I'm baffled by a piece I read today by a vegan named Ryan Andrews, and I'm hoping someone could enlighten me as to why he would have written it.It's basically a PR piece for animal agribusiness.
Now I don't know Ryan Andrews, although a Google search shows that he's pretty involved in the vegan community. He's on the board of advisors for Support Vegans in the Prison System, has worked with the Vegetarian Resource Group and has a blog called "Ask Ryan" for the Vegetarian Society of Colorado.
I hesitate to criticize anyone working on behalf of animals, but the piece he wrote just boggles my mind.
He wrote about his tour of Magnum Feedyard, a feedlot in Wiggins, Colo. He calls it both a family farm and a CAFO (concentrated animal feeding operation -- aka "factory farm"), and I don't care what it is. Animals on family farms end up slaughtered just like those on factory farms do.
Magnum houses 22,000 cows, all of whom will eventually be killed for their flesh.
When animals arrive at Magnum, they are usually 7 – 9 months of age, and receive four days of 100% grass feed to help maintain rumen health. Cattle are normally kept on the feedlot until around 12 to 15 months of age (180-200 days on feed), during this time they gain 500 to 600 pounds.And then they're killed? Oh, did he forget to mention that? Well, he does later when he describes their quick transport to the slaughterhouse and then uses a euphemism to describe their murder.
Nearly every week, a truck picks up cattle and transports them to a meat packing plant. This is where cattle are harvested and the carcasses fabricated. It's important for the cattle to be transported quickly and calmly. The more stressed the animal, the lower quality the meat.And that's that. Nice and tidy. No mess. Quick and painless.
Andrews also packs his piece full of information and statistics that no casual visitor -- even one pretty knowledgeable about animal rights would know. He cites sources at the end of the story, but the piece is too blatantly positive to strike me as true. I question his motivation for writing it. Check out his ending.
And, I have to say it. If my experience at Magnum is representative of other cattle farms, all those accounts of the dismal, depressing, disastrous cattle conditions seem to be exaggerated.Rock on? Seriously? Hey, way to go, animal killers!
No, I'm not going to start eating meat again.
However, if I did eat meat, my visit to Magnum would have made me feel great about eating non-organic, non-grass-fed beef. Seriously. I can't imagine the quality of meat would be substantially better with organic and grass-fed. Nor can I imagine the living conditions would be substantially better for the cattle.
Now, to be clear, we don't require meat in our diet. And I don't think we should be using cows for food, doesn't matter if the cattle are kept on a feedlot or chilling in a waterbed listening to John Tesh. But that's my own value system and I'm well aware that 97% of people in the U.S. eat meat on a regular basis.
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People want meat. And Magnum's feedlot system is dialed in. They're producing safe and cost-effective meat in, arguably, the most cattle-conscious way (short of opening up those pens and letting them run free). Rock on Magnum.
I hate how he basically apologizes for not eating meat. It's "my own value system"; you do whatever you want. And sure 97% of Americans eat meat, but shouldn't we be working to reduce that number? Instead he's telling meat-eaters it's ok. His being vegan lends a huge amount of credibility to animal ag -- so much so that David Martosko of the deceptively named Center for Consumer Freedom and other animal exploiters are tweeting the link to Andrews' story.
Rock on, Ryan Andrews. You've done the animals a great disservice.
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What on earth? Not to sound paranoid, but this is the kind of thing that makes you wonder about people being industry plants in the community. This reads like a paid advertisement -- and not even one that tries to hide its gushing one-sidedness. Whatever he got out of writing this -- or however much he was paid to write it -- you have to assume that if the guy is indeed a vegan, it's not for animal rights reasons. Even from a *welfare* perspective, this paragraph is just surreal:
"However, if I did eat meat, my visit to Magnum would have made me feel great about eating non-organic, non-grass-fed beef. Seriously. I can't imagine the quality of meat would be substantially better with organic and grass-fed. Nor can I imagine the living conditions would be substantially better for the cattle."
I can't even begin to wrap my mind around this.
I can't wrap my mind around it, either, and I've met the guy. It's highly unlikely that he's an industry plant (unless he's, like, a really long-term top-secret plant who really enjoys plant-based nutrition and infiltrating vegetarian restaurants with vegan menu options).
I think he cares about animals being treated 'better' and that he is vegan for health reasons. I sent him an email explaining that animals have an interest in not being used in the first place--and not being killed--but the damage is done. This has to be one of the dumbest things I've seen an individual 'vegan' do in a while. Really hard to believe.
Could it be that ... oh, I don't know ... maybe all the vegan movement paranoia about killing animals for food has been based on pure emotionalism for years and years? And could it be that this one guy has dared to find out what he was talking about?
Well, actually, no, Farnsworth. Having grown up on a "family farm" and then on a factory farm, I've done all the horrible things we do to animals so we can pen them, kill them, and eat them. Their screams are still in my head. The article contains so much mis-information and more importantly excludes so much information, that it is far from truthful. Ryan may have hoped to know what he was talking about, but a pre-planned tour of a feedlot will spare the gory details.
