Chances– not likely. As Mother Jones writes, the USDA is “pretty much a trade group for agribusiness.”

In fact, the USDA is the largest purchaser of meat in the United States, virtually keeping these huge factory farms in business and consistently favoring huge companies like ConAgra over the little guy. It supposedly keeps Americans’ meat supply safe, yet it will not allow any company or farm to perform extra testing or certification to say, for instance, that a company’s cattle are free from mad cow disease. The USDA, by its actions, keeps these companies in business. However, by its existence, it keeps much of the meat industry rolling along, because people have no reason to look into what they’re eating themselves due to a false sense of security. The government says it’s OK, so this meat must be OK!

Incredibly, when the Humane Society released its investigative video of the Chino, CA Hallmark Meat Packing slaughtering plant, then-USDA Secretary Ed Schafer blamed the Humane Society rather than the slaughterhouse or USDA inspectors, supposedly for not telling the USDA sooner about the video (local California officials had requested more time from the Humane Society for their investigation). One of the slaughterhouse workers shown in the video, Daniel Ugarte Navarro, said that the abuse of downer cows had been going on for his entire 23-year slaughterhouse career and he never thought anything of it. That means the USDA, which supposedly inspected the plant multiple times a day, missed that abuse for 23 years. How safe do you feel with your meat supply with this kind of oversight?

Now, at least a few nationally circulated articles are revealing what anyone looking into it knew all along: the USDA not only keeps huge companies in business, it allows unsafe meat into the market and covers up slaughterhouse violations to make nice with these companies, creating “public health risks” in the process according to a USDA inspection veterinarian, Dean Wyatt, who just testified before Congress.

What abuses did the USDA allow to happen by ignoring their inspector, Wyatt?

“In one scene, a calf kicks after having one of its feet cut off and in another a calf vocalizes while being skinned, its head almost severed, Humane Society officials alleged.”

The abuses Wyatt was specifically referring to as being covered up occurred with baby calves that were destined for “organic veal” from the supposedly all-natural all-organic Bushway Packing plant in Vermont, uncovered by another Humane Society undercover investigation. Unsurprisingly, animal abuses of this type have never been uncovered by the USDA itself.

USDA veterinarian and inspector Dean Wyatt “describes being threatened with transfer or demotion after citing a plant for butchering conscious pigs, despite rules that they first be stunned and unconscious.”

(The USDA is the country’s largest buyer of meat for the national school lunch program.)

To those who would make an argument like Anonymous on the post – Who has decreed that government force should only protect human liberty? Furthermore, how do you define human, and why does an animal have any less interest in being protected by government force than these humans you speak of? Here are refutations of pretty much all possible arguments you could put forth here.

1.) “Animals are not as smart as humans.” – What about a severely mentally retarded infant? What about, for that matter, a newborn baby, which certainly has less of a capacity to think than any factory farmed animal. What about an 80-year-old with Alzheimer’s disease, compared to the great apes or dolphins which have been shown in studies numerous times to have a huge capacity for sentience? What about any cow/dog/pig compared to Terri Schiavo, whose brain had absolutely no function nor hope of it, yet she had the legislative body of the most powerful nation on Earth falling all over itself to protect her right to life?

If the idea of subjecting any of the above-named human groups to a slow, prolonged death gives you a shudder, perhaps you should give a single thought to the literally billions of animals that are more intelligent (and possibly more capable of understanding pain) and put to death every week.

Anonymous, if you would classify a severely mentally disabled person as property, perhaps you can then state that animals should also be declared as such. But otherwise, there is no reason animals should necessarily be treated simply as property, as if they’re a bicycle or a chair.

Secondly, what if, for example, IQ tests showed that men are not as intelligent as women or white people are not as smart as black people? Would that be a sufficient reason to deny rights to men or white people?

2.) God created humans in His image, and they are therefore superior.

If you’re as much of a Jew or a Christian as you imply making this argument, take a look at what actually happens in factory farming and see whether that is part of God’s plan or if that is maybe part of humans’ evil free will that needs to be eradicated. Did God say “He makes me lie down in excrement”? Certainly not. A Christian who makes arguments involving God and animals should, at the very least, be a vegan or vegetarian and have nothing to do with factory farming, which is the antithesis of what happened on Noah’s Ark.

