Thursday, March 19, 2009

The foie gras fight

Just read a mostly decent article on Salon about the fight over foie gras (h/t Kitten). Some very good points were made by the writer, Alex Koppelman, until the last paragraph, which nearly discredits the entire article:

The anti-meat activists can't very well persuade Chicago to ban beef or pork or chicken, so they focus instead on something easier, arguably to the detriment of general livestock. They're demonizing and hurting small farms that care about the health of their animals. Meanwhile, factory farms that do unspeakable things to the creatures in their care are let off the hook.


Anti-meat activists - esp. PETA - wage just as intense of a war against factory farms and all meat consumption as they do against foie gras. I'm a former animal rights activist and former PETA member, and am now a co-owner of an organic/human/sustainable meat company, so I have a clear picture of both sides of the "meat debate", and I've had it with jerks who attack groups like PETA out of ignorance and petty spite.

Just as there are some foie gras farms that are inhumane, there are also animal rights activists that are disingenuous. But making gross generalizations about animal rights activists is just as harmful as gross generalizations about foie gras farming practices. Alex Koppelman should keep his frustrations with specific animal rights activists confined to the narrow few that are being deceitful - just like he tries to single out bad foie gras farms from the goods ones, and back off attacking the movement at large.

I'm sick of this kind of sloppy journalism. Salon can do better.

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