Sick Chickens

UPC Letter in The New Yorker, Feb. 16, 2015

Response to “A Bug in the System,” February 2, 2015, which looks at “Why last night’s chicken made you sick.”

To the editor: In 1987, the U.S. Department of Agriculture official William H. Dubbert told a poultry symposium at Colorado State University, “We know more about controlling salmonella than we are willing to implement because of the cost factor.” In 2007, an article in the trade publication WATT Poultry USA said, “We all know that pathogens of all forms, such as bacteria, fungi, and viruses, are everywhere in the animal-production environment and will remain, regardless of techniques adopted.” The poultry industry’s response is to bathe the birds after slaughter in a wash of chlorine and other potentially toxic substances, including peracetic acid. Conditions will worsen as the global scale of production increases. If you pack creatures into filthy, sunless places and provide them with only “feed-grade” ingredients—a primary source of salmonella, avian influenza, and other diseases—sickness will follow.

Karen Davis
President, United Poultry Concerns
Machipongo, Va.

------------

Dead Meat Aspires to Be Fake Meat

UPC Letter in the Los Angeles Times, March 8, 2015

Response to “The confusion of fur-hating carnivores,” May 2, 2015, which says that “Like fur, meat is inessential and luxurious. Like fur, its production may be fraught with brutal and obscene abuse.”

To the editor: Substitution of old materials with new ones is an integral part of human progress. In religious ceremonies, if we can substitute animal flesh for human flesh and view this change as positive, we are ready to go forward in our secular lives on ground that is already laid.

Technologically, the transformation of plants to flesh- and fur-like products has already occurred because people have desired it and technology can satisfy the desire. If “The Peaceable Kingdom” reflects a true aspiration, fake meat is the food to which dead meat has aspired, and the makers of fake meat and the fur-free designers are as deserving as anyone is of the Nobel Peace Prize.

Karen Davis
Machipongo, Va.
The writer is president of United Poultry Concerns.

------------

No Beings Are Lesser

UPC Letter in Earth Island Journal, Spring 2015

Response to “Animals Are Persons, Too,” Winter 2015.

To the editor: The Winter 2015 cover story (“Animals Are Persons, Too”), about the move to get certain animal species legally recognized as nonhuman persons, was thought provoking. But animal advocates cannot allow the idea to take hold that only the great apes and certain other “higher” animals are fit to be “persons.” Working to change the moral status of the great apes or sea mammals is a legitimate and important undertaking, but it should not be done at the expense of other animals.

Such thinking is disconnected from real animals in the real world. It also perpetuates the view that beings belonging to species deemed “nonpersons” or “merely conscious” are of lesser, or no, moral significance until through an institutionalized system of painful, stressful, and demeaning experiments over decades or centuries, some of them might “prove” themselves worthy of being called persons or semi-persons or sort-of-persons entitled to whatever privileges such designations may confer.

Karen Davis
President, United Poultry Concerns
Machipongo, Va.