3.) It’s always been that way.

Any libertarian should be justifiably suspicious of something that has always been, and know that this is not a symptom of whether something is correct or not. In fact, it’s probably the opposite.

4.) Humans have “earned” our way to the “top of the food chain” due to evolution.

There are many animals that will eat humans if given the chance. I assume that you are in favor of tearing down all zoo walls and just shrugging any time you hear of a shark “attack”? (we’ll rename it a shark lunch, with the shark just having a delicious human sandwich)

By bringing evolution into the discussion, anyone who tries to use this argument also runs up against a few pesky facts: our DNA is extremely close to other primates, way more than, say, dogs, which are granted special protections by the law.

5.) Humans are different than animals, due to some sort of magic unspecified in the arguments above that I can’t give any arguments for.

Of course, this is the silliest argument of all, and goes straight to the [fill in the blank with random insult] Hall of Fame. It’s right there next to “giving more money to education will increase the graduation rate, although it never has it will still somehow magically happen nationwide next year” and “running the country into unprecedented deficits is really a sign of my fiscal responsibility, trust me it’s just magical, re-elect me and you’ll see”.

In other words, these arguments are all inherently idiotic (the next-to-last, when made by any meat-eating Christian) and unsupported by evidence.

Phoption and Rachel made similar comments: “I took a turkey’s life; you took a plant’s life. What difference does it make? For a human to live, life must die” and “plants are alive, and capable of both stimuli and thought” — these two commenters are missing the point entirely. It does not matter that animals are alive, humans are alive, or plants are alive. It matters that humans and animals are sentient. Plants are not, they do not suffer, (for that matter, they are not subjected to long, excruciating deaths in veal crates and battery cages, why not try that out, Phoption and Rachel?), and therefore they do not deserve to be put on the same plane of consideration as humans. That, above all else, is clear, and these comments were pretty disappointing to me.

Today is a day that many people “celebrate” in America by eating a turkey. Libertarians think about things, and so I’d like you to think about that.

Do you think that taxes are wrong because they are based on aggression and force? Well, what did the turkey ever do to you?

Not only did the turkey do nothing to deserve death at your dinner plate, it probably lived a thankless life stuffed in a cage in a shed, never seeing daylight while it was alive. Our basic rights are life and liberty, along with the pursuit of happiness. A turkey destined to be slaughtered has the chance for none of these things. So if you think you’re a real liberty lover and yet you are eating a living being raised on a factory farm this Thanksgiving, I’m pulling your freedom fighter card. And yes, if you bought it in a grocery store, your turkey was raised on a factory farm.

For those who say that they won’t take part in things that are massively subsidized by the government– that turkey would be pretty expensive if meat producers weren’t directly subsidized and protected by our very own United States government, to the tune of billions of dollars every year in subsidies.

For those who say that food simply must include meat, I used to think the same but I have never eaten a more delicious variety of foods than I have since going vegetarian. This is no argument, and in fact I’ve noticed that while turkeys get the headlines, the foods most people actually rave about on Thanksgiving are vegetarian– cranberry sauce, mashed potatoes, pumpkin pies, casseroles, butternut squash.

Ever wonder why people want to drop bombs on third world countries? Why wouldn’t less educated (since I’m going to state for these purposes that non-libertarians are less educated than libertarians) people tyrannize unseen masses thousands of miles away when they are willing to celebrate a holiday by *eating a carcass*? What does it say about libertarians as a group that we are concerned about, say, unprovoked wars, but don’t demonstrate en masse against the government-subsidized, unethical slaughterhouses that are probably providing these Thanksgiving turkeys “red in tooth and claw”?

If you are a libertarian omnivore and I’ve lost you and you never want to read my blog again, I guess that’s just how it is and we’ll part ways agreeing on some things and disagreeing on others. But on libertarian issues, I’ve never minced words, and on this I won’t, either. And I won’t until sentient beings are not killed and suffering, paid for by taxpayer dollars.

And if nothing else, let me put it this way– Sarah Palin is eating a turkey this Thanksgiving. So is George W. Bush. So is Obama. Do you really want to follow that crowd and just do what the masses do?

My future posts might not be all about animals, but they will be about liberty, and animals definitely need some of that. You can help. And it’s something you can do today.

