Untruths and Omissions on Oprah

by Stephanie Ernst

categories: CageFree and FreeRange, Farm Animals, Media, Vegan

Published October 21, 2008 @ 09:34AM PT

Today's posts will be my last on the Oprah show on the treatment of farm animals, and the content of these is what I've been promising for almost a week now. Read yesterday's post and my initial but abbreviated response for an introduction to what you're going to read here. Today, we're finally going into the issues in depth, so in depth that I'm splitting this into two posts.

For starters, I'll quote myself, from that initial reaction:

I am glad that farmed animals are getting attention on a national, respected program such as Oprah's, but I am livid and disappointed by what was—and was not—said on today's program and what misconceptions were allowed to stand or even promoted as truths in the interest of getting Proposition 2 passed. Wayne Pacelle and the HSUS betrayed the animals today, on a grand, nationally televised scale when they had a chance to both promote Prop 2 and offer a truly humane alternative and did not take it.

For Proposition 2 to pass, consumers and voters must be able to see a clear good and evil, and Pacelle and company just sold out all the animals suffering—yes, suffering—immensely in supposedly free-range and cage-free operations and in slaughterhouses as well all the traumatized cows and calves who pay for humans' love of dairy, by showing people what they want to see, by fabricating a clear good. The farms you saw today on Oprah's program were the extremely rare exceptions and do not represent what most supposedly humane farms are like.

Let's talk about what was said (and by whom) and what was not said. First, there was simply a labeling problem—a big labeling problem. Oprah and Lisa Ling introduced the idyllic egg farm featured on the show as a "cage-free" farm. Over and over again, "cage-free" was used to describe this farm. It took the industrial egg farmer to speak up at some point in the show and point out that we had seen not just a cage-free egg farm, but a free-range egg farm (and many free-range farms don't nearly match up to that farm either, I should add; overcrowded, unhealthy, inhumane conditions, with little access to the outdoors, are just as possible on free-range farms as on cage-free farms).

So how are the vast majority of cage-free farms actually set up? The hens are still housed completely indoors, in massive sheds, still with very little space to move around and perform natural behaviors, but instead of being crammed into cages, they're crammed in together on the floor of the shed. They still never get outside. And they still suffer tremendously.

Second, with regard to the free-range farm shown on Oprah's show, did anyone pay close attention to the beaks of those birds, especially to the beak of the bird who walked right up to the camera, directly facing it? These hens were debeaked (see also United Poultry Concerns debeaking fact sheet). HSUS and/or the Oprah staff chose the best of the best, yet still these hens were painfully debeaked, just like virtually all egg-laying hens, regardless of whether they're being exploited by a factory farm or a free-range farm.

Nor was there any mention of where egg farms get their laying hens: hatcheries, where all male chicks are killed at only a few days old; they are suffocated in trash bags or ground up—alive. These male chicks cannot produce eggs and are not the right breed to be raised for their flesh, so they are useless to the industry. Debeaking and the cruel killing of all male chicks are the realities of all forms of egg production. When you purchase and eat eggs or food with eggs in it, regardless of where the eggs came from, you are financially supporting cruelty and injustice.

Consider the following from Vegan Outreach:

A growing number of people are looking to free-range products as an alternative to factory-farmed animal products. Poultry meat may be labeled “free-range” if the birds were provided an opportunity to access the outdoors. No other requirements—such as the stocking density, the amount of time spent outdoors, or the quality and size of the outdoor area—are specified by the USDA. As a result, free-range conditions may amount to tens of thousands of birds crowded inside a shed with a single exit leading to a muddy strip, saturated with droppings.

The free-range label applies only to birds raised for meat, not eggs. There is a cage-free label for eggs; but it is not regulated by the USDA, nor does it guarantee that the hens were provided access to the outdoors. Neither label requires third-party certification. Even for USDA Organic, the most extensively regulated label, minimum levels of outdoor access have not been set and specific rules do not apply to stocking density or flock size.

For a discussion of how the plights of pigs, cows, and calves were presented on the show and the conclusion of this series of posts, continue to the next post.