As director of Kansas State University’s Beef Cattle Institute, veterinarian Dan Thomson has a bully pulpit, and he’s using it to deliver a serious message about animal welfare. Here’s the short version: Let’s be proactive and make sure we get our act together.
The longer version is that more assessments are coming. Thomson said it started with the packers because those entities are easiest to find and evaluate. The feedyards will be next. But eventually everyone in the meat production chain will feel the impact of tighter standards and more routine audits.
He recommends animal welfare standards take the form of “best management practices” rather than additional laws.
“It’s better if these are written from within the industry,” he said, adding that they need to be uniform and consistent enough to simplify compliance.
He envisions veterinarians taking a leading role, with more young vets recruited into the industry as a consequence. “I think this could be a calling for the veterinary industry to step forward,” he said. “They could take this on as a purpose beyond being a fire station practitioner.”
Crucial issue confronts
animal agriculture
Vast changes in consumer perception, a general disconnect from agriculture and the huge influence wielded by groups like the Humane Society of the U.S. — Thomson jokes that even his grandmother donated and proudly displayed a quilt she received before he explained to her the Humane Society’s anti-agriculture efforts — signal a need to take more than a hit-and-miss, “lone ranger” approach.
“We have to have a ‘mother ship’ for our industry to work with and against these efforts,” he has said to countless farm groups around the tri-state region.
At one such meeting in Salina, Kan., he pointed out that animal welfare groups are most successful at passing new laws when they can use ballot initiatives rather than the legislative process. That’s what happened in California late last year with passage of Prop 2, one of the most comprehensive humane handling laws to date.
Thomson, who travels widely to lecture and also increasingly relies on web-casts from KSU’s campus in Manhattan, said financial resources are one of the areas where agriculture tends to feel out-gunned by animal rights groups. Such groups receive $300 million a year just in donations, Thomson said. But what concerns him most is the rate of growth in their fundraising, which ranges between roughly 10 and 20 percent annually.
He points out that humane society leadership has virtually no agricultural experience or real-world knowledge. Wayne Pacelle, the group’s president, has a degree in history from Yale University. The group has one vet on its advisory board — a woman who believes animals have the right to vote. “They want animals and humans to have the same level of rights, and we can’t do that,” Thomson said simply.
Records show much of the group’s money is spent paying Hollywood stars to endorse it.
“They are marketers,” he said. “They are scamming the U.S. They are making money off of their story and the animal-human bond.”
At the same time, Thomson urges everyone in agriculture to take more responsibility too.
Many of the images that have appeared on the Internet and TV in recent years are not of animal handling but of animal abuse, he said. While he said the industry should show zero tolerance for such treatment, he also supports making it illegal for someone to hire on for purposes of entrapment. He urges farmers to send a clear message to friends and neighbors to straighten up their act and said in packing plants and feedyard facilities better employee training might be needed.
It’s black and white
Thomson also points out that the cattle depicted in nearly all of the unsavory images are black and white. He said the beef and dairy industry need to work together on the issue. Some dairymen take the attitude that beef is merely a byproduct of their industry, but Thomson challenges them on that point. The influence dairy animals have on beef perception and consumption is huge.
“Be a good American, be a good neighbor,” he urged. “Understand the impact your industry can have on ours.”
He acknowledges some things that are done in the best interests of the animals and the people working with them don’t always look pretty. He doesn’t believe slaughter plants should be open to the general public, for example. On the other hand, he urges cattlemen to invite everyone from friends in town to schoolchildren out to their farms to learn more about how food is produced. “We are a beacon of light when it comes to animal welfare,” he said of the cattle industry specifically.
He does tell cattle producers to think harder about the consumer perception of common practices like castration, dehorning and preconditioning.
To make his point, he compares the way some people handle stocker calves to having parents show up on the first day of kindergarten, abruptly drop off their kids and allow them to mill around, crying and bumping into each other.
“We need to precondition these calves,” he said.
He also questions the industry’s tendency to put all of its emphasis on science.
In the two or three years it takes to conduct and publish a study, opponents of animal agriculture will have ample time to spread their emotion-based appeal, he pointed out.
Thomson quotes the man he considers his mentor, Dr. Dan Upson, a key leader for many years in K-State’s vet school, with questioning the decision to change the name of K-State’s animal husbandry department to the animal science department in 1977. “We changed the name. Why?” Thomson asks. “Animal welfare is animal husbandry.”
One of the toughest questions he’s fielded during his talks concerns how to work most effectively with animal welfare groups like the Humane Society. Thomson, whose Beef Cattle Institute hosted a nationally attended animal welfare summit last year, admited that after much deliberation he turned down an opportunity to fly to Washington and meet with HSUS president Wayne Pacelle. He considers some groups and individuals “too far gone” for constructive dialogue, with the risks of engagement outweighing the benefits.
Still, he is a staunch advocate of reaching out to the public, through the media and as a good citizen.
“We have to get away from this paradigm where if you’re not in ag, you’re against us,” he said.
“Find the middle ground or form a group with middle ground,” he concluded.
Salina, Kan. —
