Change the Animal Welfare Act

If you have a teenager, you know that most kids are aware of the cruelties of factory farms. Each year at school, someone does a report with awful pictures and terrifying statistics: Amerians eat a lotta meat! You agree that things in the last 50 years have gotten very bad for our farm animals. But then your family, like mine, continues to eat in restaurants and shop in grocery stores without 100% surety that the animals were cared for with a minimum of decency. We’re all busy! If I see a chicken burrito on the menu, my standards are going to be: is it delicious? Only when I stop to think, well, the care I take buying chicken at the farmers market for home is kinda undercut by the darkness of that restaurant experience. Love bacon? We sure do! Yet the connection between bacon and the horrible conditions for pigs all over our country is severed when I line up at the deli. I’m tired of feeling guilty because I eat factory-farmed animals.

How do we fix this? We cannot reasonably expect that every place we eat has purchased ethically. The whole “purchasing with care” is exhausting and expensive. What I want is a minimum level of care in every meat purchase I make. How do we get there so I can return to the 9,000 other things I’m thinking about? Well, although humans evolved together with our farm animals, our federal law against cruelty to animals only protects dogs, cats, rabbits, non-human primates, guinea pigs and hamsters. You can read it here: http://awic.nal.usda.gov/public-law-89-544-act-august-24-1966. Why? This law should include our food animals, too.

This summer, if you make it to a county fair (go! they are great!) notice your (and your kids’) reaction to healthy pigs, sheep, cows and chickens. Our ancestors depended on their animals’ health and happiness, so it’s deep in our DNA. Look at pictures of happy piglets or tiny peeping chicks! It’s just like looking at a happy puppy; something is triggered in our hearts. We want animals, even the ones we eat, to live happy healthy lives.

Let’s amend the Animal Welfare Act to include animals we raise for food. Let’s fine slaughterhouses when they step over the line. Let’s make things better. This year. Badda bing, we’re relieved of the ethical dilemma of eating cruelty-raised animals. Will it cost more? Somewhat. However, the price differential between local, organic and cruelty-free meat and factory farmed meat will shrink dramatically once the playing field is leveled. Really. And I can go back to worrying about the bees.

Here are some links to farm animal welfare sites and advocacy groups

http://www.facebook.com/HSUSFarmAnimals

https://awionline.org/content/what-you-can-do-farm-animals

And here’s our local representative: http://engel.house.gov/. Ask him to introduce an amendment to the Animal Welfare Act. I did!