This Week in Animal Ag Spin: Prices, Politics, and Propaganda | Rising Anxieties

Going to mention that a lot from now on until they change it back. Uh, sorry, sorry if you're in some place where you don't need to know what I'm talking about.

You're very lucky, I can assure you. Um, all right, so this is where we talk about what's worrying the industry. So let's l- uh, apparently you are, you'll be happy to hear. This first article is from Meatingplace. Uh, animal- it's by Jack Hubbard, who basically reports on, on the animal, the animal movement. It is nice to know that they have somebody there.

Well, I mean, I guess he does other things as well, but, uh, he, you know, he, he's one of those people. Um, and Animal-- his, the title of his story is Animal Activists Have an Affordability Problem, and you can imagine where he's going with this. He starts off by saying that Americans are losing sleep over the cost of food.

Certainly prices are going up, and everybody's upset about it, understandably. And he seems to think that, uh, this is going to redound to the benefit of the meat industry somehow, even though, I mean, especially, you know, Meatingplace is mostly about beef, not exclusively, but mostly about beef. And, uh- I, I would say the beef industry has an affordability problem.

But anyway, despite consumer anxiety over prices, he says, activists are doubling down. During a recent animal rights conference, a presenter revealed a plan to raise the cost of animal protein even more. And, uh, they talked about... It's talking about, uh, you know, probably so, a presentation at AVA, The Animal and Vegan something conference.

Um, and he talks about some polling, uh, that was mentioned in this lecture that, uh, that found that public opposition to co- There was a lot of public opposition to common farming practices, 'cause we all know that once they find out what they do, people are, like, freaked out, if you can actually get them to listen for more than two seconds.

"Think keeping chickens indoors to protect from bird flu," he says, "or the temporary confinement of pigs to mitigate piglets from being squashed," he says. Uh, temporary confinement of pigs, they go from, uh... Mother pigs go from the gestation crate, to the farrowing crate, to the gestation crate, to the farrowing crate.

I mean, if they're in a crated system, which most, you know, a lot of them still are. Uh, but he thinks that people, if they really knew how valuable these processes were, they wouldn't be against them. I think he might be wrong. He's worried because the survey language is so misleading, 'cause it doesn't explain things like, like the gestation crates, or actually it would be farrowing crates, would just be there to keep the piglets from being squashed.

It doesn't explain that, so it's misleading, unlike the meat industry, which he apparently thinks is never misleading. Uh, and, um, he is concerned that, that, uh, the next, the, the next step for the movement... I don't know whether this is true. It seems a little, it seems a little ambitious to me, and I've never heard anybody say this, but he thinks, he might know more than I do, that outdoor access is going to be the big thing that, that they're gonna be talking about next, and I like that 'cause they can't possibly do outdoor access and do factory farming.

He's talking about the ASPCA. He's very hung up about the ASPCA, and they have this... I th- I've talked about this before. The ASPCA put out this supermarket guide And, uh, it, it, it includes animal protein, uh, dead animals, and, uh, so, you know, that's not our favorite thing for an animal protection organization to do, but the fact is that the meat industry's really upset about this, so it's gotta be... there's gotta be something to it.

And the point is, is that they, though they do endorse certain, uh, certain, you know, ways of raising animals, they're, like, extremely expensive. So basically almost everybody would just have to eat plant-based protein. I, I think that's probably a pretty decent approach. It's not my philosophical, uh, it doesn't represent my philosophical beliefs, but that's a different issue.

Um, he points out that allowing animal rights activists, many of whom don't even eat meat, to dictate farming practices is not sustainable for family budgets. Uh, you know, as I've pointed out so many times, I would really love it if we could dictate farming practices. I think it would make the world a much better place.

Just put me in charge. Just, just put me in, coach. Uh, but we can't, you know? Like, these have to be voted on by the entire population, as they were in California with Prop 12, these tiny little, uh, improvements. He, but he does think that veterinarians and farmers should be calling the shots when it comes... So he doesn't think it should be the government, apparently.

