. The industry has until 2015 to convert to these more humane housing practices.

As the battle over Proposition 2 intensifies, there will be many stories of collapsing industries and sky-rocketing prices that are purportedly caused by Prop 2’s passage. These stories will prove to be nothing but fictions of doom. Such were the dire predictions surrounding similar propositions in other states. None of them came true.

So, Californians – two-thirds of whom support Prop 2 according to the most recent Field poll – should vote their conscience in November, free from concerns of economic peril. That’s precisely what farm workers, veterinarians, clergy, food safety groups, and environmental organizations all around California are doing. Reducing the suffering of animals raised for our consumption is a reasonable and common-sense reform that will not only help the animals but improve food safety, support family farmers, and protect and safeguard the environment. It just makes sense.

Golden Calves and Veal Crates

Since the dawn of time, humans have objectified animals, and we’ve tended to move between two extremes: we either revere them, or we abuse them. To wit: we live in a country that spends more money on its pets than it does on music, movies, and sporting events combined (pets are a multi-trillion dollar industry), and yet this same country sustains factory farms, an institution so morally corrupt that it is off limits to the public. And think about that: you can tour a nuclear reactor, prisons, the Federal Mint, even the White House if you’re fortunate enough, but one thing in this country is so top-secret, so inaccessible to the public, so off the radar that it literally takes undercover agents to penetrate its walls. When’s the last time you heard of a school field trip to a factory farm? After all, wouldn’t it be instructive for the kids to see where their meat and eggs come from?

Not a chance.

In the Hebrew scriptures, we read how the Israelites grew impatient with God, so they constructed a golden calf to worship instead and threw all restraint to the seven winds. And God was not amused. In Paul’s letter to the Romans in the New Testament, Paul points out that the essence of all sin is what we worship creation (that is, ourselves, our ingenuity, our cleverness, each other) instead of the Creator.

Then we have the biblical story of Balaam’s Ass (as we called it when I was a kid—always caused a twitter) in the book of Numbers, where the clear and apparently only moral of the story is that animal abuse is strictly forbidden by God. Balaam beats his donkey until an angel puts an end to it.

Clearly, the bible prohibits both extremes of objectifying animals: we ought not worship them, nor should we abuse them. And there’s a connection: that which we worship we often end up objectifying. Just look at the vendors outside the Vatican with their Jesus bottle openers and glow-in-the-dark crucifixes.

And yet, the objectification continues at both extremes, from the Paris Hiltons of the world whose dogs are simply another fashion accessory along with their pearls, to the Michael Vicks, whose dogs are nothing but fighting machines; from the prosthetic testicles that can be implanted in a neutered dog (presumably it’s someone’s else’s testicles who are metaphorically being augmented) to the factory farm and veal calves chained by the neck to their crates (read "coffins").

You might have thought that we’d come a long way since the days of Moses and his 40 years in the wilderness. But apparently we never left. We have lost our way and have grown impatient with the inefficiency of compassion. You might have thought that in the several thousand years between us and the wandering Israelites we would have learned a thing of two, but no. We’ve simply moved from golden calves to veal crates and, once again, thrown all restraint to the seven winds.

And God is not amused.

Prisons and Plowshares

It used to be that farms in this country were owned by farmers whose well-being depended on the well-being of the animals they raised for food, and farming wasn’t so much a business as a way of life. Cows, pigs, and chickens were still raised for their meat (or eggs, or both), of course, but their lives were spent in relative ease prior to that fateful day. And yes, those lives were often spent in coops and barns, but at least the animals had room to move and knew the cycles of the seasons and when day would turn to night. Farms weren’t merely places where animals died, in other words. They were also places where animals lived.

Today’s factory farms are nothing of the sort. Animals are kept alive in these modern behemoths of production (and pollution), but it really can’t be said that these animals truly live any more than one can say that prisons are where people truly live. The only real difference between prisons and factory farms, it seems, is that the inhabitants of one have room at least to move around and stretch their limbs and are given balanced meals, while the inhabitants of the other are fed chemically altered slop and kept in cages so small they can never turn around their entire lives. Oh, yes, the other difference is that the former group of inhabitants are people who presumably did something wrong to get themselves in their predicament, while the other inhabitants are animals who… well, their only “crime” was that they were born with hooves and tails or beaks and feathers.

How we arrived at the place where animals face a fate worse than criminals for the sake of efficiencies of production and to satisfy our insatiable taste for meat is a long and sordid tale, and one that will be examined in future posts on this blog. Suffice it to say that we’ve unwittingly become a culture that prizes efficiency over ethics and mass production over morality. If it saves money, who really cares if it came from the sweat of impoverished third world labor or the blood of abused animals? When convenience trumps compassion, a culture has lost its soul.

The Psalmist says, “The Lord is gracious and merciful, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love. The Lord is good to all, and his compassion is over all that he has made.”

If we, who were created in his image, do not likewise show compassion over all that God has made, are we then not marring God’s image in us? When we have fashioned the plowshares of our farms back into the swords of factories, and our pruning forks back into spears, have we not reversed the very call we’ve been given to be ambassadors of peace and compassion? Have we not, at that point, dispensed with our inheritance and, thus, forfeited our own souls?