From Animals

The ad garnered more attention for asking why Obama supports different policies for his children than for others’ children, and the White House asking for the ads to be taken down, than it did for its actual content or purpose. I think the ad serves its purpose well. The fact is, Obama has no idea what food is served in the lunchrooms of American public schools because his daughters have never attended one, and neither did he. He went to the most exclusive private academy in Hawaii.

As for the mission of PCRM– I’m a vegetarian, so I agree with their mission of showing that vegetarian diets are in fact healthy (as confirmed by the American Diatetic Association in a recent statement) and expanding them. However, the concurrent goal of having the federal government step in to provide healthier school lunches is not one I can wholeheartedly endorse. I don’t think the federal government, and especially the USDA which works in tandem with agribusiness lobbyists to buy gruel for the nation’s schoolchildren, should be in the business of providing lunches at all.

However, we currently spend billions of the USDA’s budget on school lunches and other subsidized lunch programs that will not end anytime soon. IF we’re going to spend the money anyway, we might as well buy healthy food and not contribute to an obesity problem poor children are already more likely to have due to our other food policies. While vegetarian food, strictly speaking, is not necessarily healthier than meat-based meals 100% of the time (think cheese pizza vs. salmon), most of the time it is. Spending billions on meals for children and not including fruits and vegetables is pretty much a crime. This is true especially if we get some sort of public health care system in place (of course, we do already have that for those over 65), where we’ll be paying for treatment for heart attacks, statins, and strokes of grown-up schoolchildren with clogged arteries from years of mystery meat.

And there’s always the possibility, too, that Malia and Sasha might take notice: the last young girl to live in the White House, Chelsea Clinton, was a vegetarian. The Obama daughters attend the same school as Chelsea, Sidwell Friends, which has a Quaker affiliation; Quakers have historically been very friendly towards vegetarian diets due to their teachings of non-violence.

Rarely have I found a cause which should be so in line with libertarian thinking, yet is so misrepresented. Some libertarians who oppose the seal hunt even neglect to mention the primary reason this is such an easy choice for libertarians.

From Seal Hunt

Canada’s polar bears are dying because they don’t have enough seals to eat, yet Canada’s government each year subsidizes the world’s largest slaughter of marine mammals, the Canadian seal hunt.

From Seal Hunt

This is a favorite cause of Paul McCartney, as well as many animal rights activists. It’s also a cause close to the hearts of Canadian MPs– not surprising when you see the seal hunt described as “a make-work project for out-of-work fishermen”; one can’t help but wonder why our own government hasn’t tried to import seals as part of Obama’s economic stimulus plan, since these plans are based on the same central idea as that failed plan is (and which many animal rights activists might support in our own country!)

Each year, Canada uses taxpayer dollars to attempt to sell seal meat internationally, even though no one from anywhere but Taiwan and South Korea is willing to buy it (including Canadians, if that tells you anything). Canada also spends “R&D” (again, tax dollars) to market “seal oil” as a source of Omega 3 fatty acids in an attempt to make some sort of successful product from the seal hunt, but to little avail. There’s one product that can actually be sold from the seal hunt, the sealskins, and 80% of the sealskin that’s purchased is bought from a Norwegian company that receives significant financial backing from Norway’s government.

From Seal Hunt

Finally, while the United States has banned the import of seal skin since 1972 and the European Union since a few days ago, it has been the boycott of Canadian seafood by American buyers opposed to the seal hunt that has damaged Canada’s economy and, I predict, will force Canada to eventually end the seal slaughter.

This is certainly a case where free market boycotts and education can make more of an impact on the ending of a practice consumers object to, rather than countrywide bans. Even if the United States had not banned seal skins in 1972, there wouldn’t be much of a market for seal skins in America today simply because most Americans are revolted by the practice. You can see if your grocery store is participating in the boycott of Canadian seafood here.

These retailers and importers have shown that they have no ethics– mislabeling fur or saying it’s not fur is clearly a deceptive business practice and is against the law, as the Humane Society asserts in their lawsuits, yet the companies have done it anyway. So why Truth in Fur Labeling Act of 2009“>work to get another law passed, one which these lawbreakers will inevitably ignore, too? Maybe this law has some magic fairy dust sprinkled on it that will make these scofflaw companies magically toe the legal line from now on?