Besides ignoring the environmental issues (water wastage, destroying the rainforests for grain, etc.) and the human rights issues (again, rainforests, human health, water issues, pollution, industrial racism, grain distribution to animals rather than people, etc.), the article ignored the breaking of families, the screams/bellows of mothers for babies and babies for mothers, the screams of all the male calves who had their horns burned off and their testicles ripped out, the exposure to the elements weather 10 below or 100 degrees outside, it ignores the terror of transport and of slaughter. It ignores that NONE of this is necessary and that ALL of this is for greed. It ignores that that "family farmer" is a millionaire profiting from the agony of others and the tax subsidies of you and me.
It pretends that farmers care about their animals. They don't, I know, I was one of them. They care about profits -- a sick animal is more expensive to take care of than to let die -- just left to die without food, without water. This is "modern animal farming" that the article pretends to understand yet ignores and glorifies.
By the way, here's a description of the recommended ways to castrate "beef" calves written by the industry who "cares so much" about animals http://www.utextension.utk.edu/publications/spfiles/SP692.pdf. I can tell you from personal experience, the screams of baby animals are something that would've stuck in Ryan's head -- and this advertisement, er, article would never have been written.
And, yes, I am now Vegan. And my activism, my penance. I'm so sorry for all the pain I've caused.
I read this article earlier today and it made me feel sick. Ryan is basically saying "if you can't be 'em, join 'em!".
I really don't understand what on earth could possess a vegan to affiliate himself with a CAFO, let alone promote it. it just boggles the mind. WTF?
I am honestly at a loss for words. It's just so... sad.
this is such a horribly written article by a naive and ignorant young man who claims to be vegan for the animal reasons. it is as if the feedlot operators were able to spoon feed him everything he wrote. he thought so shallowly and misrepresented the picture as if it was a researched article.i was hoping he could do the only right thing at this point and pull the article but he has chosen not to do that. so sad for the animals who have so few of us to begin with and then we have morons who claim to be vegan and do massive more damage to the animal cause.
This article is a pile of misinformation and whitewash. No mention is made of the intense suffering these animals endure such as branding, having their testicles removed without anesthesia, the horror of veal, etc. And not one word is mentioned about the brutality and unspeakable horror these animals endure at the slaughterhouse.
Ryan, perhaps you'd like to spend *your* life in a feedlot if it's so great? Shame on you, as a supposed vegan, to write a piece of trash like this.
Ryan acknowledges that he was "treated with the utmost respect" during his visit to the feedlot. Too bad the animals don't enjoy the same respect.
He may be vegan... But he is certainly not for animal rights.
There are people who eat vegan diets without being a "vegan". That is, they do not hold the belief that it is wrong to exploit animals.
Such a person would not have a problem with endorsing a factory farm for being slightly less disgusting.
To be fair, many people who start eating a vegan diet become vegans and stay that way. Also, as we all too painfully know there are also AR activists who quit being vegan.
The article was so sing-songy and childish, it reminded me of the pro-meat video Lisa's class watched in the Simpson's episode "Lisa the Vegetarian"... "your vegetarian friend is a grade-A loser" ...which, is basically what he said with his 97%/ my lifestyle/ go find out for yourself, but this meat is great! ending... >.>
The only thing I kept wondering while reading was "is he getting paid to be a mouthpiece?" Seriously! There must've been a nice sum of cashola at the end of that tour & article to make it worth his while to put aside his vegan "value system" for a few hours.
Food for thought...
Thanks for this post. We linked to it at the Vegan Outreach blog today.
Thanks, Matt!
Wow, it's an incredible blog. I wonder what Ryan had to promise in order to gain access, what kind of hoops they put him through. It seems to me, the flesh industry must have some sort of showcase farms, farms they can use for hype fotos and farms they can impress people like senators and bureaucrats with. Ryan's clearly not an investigative reporter. The industry might have thought, what a deal, we can get a dumb vegan to buy our story and write about it. A great, brilliant propaganda strategy. A real reporter would have been very leery of such an obviously staged presentation.
Anonymous, practically any vegan who's done his or her research about animal agribusiness would know not to write such a one-sided, pro-ag story.
As others have said, it's clear Ryan isn't vegan for ethical reasons.
He's vegan for purely selfish health reasons. I say "selfish" because his piece only makes it easier for meat-eaters to rationalize continuing their current diets. He doesn't seem to care about getting people to change their diets even for health reasons.
The first thing that came to my mind when I read this was, "industry plant." I don't think it's paranoid. It makes sense.
It is indeed possible to eat a vegan diet and either not buy into the whole animal rights argument or, at best, to be on the fence about whether or not it makes ANY sense to convince everyone else in the world to forgo meat-eating -- something that's been going on for what? 10,000 years? Something like that.
I tend to fall into that camp, though more and more I admire and quote animal rights folks.
I don't know the guy and I think he could have written a better piece. That said, I can accept that he eats a vegan diet, argues that people don't need to eat meat, and still thinks that IF people are going to eat meat, *some* operations may be doing a "good" job taking care of their animals.
Not a vegan position to be sure, but not entirely so hard to understand, either.
I hope people can politely disagree with him, rather than vilify him. Respect, anyone?
Elaine, for those of us in the vegan community to have one of our own publicly support what we all struggle against is so painful. An article like that does so much more damage than if an omnivore wrote it. It's sort of like a child-abuse advocate writing an article that says child abuse isn't so bad after all. It's really, really hurtful.
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