It just shouldn't be animal activists, but it should be farmers. Yeah, maybe not. Um, then he gets to Prop 12. Uh, you know, they're still trying. They still wanna get it in there, uh, and how enthusiastic is he is about how Prop tw- it would fix Prop 12, uh, you know, which provided these m- minor reforms in California.

And, um, he says that the overwhelming majority of voters are waiting on the Senate to act. I ha- I hate to tell you, Jack, but the overwhelming majority of voters have no idea what you're talking about or anything about this, 'cause, you know, there's a lot of other things on people's minds. Like, like Lake Ontario.

Um, but now he gets to the point. Finally, some local governments are taking their own initiative, and now what he says is quite troubling, because he's saying that North Carolina lawmakers are considering putting a right to farm constitutional amendment to voters this fall. I don't know what the current...

I mean, I'm sorry, but I don't know what the current state of right to farm le- legislation is in, in, uh, North Carolina, but I bet there's a lot of it. North Carolina is a state that is very, very heavily influenced by its farming community and, uh, and right to farm, you know, everybody has... I, I think all the states have right to farm laws.

It basically puts, uh, restrictions on, on, uh, taking, on what can be done with land in order to preserve the right for farmers to be able to hold onto their land. It's based on this fiction, which didn't used to be a fiction, that farmers' land was being bought up cheap and turned into housing developments or whatever.

But now it's basically, it, it, now it includes animal... And now it, it's basically there to protect farmers from getting in trouble for doing anything. Um, he's also talking about Maine, which became the first state where voters approved a constitutional amendment establishing a right to food. Now, that sounds good to me.

I think people should have a right to food, but is that what that really says? Uh, somebody's gonna have to take-- I'm sorry it's not me today anyway. Somebody's gonna have to take a look at these laws 'cause I bet they are, you know, they're, they're named very nicely and very attractively. A right to food, that sounds good, but what do they really say?

Uh, he concludes by saying, "Obviously, how these measures are crafted matters greatly." I could not agree more. "But generally speaking, with food costs on everyone's mind, this is the direction that many voters have an appetite for." Yeah. Yeah. I-it's true. It is a huge opening for them because people are so worried about prices because our country is being completely destroyed, but, uh, by people, you know, that all of these folks voted for.

Um. And he's, he's, he's still hoping for Prop 12 to get destroyed. Gotta keep an eye on that. Now, I feel like sometimes we celebrate a little too early when the good things happen. We're desperate. Uh, all right. Our, our second story, and, um, which unfortunately I did underlining so I could talk about this to you, but it sh- my computer just under- uh, erased all of my underlining, so I'm gonna wing this.

Uh, the earth needs grazing livestock, you will be surprised to hear. Uh, this is also from Meatingplace by Doc Erica Vu- uh, V-O-O-G-D. No idea how you pronounce that. Not even gonna try. Um, and she's talking about... It's so interesting how she starts out. This is really interesting. Why eat meat animals? In the first place, they're not meat animals, they're animals.

Uh, but an interesting question, right? Mostly they don't, they don't bother trying to ask this question. And she says this, this question comes up a lot for discussion for a meat sci- she's a meat scientist such as herself and Dr. Temple Grandin, who is a much more famous meat scientist. Why people, people ask them, why should we eat meat and not just vegetable proteins?

Um, and you know, she talks about how animal rights groups and animal activists steer consumers toward veganism, so do health advocates and environmental advocates, but whatever. Um, and this is especially true as we learn about s- quote, unquote, "sentience" in livestock, poultry, and seafood. I guess they didn't know about that before, meaning that animals are conscious beings that deserve at a minimum the five freedoms.

Well, I'd say they deserve a lot more than that. And she's actually, like, trying to figure out how do we answer this question, which that's pretty interesting. So she's, she's recruiting, uh, things that Temple Grandin has said, uh, in order to support why it's important to eat meat in spite of all, you know, the fact that they suffer and there's vegetable protein.

And her conclusion is basically summed up with animals are part of the land, and she's talking about how important grazing animals are to, uh, to everything, uh, to preserving land and all these environmental issues or whatever. I, you know, I, I'm just gonna start off with a general comment of nobody ever said there shouldn't be animals out there eating grass.

