Black angus, Sauvie Island, Oregon. Photo: Jeffrey St. Clair.
The year was 1975. Actress Sally Struthers had charmed her way into America’s living rooms as Gloria Stivic Archie Bunker’s daughter on the hit sitcom All In the Family, married to “meathead.” But Struthers was known for something else. More prevalent than her appearances on All in the Family were her cloying pitches for the Christian Children’s Fund for which she was trying to use her “Family” fame.
Finally a glib SNL-writer wannabe came out and said what many were thinking when they saw her entreating, eternally earnest face: people were more interested in paying money for Struthers to shut up than helping the hungry children. Ouch.
The same phenomenon happened later with another charity: people began to dislike Jerry Lewis more than the muscular dystrophy telethons he ran.
Struthers’ and Lewis’ charities are not the only ones in which compassion turned against itself and people began to dislike the messenger. Animal exposes can also produce compassion backlash:
Yeah, yeah—we know veal calves are taken from their mothers at birth and allowed to freeze to death. We know chickens miss the knife and get boiled alive. We know newborn male chicks are ground up alive at hatcheries. What else is new? The problem is they still taste good and the cruelty videos ruin your appetite!
No one wants to be called bad and feel bad for their diet—and as long as there is more than one channel on peoples’ devices, they will tune out upsetting images.
If farm practices are so cruel, why do restaurants, grocers and the government allow them people think. Aren’t there laws?
Animal Decimations
There is another backlash in addition to ridiculing empathy appeals—commercial interests.
If ever there were an appropriate use of the term “countless,” it is for the millions of farmed birds killed recently to prevent further spread of bird flu and profits.
Notice how big food and news outlets funded by big food have avoided displaying landfills of depopulated animals and terminated chickens? It might ruin people’s appetites… and sales! (Of course, some of the terminated animals were fed to other animals—why waste good “protein”? Is that how bird flu got in cows’ milk, Big Food? Economies of scale?)
Like Covid, the current avian flu that is morphing to cows, pigs, pets and zoo animals before our very eyes was abetted—if not begun—by animal mistreatment. Most scientific studies attribute the first Covid—SARS—to practice of eating civet cats and raccoon dogs and slaughter-while-you-wait wet markets.
How does a virus mutating in the US spread so quickly to birds, pigs, cows and other animals? The oppressive incarceration of factory farming.
New York Times’ Columnist Nick Kristof Was Moved By Images
New York Times’ columnist Nick Kristof was no wild-eyed vegan but this is what he wrote after video of chickens legally boiled alive was released.
“Workers grab the birds and shove their legs upside down into metal shackles on a conveyor belt. The chickens are then carried upside down to an electrified bath that is meant to knock them unconscious. The conveyor belt then carries them–at a pace of more than two chickens per second–to a circular saw that cuts open their necks so that they bleed to death before they are scalded in hot water and their feathers plucked. Even when the system works as intended, the birds sometimes have legs or wings broken as they are shackled, the investigator said. And when it doesn’t work correctly, the birds’ end can be horrifying.”
Since Kristof wrote this, the slaughter line speeds have increased over the vehement objections of 26 groups of poultry worker representatives, worker rights advocates, occupational safety experts, animal right advocates, consumer rights advocates and public and community health organizations.
Upsetting Photos Can Work
Yes, a gory and emotional photo can make a difference if not censored by commercial interests or ridiculed. Who remembers “The Vulture and the Little Girl,” a 1993 photograph by Kevin Carter of a collapsed, famine-stricken child in Sudan with a vulture ready to pounce a few feet away? Papers and magazines around the world published the photo and it was critical to fund raising efforts and famine relief that followed.
© Counter Punch
