One week ago, the American Meat Institute rolled out a brand new website: SustainableMeatIndustry.org. The site devotes one of its four sections to “Caring for Animals.” Here we learn that:
Ensuring livestock welfare from farm to plant is ethically appropriate, good for animals and good for business. Calm animals create safer workplaces and higher quality products.
and:
The meat industry has a documented record of not just meeting, but exceeding federal rules.
Well, it so happens that the American Meat Institute announced the launch of that site on the very same day that the story broke about the HSUS investigation at Vermont’s Bushway slaughterhouse. There, it emerged that a worker skinned a live calf in front of a USDA meat inspector, who explicitly said that if another inspector saw this being done that the plant could be shut down. So much for, “exceeding federal rules,” where animal care in concerned.
There were all manner of other horrendous cruelties documented at Bushway. So I decided to give the American Meat Institute a week, to see how they’d respond to the Bushway investigation on their brand-spanking-new website.
Here’s their response after one week: absolutely nothing. It’s as though the Bushway investigation, and the raft of cruelties it exposed, never happened.
If you want proof that the meat industry’s sole interest in animal welfare is paying the matter lip service, the evidence doesn’t get any clearer than this. (Thanks, Bea and Paul.) Link.
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