They just said we shouldn't eat them. We don't need to control them. We don't need to raise them. We just need to, like, l- let them be and go out, you know, and, uh, and we could have buffalo again, and all sorts of animals. Like, I'm, I'm all for setting apart enormous amounts of, uh, places that are currently grazed and letting animals go there, but, you know. All right, sorry.

Um, all right, grasslands. She talks about how grasslands are important, and one study indicated that an estimated 20% of the habitable land on Earth is not appropriate for growing crops, and is only suitable for grazing. Well, what do you mean by gra- only suitable by grazing for, by cows? There's plenty of other animals who could live on that land.

And, uh, grassland, this is-- there's a quote from this guy Richard Teague who stated that grasslands evolved with grazing animals. Yeah, that's fine. We're not against animals. Um, and so that allowed the pasture to fully recover. Well, it doesn't have to be pasture And then we discuss different types of grazing systems.

It all had to do with, you know, putting cows or other, quote-unquote, "domesticated animals"... I don't know why I put that in quotes, but anyway, on, on land. You know, humans controlling who goes there and putting the... Like, we don't need to do that. We can just let them be, uh, let them be. Um, grazing can help improve soil health and increase soil carbon.

That's all good. I'm, I'm fine with that. Um, growing monocultures, uh, can be detrimental to the soil health. Well, yeah, let's not grow monocultures. Let's grow other things. Uh, you know, you can rotate crops. Ever hear of that? Um, cattle or other livestock can be grazed on corn stubble left after crop harvest.

Well, you wouldn't have all that corn stubble if you weren't raising all that corn to feed to animals who are not out there grazing. That's idiotic. Latin American countries she goes to. Grazing cattle are the primary source of beef. Well, we don't have to have beef. Oh, my God, this is so crazy. This is so crazy because they can't see beyond the narrow little world that they live in.

And we gotta get, uh, other people to be able to see that. She talks about a solar farm that, um, they graze livestock, uh, uh, along with having the solar. Like, you can have animals with your solar, uh, panels. That's fine. I don't have a problem with that. Just don't eat them. Fires, yeah, um, grazing a- uh, we go on and on.

All these reasons to have grazing animals and no mention of the actual point that, uh, animals can graze places without humans controlling the whole process. Just like they did since time immemorial. All right. This is an interesting one. This is from Ag Daily. Trump pivots to meat processing as ranchers blast beef imports.

Of course, ranchers are very, very upset because beef is so expensive, so Trump had the brilliant idea because, you know, he's a, he's a fucking genius, we all know that, of, um, importing beef from, um, from Argentina. So the cattle ranchers are very, very upset about that because they want people to be forced to eat their dead animals, not Argentinian dead animals.

And so President... So, uh, he knows that the ranchers are mad at him, and he knows that they v- they all voted for him, so, you know, that's a problem. President Donald Trump said in a social media post today that he wants to give farmers and ranchers the ability to process their own food. Uh, now you may be thinking, "Well, what does that mean?"

But the whole article is about like, well, what does that mean? 'Cause nobody really knows. So he-- Then he put out a, um... All right, so this was a Tr- Truth Social post, and he said he was moving toward legal action aimed at reducing producers' dependence on major processors, 'cause he just found out there's only four of them, and they have a monopoly, and it's terrible.

Apparently, uh, uh, somebody told him that. Who-- It was, uh, Glenn Beck, I think. Yeah, Glenn Beck told him that, and he was like, "Oh, no, that's bad." Um, so the- there're essentially four of them, a very non-competitive number, and, "they make life miserable for our wonderful farmers and ranchers," who you just, like, stabbed in the back, so you wanna pretend like you like them. "And I can't let that happen, can I?"

Um, "so in order to break this powerful monopoly," I-- This is Trump talking, of course. "I am authorized..." I, I wish I could authorize this stuff, but I can't. "I'm authorizing legal documents to be drawn," legal documents, "in order, in order to allow farmers and ranchers to be given the right to process their own food."

