Letter: HSUS responds to Center for Consumer Freedom letter

Talk about it

There is a difference between farmers and factory farms — a world of difference.

Sustainable family farmers are, in growing numbers, joining with The Humane Society of the United States because we share an important value: We care about the treatment of animals. That puts some of the corporations who run giant factory farms in a corner. Naturally, these social outliers are too timid to stand up and defend the status quo mistreatment they inflict on farm animals, so they try to pay top dollar to discredit the messenger.

They outsource their dirty work to a Washington lobbyist who learned his trade as an apologist for Big Tobacco. Someone with those ethics is the perfect chap to try to stand in the way of better treatment for farm animals — as long as he gets paid enough, and these industrial farms see that he does. So he writes letters to newspapers attacking a fourth-generation family farmer who stands up for sustainable practices that answer to higher welfare standards.

If you watched the Super Bowl, you saw that the most popular ad of all depicted a family farmer and celebrated the role he has played in the great American story. The corporations behind factory farms love to be associated with the halo of such farmers. It’s only when a real farmer stands up for giving breeding pigs a little room to move that factory farms look to the fancy-suit hit man with Phillip Morris on his resume.

Sorry, it won’t work. Joe Maxwell is a farmer, the real deal. He and farmers like him support the goals of The Humane Society of the United States because it honors the people who work on the land, it honors the animals that populate our sustainable farms – not the torture chambers of outlier industrial agriculture. That’s the future of agriculture, and we’re rolling up our sleeves to help make it happen.

Tags: opinion, letters, agriculture, farm