My question to the Humane Society is this: what does the Truth in Fur Labeling Act of 2009 have that the previous three federal laws the Humane Society is suing under do not have? Perhaps it would be best to spend your time and money enforcing the laws we already have.

The Humane Society writes in its fact sheet (PDF), “The labeling law has not kept up with changes in the marketplace.” That’s the problem with laws, isn’t it? They’re not set by the marketplace, so they have a tendency to not keep up with it. Perhaps that’s why we should avoid them if there’s an alternative in the first place. Consumers have been trying to avoid fur for a long time, let’s let them by suing the bejeezus out of those who would sell fur to those who don’t want it.

People today think they’re avoiding fur if it’s not labeled, precisely because there’s a law mandating that it be labeled. But there’s a loophole, as there always is, and Clinton widened the loophole, so now we have people buying fur who wouldn’t if they knew it was fur. They think they don’t have to look because the label and the government will tell them all they need to know.

This is partly caused by the existence of the law in the first place. If consumers were personally responsible for figuring out if what they were buying was fur, maybe they’d take more than a cursory look at it and figure out that it is in fact coming from a domestic dog (as the HSUS found some fur trim in major department stores was). *Of course, this is a better argument in case studies like the FDA. Fur should be labeled, no exceptions. I just think that companies would be more accurate with labeling if they were in danger of being put out of business for an incident of mislabeling, rather than in danger of a small fine or slap on the wrist from violating a federal law or FTC regulation.

Finally, the labeling as actually mandated by the Federal Trade Commission can have the result of making things more confusing for the consumer. Raccoon dog, which is a species of canine more related to a dog than a raccoon, is often skinned alive for its fur and listed on fur labeling, per the FTC official mandate, as “Asiatic raccoon.” People might not care about wearing raccoon fur, but the FTC’s regulations won’t even let the company list the fur as coming from a dog even if they wanted to. When I see “Asiatic raccoon,” I think raccoon, not dog. Don’t you?

Please tell me how this kind of labeling doesn’t make things even worse for the consumer.

The way to handle this in a libertarian society would be lawsuits. Lots of them, filed by individual consumers for deception and false advertising. That’s one thing that’s different in today’s society vs. a libertarian society. Today, using an egregious environmental example brought up by one of my fellow Humane Society lobbyists, the citizens of Smithfield, NC suffer from the stench of manure lagoons, their children get sick, and their only hope falls to the EPA.

The EPA in turn slaps Smithfield Foods (America’s largest pork producer) on the wrist with a one-time fine of .035% of Smithfield’s yearly sales for polluting so badly and making so many people ill– and, oh yeah, an award for environmentalism while they’re at it. Smithfield, of course, considers these puny fines the cost of conducting business and continues on like normal. Meanwhile, the company’s neighbors have no recourse or redress since the EPA has already done what it says it can.

Fast-forward to a libertarian society (no utopia, but better in many ways than what we have now). All of those individuals would personally sue Smithfield Foods in a slam-dunk case, collecting millions of dollars, if not hundreds of millions of dollars, in damages for this company polluting the entire town and rendering it virtually unlivable. Smithfield has also in the process of pork producing polluted the water sources of much of eastern North Carolina, so virtually everyone in that half of the state could jump in with lawsuits, too. What happens in this system? You guessed it, Smithfield would be out of business tomorrow.

So in our prospective libertarian society, there are many consumers who would be upset about their mislabeled fur and would sue and have an effect on these companies’ bottom lines that would make them sit up and label their products correctly. People wouldn’t be able to afford it, you say? The type of people who can buy $500 faux fur coats at Neiman Marcus can spare a few for a lawsuit and may even have lawyers on retainer. In our current system, instead of any semblance of justice on the part of those wronged by these companies, we have the Humane Society suing the deceptive companies under an obscure federal law (the D.C. Consumer Protection Procedures Act) with no results and trying to get federal legislation passed at the same time.

So, I’ve told you what tactics I would use to immediately solve the problem of the deceptive fur sellers. Tomorrow, I’ll discuss why a federal law won’t really do anything on behalf of the cause of ending the fur mislabeling and could in fact make things worse.