"This should move quickly." So everybody's like, "Well, what do you mean process your own food?" Like, people who raise animals for food are already allowed to, uh, slaughter and, and, you know, do whatever you have to do, uh, to dead an- to, uh, live animals to turn them into dead animals, to turn them into meat, um, uh, for their own household, for, and for non-paying guests and employees.

So that sounds-- that's like your own food, right? So is this just letting you do things that you already were allowed to do, or is this doing something big? Like, every, every rancher can have their own slaughterhouse? I'm not sure that's what they wanted. So, um, Brooke Rollins, who's the agriculture secretary, uh, you know, had to try to clean this up, and she said that, "changes to processing rules are coming."

She's probably like, "Oh, shit."

"Including efforts to reduce regulatory barriers and expand opportunities for interstate meat sales." Well, that's, that, that sounds different. Uh, so we'll have to see what's going to happen. Um, "and ranchers question apparently whether processing is the real problem, pr- processing their own food is the real problem."

I bet, I bet they do. I bet they're like, "Oh, man, this guy's an idiot." Um, but they don't wanna say that. All right, the wild horse thing. The wild horse thing is, is, um- You know, has been a big thing because The New York Times did this big, quote-unquote, well, exposé of how the Trump administration is, is allowing the, uh, wild horse policies to be used in these evil ways so that, um, so that animals are being sold to slaughter.

Uh, and you know, I, I have, um, Karen Dawn's article o- on, on this. Uh, she always summarizes things well. So on Substack, um, look for Karen Dawn of DawnWatch. And, um, you know, she makes the point that this is not news. The Wa- The New York Times may have just found out about it, and The New York Times want, may wanna say this is all about Trump, but this is what the BLM has been doing for years and years and years a- and that animal activists have been complaining about.

Like, they have these roundups where they, 'cause they have to clear these horses off the, you know, where they wanna put cows and, and then they have to do something. And they're not supposed to sell them to slaughter. They're only supposed to sell them as pets, so you can imagine what happens. Um, but you know, all of a sudden The New York Times is on it, which is good.

It's good. I'm not gonna complain, but it's hardly news. Uh, but according to Ag Daily, it is, um, it is news because the Bureau of Land Management, which runs this whole program, is now asking the public to report suspected violations 'cause they're horrified. They were horrified to find out from The New York Times that this was happening.

So what they wanna do, they, they want the public to report suspected violations involving feral horses. They don't call them wild horses. They call them feral horses, um, and burros. And, uh, so basically what they're saying is that, uh, when the cases are reported to them, that these people are coming in and buying horses and then sending them to slaughter, uh, they will do something about it.

Well, h- like, what? Who's in charge here? You're the government. Like like, th- it, there's all this blame about how people aren't speaking up when they find out this is happening and are then getting mad at BL- Like, you're the government. You don't, you, you don't rely... How are... Like, there are some organizations that are keeping an eye on them, but it's hardly, like, their job to be making sure that the BLM is, is, is enforcing its own regulations.

Like, they have to do it. They're the ones who are in a position to be able to figure out who's doing what and to gather the evidence on it. This is crazy.

Um, so, uh, BLM is all-- is now that it's in The New York Times and everybody's paying attention to it, they're, they're all upset that this is happening, and their point is that we have to round them up and we have to sell them.

But, you know, if somebody who told us we were selling them to the wrong people, we would do something about it. Um, and the reasons they have to round them up is, quote, "When populations exceed what the land can sustainably support, animals can face inadequate forage and water, declining body condition, and other serious consequences."

Well, guess why the land can't sustainably support them? Because the land is sustainably supporting gazillions of cows. Ridiculous. Um, "the controversy comes against the backdrop of a much larger challenge facing the Federal Wild Horse and Burro Program. The number of animals on western rangelands remains far above the population levels the BLM considers sustainable."

Yeah, because they, they're, they're judging how many ad- how many additional animals can there be on that land when you've, when you've got all those, those cows. Ridiculous. Ridiculous. All right, finally, this isn't really a Rising Anxiety. I mean, I bet I could spin it as one, but, you know, I just wanted to talk about it really.