Something there is that doesn't like a wall

My 2-year old knows better. She's not enthusiastic about it, but she begrudgingly will accept the responsibility of putting her stuffed animals and dolls back into her toy chest at night. She knows mama and papa don't like a mess. Conveniently enough, she's learning not to like messes either. It bothers her, and she's not sure why. We'd like to think she's developing taste, a conscience, an aesthetic rule, a pitch, an angle... or maybe it's just instinct.

Something there is that doesn't like a... mess.

Which brings me to Proposition 2 (The Prevention of Farm Animal Cruelty Act) on the California ballot this November. I've heard some other bloggers (Charles Hartley on KPBS.org) ask the obvious question, "Why?" Why?!? Why should we prevent farm animal cruelty? Hmmmm.... let's see.

Something there is that doesn't like... cruelty, perhaps?

When you have to ask the question, you've already gone the way of Dante in the middle of a wood: you have lost your way.

My two year-old knows better. She knows not to step on a Rolly Polly bug when we got out walking the cul-de-sac. She knows she shouldn't hit our dog just because. She knows it's not nice to torture butterflies. She would also know, if we cared to show her, that it's not nice to tether young calves by the neck to a chain and stick them in a cage just big enough to stand up or lie down... in their own feces... their entire life. She'd know, if we cared to show her, that it's really not nice at all to keep a pregnant sow in a crate not much bigger than the veal calf's confinement for months on end, until she finally gives birth, and then wean the little piglets from her after only three weeks, only to start the process over again, month after month after month. She would clearly know, if we dared show her, that it's not nice to stuff a bunch of hens into a cage not even big enough for a single hen, then expect them to get along for months on end while they're forced to lay eggs and an unnaturally high rate and can never extend their wings. Once. Their entire lives.

Even if this Proposition passes, it doesn't mean the end of all farm animal cruelty. But it does mean the end of the worst of it. And a little less cruel is a whole lot better.

Even my 2-year old knows that. And if she could, she would vote "Yes" on Prop. 2.

Shhhh...

"The Secret" hit the shelves with a vengeance a few years ago and flew off the shelves just as fast. The basic premise (for those of you who have been stuck in an alternate universe for the past year) is that the good things that happen to you are the result of your ability to envision them happening. If you keep a positive attitude, good things will come your way: positive energy creates positive outcomes.

There have been countless iterations of this idea for millennia, the most historically recent being Norman Vincent Peale's "The Power of Positive Thinking." (The Health and Wealth Gospel movement has been a more recent offshoot.) Of course, for any student of culture or religion, The Secret wasn't much of a secret at all. Indeed, a variation on this theme exists in the Christian tradition in Paul's letter to the Philippians:

"Finally, brothers, whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable—if anything is excellent or praiseworthy—think about such things. Whatever you have learned or received or heard from me, or seen in me—put it into practice. And the God of peace will be with you." (4:8-9)

The Christian version of The Secret (more accurately, the various iterations of "The Secret" are really just misguided versions of the Philippians passage) promises, not that good things will come to you if you envision them, but that God's peace will be upon you if you continue to focus on the good and noble. And what is a better thing than God's peace?

In the work of animal welfare, it is far too easy to get overwhelmed by the sickening reality of animal abuse and the horrific conditions of factory farms and the plight of millions of animals who are euthanized each year in this country in the name of population control. We must nevertheless hold up, in the midst of the reality of this desperate situation, a vision for what things can--and with God's help, will--be. God has rarely made a practice of swooping in to stop suffering. Many of us wish otherwise, but that's not how it works (freedom invariably begets suffering, which is the price we pay in a broken world). That will all change, of course, when "Thy Kingdom come, Thy will be done, on earth as it is in Heaven," but until that day, WE are God's hands and eyes and feet and heart, and WE are the ones whom God entrusts to carry out his will that all suffering might end, in spite of, or perhaps because of, our freedom to do so.

Think of a world where animal shelters are empty, factory farms gather cobwebs, dog and horse racing tracks are turned into pastures and parks, where medical laboratories are turned into classrooms, where children dissect sentences instead of animals. Meditate on these things... then get to work to bring it about.

First They Ignore You...

Mahatma Gandhi's little stroll to the sea to protest Britain's occupation of India started, not with a step or even an idea, but with a conviction; namely, that people must be self-governed. From convictions come ideas, and from ideas come first steps. When asked how the process, from conviction to that first step and finally to the shore, bore itself out, Gandhi remarked, "First they ignore you. Then they mock you. Then they get angry. And then you win."

The opposition to California's Proposition 2 (The Prevention of Farm Animal Cruelty Act) is angry. After losses in Arizona, Oregon, and Florida, they realize that the inevitable march to end the cruelest and most inhumane treatment of farm animals in this country has begun. Tens of millions of dollars are being spent to thwart this progress, but much like Gandhi on his way to the sea, once justice is on the march, even armies cannot stop it. It is true that a lie gets half way around the world before the truth has even got its shoes on, but as the tortoise and the hare show, it's not who starts first (or who spends the most money), but who gets to the finish line that matters.

The conviction that underlies the effort to pass Proposition 2 is simple: no animals should be prevented from engaging in even the most basic movement. It's that simple. This is a mainstream, modest, simple call to reduce the suffering of millions of farm animals who live destitute and degrading lives every day in California. We Californians are better than that. We humans are better than that. And the factory farms know it. And that's why they're mad.

First they ignore you. Then they mock you. Then they get angry. And then you win. Vote with a conscience. Vote "Yes" on Proposition 2.