Cruelty at Tyson "Factory Farm."

A friend of mine posted a video on Facebook showing abuse at a pig farm under contract to Tyson Foods that showed abuse of the animals. Not wanting to hijack his post with my thoughts, I've gone to my blog to post them, and will link to FB for anyone who cares to read them.

It is easy to blame a huge corporation like Tyson for such incidents.  Animal rights activists sometimes do good work in exposing such practices, but tend to over blow them in furthering their own agendas.  We see the horrific videos, which are implied to represent the standard.  This particular video will get passed around through the net for years, but the fact that Tyson terminated the contract with that farm upon being made aware of it will not.  Nor will the fact that the farm owner terminated the employee seen in the video, when he was made aware of it.

If a fast food worker drops a burger on the floor, and goes ahead to serve it instead of cooking another, is the parent company responsible for it? Is the manager of the store who wasn't even on the premises at the time responsible?  Is the shift manager, who was dealing with a delivery and didn't see the action responsible? Are the coworkers who actually saw the incident, but didn't report it responsible?  Or is the guy who picked the burger up off the floor because he was too lazy to cook another the one who was responsible?

Huge corporations, and the Mom & Pop biz on the corner alike, set up rules of conduct, methods for production, and standards for employees to follow. Owners of small businesses and corporate CEOs alike are concerned with making money, and ethical considerations aside, are well aware that bad publicity impedes the making of money.  By and large, these people are just like us.  They have feelings, families they love, pets they cherish and charities they support.  

I expect that the 'suits,' at the Tyson corporate headquarters, when viewing the video my friend posted were just as horrified as you or I would be.  They probably went home and told their spouses about it and wondered how anyone could be as callous and cruel as the employee caught on tape.  Even if they were not, even if they were the greedy monsters without feeling that corporate 'suits,' are often portrayed as being, they went home realizing that something would have to be done, because it is their job to make money for the company, and bad publicity is expensive.

So Tyson cancelled the contract with that farmer, because bad publicity requires damage control, even though the farmer fired the employee responsible for the acts.  The farmer, is likely trying frantically to figure out a way to make up for the loss of what is likely his biggest, or perhaps only, contract so that he can keep in business and meet payroll for the other employees who count on his farm for a living, and which he counts on for his own. 

And yet, because the internet is what it is, this video will be circulated and recirculated, and people will abhor Tyson Foods and call for boycotts, maybe costing Tyson Food employees who have never been cruel to animals in their lives income, or maybe even jobs.

Instead of calling for a boycott, I'd like to see people calling for the prosecution of the guy in the video on charges of animal cruelty.  But that's just my two cents.

As for the rest of us...if we eat meat (and I do,) we have to face the fact that eating meat ain't pretty under any circumstances.  Watch a video of a lion pride taking down a prey animal sometime. We can try our best to enact and enforce humane treatment and processing laws, but the fact is that if we want a pork chop, a pig was killed so we could buy it. And as long as we want to buy that pork chop rather than raise our own pig and butcher it ourselves, we can not oversee the whole process and must understand that there will be some sadistic asshole, somewhere, who won't follow the guidelines set up by his employers.