This is from Plant Based News, and it's just this really interesting, um, research coming out of PHAIR, uh, P-H-A-I-R, um, Psychology of Human Animal Intergroup Relations. It's a great organization doing great-- I mean, we've interviewed the folks, um, uh, from PHAIR. I think we're gonna interview them again 'cause there's a new book coming out.

And, uh, this is, uh, I mean, this is kinda... it's not obvious. It links to stuff that is obvious to us all, but it's really an interesting twist. Research finds nostalgia remains major barrier to widespread plant-based diets, and, uh, re- recreating nostalgic or culturally significant dishes using vegan ingredients could make plant-based and vegan diets more accessible.

And I just... You know, when I read this, I just thought of our recent interview with Joanne Molinaro, who was... is the, like, vegan cookbook author who broke through. I mean, her cookbooks are, like, beautiful, and Korean food in general is very popular right now. But still in all, she broke through big time, and one of the reasons is because this is exactly what she does.

I mean, she does it big time because she tells all of these stories about her family, and it's totally based in nostalgia and, and sincere faithfulness to the tastes and flavors and ingredients of tradition, except for the dead animals. And, you know, I think that her cookbook proves the point. And, uh, so there was this...

this study didn't have anything to do with Joanne Molinaro, but it just is more evidence for, for... One of the barriers that perhaps we don't pay enough attention to is that people... I mean, of course we replicate the foods, and God knows our attempts to replicate the foods are then castigated as ultraprocessed.

You know, they'll, they'll come up with something to complain about. But the dishes and, and it... 'cause the findings showed that many people's lingering attachment to foods made with animal products often stems from links between certain flavors, aromas, and culinary traditions and their culture and experiences rather than with meat itself.

I think that's just such an important thing. People want to have access. I mean, it's the, the thing people bring up. "Oh, I could never go vegan. I can't give up my grandma's brisket." Like, that sort of thing. Like And of course, they use that as a barrier to vegan... They don't just, you know, go vegan except for their grandmother's brisket.

They, they use that as the barrier to going vegan at all. It's like, you know, a convenient, uh, rationale. And i- I, I think that we have to pay, like, a lot of attention to it and really get around it. I mean, I don't because I'm a terrible cook, but the rest of you out there who are good cooks have to pay attention to that.

Um, and they did this thought exercise with people about, you know, ferreting out this kind of, uh, this kind of what they were really attached to here, and after that, most participants were able to view dietary changes positively. The researchers noted that participants' nostalgic attachments were, quote, "more about shared social experiences than specific foods" unquote, and that understanding and catering to this nostalgia for significant foods could aid public health and vegan advocacy.

I think this is real... I mean, this is subtle, but I think it's really important, really important, um, the shared experience, and the shared experience is rooted, I think, a lot of times in foods that evoke nostalgia. I mean, think of Thanksgiving. You know, like, there's so many foods involved in Thanksgiving, but it's the turkey that gets all the attention.

Um, there's so many other ways to play it. Thanksgiving is coming up. We all have to start making our plans 'cause it's the vegan nightmare. Um, all right, it does point out that changing dietary requirements appear to be more difficult in family settings. Friends were seen as more accommodating. I mean, no shit.

If there's one principle of vegan advocacy that I will stick to till I die, it's, um, don't start with your family, or don't just start with your family. They're the people who are least like-- they might love you the most, but they're least likely to listen to you. They've been ignoring you, like, since the day you were born or since the day they were born.

Um, so recreate nostalgic or culturally significant dishes using vegan ingredients. That is a-- that's the project for this week, and, um, if you make something really good, you know, send, send it to me since I won't be doing that part. All right, I, I think that's, that's all I got for you today. Um, it was a lot.

Uh, so thank you for being here. Don't for- forget to subscribe, like, do all that stuff. Don't forget to listen to the Hen Report and the interview. And, if you can, we appreciate donat- donations, um, to try to keep us going at ourhenhouse.org/support, and I will see you next time.