The ‘Wakker Dier’ foundation is waging a campaign against C1000, a cheap supermarket chain in Holland. It has radio adds where it explains how the farmers of the animals that provide the cheap meat get to little money to adequately care for the animals. The adds have been protested against, but they are allowed by the dutch ‘Reclame code commissie’ (Advertisement Ethics Commision). Wakker dier also started to air advertisements for competition of C1000 that does sell meat of well treated animals. As a result C1000 has stopped selling the meat at bottom prices.
This is a good model for action, part of the reason why it works is because ‘Wakker Dier’ is well funded. The fact that differential adds and negative adds are allowed opens a whole spectrum of possibilities. It may ultimately inspire moral warfare amongst retailers.
Marginalizing and Criminalizing Care
Personally animals rights are not the reason for this post, it is understood animals should be treated humanely, but the thing required to save our climate from deteriorating further would be to have no meat industy at all, and especially not the way it is done right now. Precuations have been taken by its lobby and they are very strong. In the US the AETA criminalizes even the slightest inquest into the operation of ‘Animal enterprises’. People that picket Kentucky fried chicken or chalking slogans on the sidewalk can be arrested as terrorists. The ability of lobbies to push trough such draconian laws builds a group of citizen that have little to lose if they want express their desire for a society that cares about animal’s welfare at even the most basic level. If this desire was such a deviant thing, an most people hated animals and wanted them to live in the most appaling circumstances, then whence the views on below video?
It is the assymetry between an industry that cares little about
anything but money and does not need to explain itself for its abuses
and a population that has to justify even the tinyest protest. It
should be the other way around. Using advertisement seems to work and is allowed in the US. Can one start a struggle for the moral high ground? How much would be needed to stoke it so the companies themselves would take over the fight ?