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PETA breaks with policy of not criticizing other animal advocates over “endorsement of deceptive ‘humane’ meat, egg, and dairy certification”
WASHINGTON D.C.––People for the Ethical Treatment [PETA] rarely kicks the butts of other animal advocacy organizations, no matter how self-serving, corrupt, hypocritical, or just plain incompetent, but since September 5, 2024 has made a public exception for three of the biggest.
“The world’s largest animal rights organization is calling out three of the largest animal welfare groups for their endorsement of a deceptive ‘humane’ meat, egg, and dairy certification program that props up factory farms,” opened a media release from PETA publicist Rachel Hershkovitz, citing the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (ASPCA), the Humane Society of the United States [HSUS], and Compassion in World Farming [CIWF].”
The PETA media release was soon followed by a series of emails to PETA donors and activists.
Ingrid Newkirk. (Facebook photo)
Newkirk writes to ASPCA, HSUS, & CIWF board members
PETA founder Ingrid Newkirk had in a September 3, 2024 open letter asked ASPCA, HSUS, and CIWF representatives to resign from the board of directors of Global Animal Partnership [GAP], a “humane certification” program begun in 2005 by Whole Foods Markets founder John Mackey, who retired in 2022.
ANIMALS 24-7 extensively exposed weaknesses in the GAP standards and structure in 2009-2011 and again in 2014-2016, 2021, and 2022.
“As you may recall,” Newkirk reminded ASPCA, HSUS, and CIWF board members in her September 3, 2024 open letter, “PETA was on the Global Animal Partnership board of directors when the organization was founded but left shortly after it became clear that this initiative was not realistically going to reduce animal suffering.
“Farm Forward remained on the board for years afterward but also finally came to the same conclusion and resigned as well.”
(See Farmed animal product certifications “lack integrity,” investigators find.)
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Global Animal Partnership “does real harm”
“We understand,” Newkirk said, “that your organization may feel that working from within the system is better than not having a voice at all and that you may have held out hope that the program could still improve animals’ lives, but there is clear evidence that it doesn’t.”
Instead, Newkirk alleged, Global Animal Partnership “now does real harm by promoting factory farming, sometimes including the worst forms of abuse.”
PETA, Newkirk reminded, has “uncovered rampant abuse and suffering at all 12 GAP-certified sites we have visited.
“Sometimes sadistic torture of animals took place every night on every farm—but would never have been observed during GAP’s announced inspections once every 15 months,” Newkirk charged.
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Plainville Farms cruelty convictions
“To remind you, in 2021 we saw workers kicking and stomping on turkeys, breaking their necks, and hitting them with an iron bar, as well as simulating having sex with them, among other atrocities at GAP-approved Plainville Farms.
“That investigation resulted in the largest number of cruelty charges in any factory-farm case,” Newkirk said, mentioning that “ten workers have been convicted so far.”
Most recently convicted, by plea bargain announced on July 31, 2024, was former Plainville Farms worker Jason Kyle Turner, who pleaded guilty to cruelty to animals in the Cumberland County Court of Common Pleas in Pennsylvania.
Said a PETA media release at the time, “Turner joins eight other former Plainville Farms workers—including former supervisor Kevin Lee Wagaman—who entered guilty pleas to cruelty charges between June and November 2023.
“All nine individuals have been sentenced to supervised probation, during which they are prohibited from obtaining any employment that involves the care of animals.
“Additionally, in October 2023, Christopher Stephen McArdle pleaded no contest to a cruelty-to-animals charge.”
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HSUS squawks back
The Humane Society of the U.S. responded to Newkirk’s open letter with a September 6, 2024 website statement.
“We advocate for both reducing the number of animals kept and killed for food and increasing plant-based alternatives, and for improving the welfare standards for farmed animals suffering today,” the HSUS statement said.
“Collaboration with farmed animal welfare standard-setting bodies, including Global Animal Partnership is an important part of the latter tactic,” HSUS asserted.
“Our international work with certifiers including Global Animal Partnership and Humane Farm Animal Care, among others,” HSUS contended––broadening the discussion by lumping the GAP, the certification program widely regarded as the weakest, with one of those generally believed to be the strongest––“is important for providing technical assistance to poultry and pig producers.
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Changing the subject––again
“Cage- and crate-free systems are more difficult to manage and in the developing world, producers often need guidance to realize the full welfare potential of these systems,” HSUS said, again changing the subject, since the PETA allegations pertain specifically to factory farming corporations headquartered within the U.S., producing animals almost entirely within the mainland U.S.
“Certifications also have segregation protocols to ensure that cage eggs are not sold as cage free, which is a vital component of our work with companies to implement their cage-free egg commitments,” HSUS mentioned.
Indeed, producers passing off eggs from caged hens as eggs from cage-free systems has been a persistent problem for farm product certification schemes.
(See How 725 million chickens lost the Super Bowl, & got a bum deal in U.K. too.)
But this is not among the issues Newkirk and PETA cited.
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“GAP has been a leader”
Contended HSUS, “GAP has been a leader in addressing the rapid growth of chickens raised for meat.
“In 2017,” HSUS said, “GAP initiated a research project with the University of Guelph to conduct the largest broiler chicken welfare study ever undertaken. Based on these findings, GAP selected breeds with demonstrably better welfare outcomes.
“GAP is on track,” the HSUS statement claimed, “to complete a revised broiler chicken welfare standard. The new standard, due in December, sets a timeline for the integration of breeds that have been tested and verified to have better welfare outcomes compared to conventional chickens.”
