JSBy Jessica Scott-ReidFri., Oct. 15, 2021timer3 min. read

https://www.thespec.com/opinion/contributors/2021/10/15/warm-and-fuzzy-fall-fairs-dont-tell-the-whole-story-on-animal-farming.html

At Ontario’s fall fairs, animal farmers want fairgoers to see what animal agriculture is all about. They display cute animals with names, some nursing their young, and speak of their important roles as food producers. This is all to help consumers feel OK about the animal agriculture industry, which kills over 800 million of those animals each year. Agricultural fairs have long been used by the industry as a tool to perpetuate ideas of animal farming as wholesome, natural and necessary. But, what you see at the fair isn’t really what most animal farming is all about.

In recent years, demand for more transparency in meat, dairy and egg production has grown. More consumers want to believe their sausage and cheese come from humanely-treated animals. And the animal agriculture industry has been eager to sell that dream. One farmer at the Norfolk County Fair recently told a Torstar reporter that transparency “is key for farmers looking to correct the record about controversial topics like animal welfare.”

However, rather than actually making changes to increase transparency and improve animal welfare, the industry has instead worked hard to further conceal how the sausage is really made, and to sell false images of animal farming as honest and humane. This is done via well-known marketing imagery of happy animals in green pastures, of clean barns and caring farmers. This is also done through media sound bites that describe cruel farrowing crates that don’t allow nursing pig mothers to so much as turn around, as a “piglet protection program,” and that describe the process of shocking or gassing those pigs before stabbing them in the throat, as them simply “moving on.”

No, this is not “agriculture awareness,” as the industry calls it, this is marketing. Because when activists and undercover investigators enter the spaces where animals are farmed, those massive sheds far from public eye, they don’t find happy, clean animals with names. They find filth, suffering and death.

If activist or investigator footage makes it to the media, farm owners will almost always describe abuse caught on camera as a rare one-off. And when footage doesn’t make it to the news, it is often because what is captured, though shocking, isn’t illegal. How can it be, when there are no laws governing everyday treatment of farm animals, and most provincial animal care acts have blanket exemptions for “standard” practices? Such practices can and do include taking newborn calves away from their mothers, bashing the skulls of ill or injured piglets into concrete as a form of euthanasia, and killing “byproduct” male chicks by throwing them live into macerators. Why don’t farmers display those things at the fair?

Transparency is not the goal of the animal agriculture industry. If it was, it would not have lobbied for “ag-gag” legislation, which just passed in Ontario last year, to deter investigators, journalists and activists from further exposing it. (The author is currently part of a lawsuit challenging this law in Ontario.)

As meat prices continue to increase and efforts of activists to expose animal farming continue, the industry is upping its marketing game. Don’t be fooled. Farmers will often say that the majority of animal operations in Canada are family-owned, to evoke those lovely images of small, bucolic farmsteads. But with the average number of animals per-farm in Canada around 2000, it’s obvious that family-owned doesn’t mean what many consumers likely think it does. Inhumane factory farming is abundant in Canada. They just won’t tell you that at the fair.Jessica Scott-Reid is a writer and animal advocate, and a co-host of Canada’s animal law podcast, “Paw & Order.”