Producers Beware: A Look Inside the Animal Activists' Playbook
While the animal ag industry continues to strive to produce more, nutrient-dense pork, beef, poultry and dairy products using less resources, animal rights activists and extremist groups craft strategies and agendas to turn consumers away from these animal-based products.
The Animal Agriculture Alliance (AAA) has released its compilation of reports from five prominent animal rights extremist conferences held throughout the last year, including:
• Humane Society of the United States’ Taking Action for Animals (TAFA) Conference
• The Rancher Advocacy Program’s (RAP) Summit
• Animal Place’s Farmed Animal Conference E-Summit (FACES)
• Animal Legal Defense Fund’s (ALDF) Animal Law Symposium
• ALDF and the Center for Animal Law Studies’ Animal Law Conference
“Animal rights extremist organizations are becoming increasingly more persistent in attacking the animal agriculture community through various channels, including pressuring our restaurant, retail and foodservice customers, targeting the public with misleading emotional campaigns and using the legal system,” says Hannah Thompson-Weeman, president and CEO of AAA.
In compiling these conference reports, the animal agriculture community can be more informed of emerging tactics and can take steps to safeguard livelihoods from potential extremist threats, Thompson-Weeman adds.
The key takeaways and claims from this year’s conferences, compiled by AAA, include:
• Animal rights activists aim to advance the interest of animals through the legal system by utilizing “undercover videos” as evidence in court.
• Activists believe the marketing of plant-based products and promotion of animal rights needs to speak to the emotions of the consumer rather than the intellectual messaging that currently compares alternatives to meat, milk, poultry and eggs.
• Activists are pressuring elected officials to include animal rights in their political campaigns in order to bring their cause to the legislature.
Many activist voices were loud and clear about how they plan to convince consumers to change habits.
“I have been a vegan for almost 40 years, and my whole life has been around activism through food, and that’s really how I’ve tried to touch people—trying to reach their hearts through their stomachs,” says Miyoko Schinner, founder and CEO of Miyoko’s Creamery.
Targeting children in school was also a topic of discussion, as Monica Chen, executive director of the Factory Farming Awareness Coalition explains, “When we do our lessons, we target the audience’s emotions by creating a story about the suffering and destruction that factory farming causes, and students are now primed for us to help them connect the story of factory farming to the story of who they are.”
Undercover videos were highly praised, as Sharon Nunez, president of Animal Equality, says, "[Undercover] investigations are a foundational aspect of our work as we bring light to the darkness of factory farming."
As producers look ahead to 2023, the importance of sharing the animal ag story will become increasingly important to combat misconceptions and ensure consumers understand the truth about how their food is raised.
The AAA shares more activist perspectives in the full release.
Read More:
What Animal Rights Activists are Saying About Ag: 2022