But even if the vaunted “revised broiler chicken welfare standard” is delivered down broiler industry smokestacks by Santa Claus himself, Ingrid Newkirk is unimpressed.
Arabella is what a healthy hen looks like.
(Beth Clifton photo)
“Still the same overweight, unhealthy birds”
“The Better Chicken Commitment [BCC] was supposed to make the industry move away from the ‘broiler’ chicken,” Newkirk wrote, but “has failed on every count.
“The breeds allowed to be factory-farmed under the BCC’s much-anticipated breed standards are still the same overweight, unhealthy birds who can barely walk more than a few steps at a time and spend their entire lives in pain, forced to stand or sit in their own waste on a crowded shed floor.
“It is appalling to any decent person,” Newkirk said, “that these companies were ever allowed to breed these birds into such a sad state of existence in the first place and that these new breeds are being passed off as in any way ‘humane.’
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Even Whole Foods has yet to adopt the BCC standard
“Despite years of efforts,” Newkirk charged, “not one of the hundreds of companies that signed on to adopt the BCC by 2024—not even Whole Foods—has done so.”
Finished Newkirk, “When we put animals first and ask for what we all truly want—a world in which consumers have been persuaded to try non-animal foods, rather than enticed to continue paying factory farmers to perpetuate the massive suffering inherent in raising, transporting, and killing animals—we can move the market and make changes that once seemed out of reach but are now achievable.”
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“Systematic cruelty, deprivation, & suffering”
Taking the case to the public, PETA specified that, “PETA investigators who obtained jobs at Plainville Farms and Sweet Stem Farm—Pennsylvania companies that claimed to produce ‘humane’ turkey and ‘humanely raised pork,’ respectively—found systemic cruelty, deprivation, and suffering, even though these farms were certified by Global Animal Partnership.”
Global Animal Partnership “is also behind misleading signs posted in meat departments at Whole Foods Market stores touting ‘enriched environment’ and ‘treated humanely,’” PETA said, citing some of the same issues that ANIMALS 24-7 spotlighted when the GAP program was first introduced.
Tracy Reiman. (Twitter photo)
“Bogus branding scheme”
Offered PETA executive vice president Tracy Reiman, “An animal welfare group signing off on ‘humane’ meat is like an oncologist endorsing a tobacco company. PETA is calling on the leadership of the ASPCA, the Humane Society of the United States, and Compassion in World Farming to stop betraying animals and duping consumers by putting their seal of approval on this bogus branding scheme and is urging everyone to do the only thing that will stop animal abuse on farms—go vegan.”
Responded HSUS, “GAP is also an important ally in the policy arena. In 2022,” for example, “GAP submitted an amicus brief in the Supreme Court case challenging Proposition 12, the California law that now requires cage- and crate-free production throughout the state.”
This brief, HSUS contends, made “an important argument swaying the justices to uphold California’s historic law.”
(See Supreme Court split verdict on California pig law sets up another round and Kamala-won precedent for pigs wins again in Massachusetts federal court.)
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John Mackey & Alaric the Visigoth
But as the fall of Rome in 476 CE should have amply demonstrated for the ages, military alliances of convenience with Germanic tribes should not have required surrendering the whole western half of the Roman empire to Alaric the Visigoth, whose whole interest in sacking Rome was in collecting personal profit.
The PETA investigation of Plainville Farms coincidentally appears to have begun just after ANIMALS 24-7 on July 18, 2021 published Credibility, GAP? Global Animal Partnership 10 years later, asking rhetorically, “What a difference ten years of Global Animal Partnership have not made for factory-farmed animals!”
ANIMALS 24-7 followed up, detailing the PETA findings, in Plainville Farms turkeys kicked, beaten: Credibility, GAP? redux.
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Karen Davis: “Yet another example”
Plainville Farms acknowledged what it termed “the horrific video of animal abuse that is being circulated in the news and online,” agreeing that “What is shown is horrific, despicable.”
Plainville Farms contended, however, that the routine violence documented by PETA “goes against everything this company stands for.”
But United Poultry Concerns founder Karen Davis was scarcely mollified.
(See Karen Davis, Ph.D., United Poultry Concerns founder, dead at 79.)
“Here is yet another example of the savage brutality to animals taking place on ‘humane’ farms,” Davis blogged, mindful of many similar past incidents also involving GAP members and other “certified humane” farmers who supplied animal products to Whole Food Markets.
(See Fair Oaks Farms stepped in the same crap as the rest of the herd, “No injuries” says Michael Foods of fire that killed 400,000 hens, and Complaining that seals cause “stress,” farm cuts gills from salmon alive.)
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PETA sued against the GAP system
“More than in the past,” observed Farm Forward executive director Andrew deCoriolis in a June 2021 blog posting amplified by the vegan advocacy electronic magazine Sentient Media, “Global Animal Partnership seems dedicated to passing off low welfare standards as the gold standard, thus helping the purveyors of factory-farmed products deceive shoppers.”
PETA and individual activist Lori Grass of Portola Valley, California, in 2016 filed an attempted class action lawsuit alleging that the Whole Foods Markets use of a five-step rating system for producers of beef, chicken, pork and turkey is a “sham,” summarized Jonathan Stempel of Reuters, “because it was not enforced against suppliers, and the standards were at best little better than normal industry practices.”
Merritt & Beth Clifton with Henry the rooster.
But the lawsuit was dismissed on April 27, 2016, Stempel wrote, when “U.S. Magistrate Judge Nathanael Cousins in San Jose, California, said PETA failed to show that Whole Foods’ alleged misrepresentations on in-store signs, placards and napkins defrauded consumers into overpaying.”
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