Can you explain what Mercy for Animals does?
Mercy for Animals is a non-profit animal advocacy organization, and we are based on the belief that non-human animals are irreplaceable individuals with morally significant interests, and hence, rights, including the right to live free of unnecessary suffering. The majority of animal cruelty in this country occurs in the production of meat, dairy and egg products, to farmed animals. So every year in the United States alone, over nine billion land animals are raised and slaughtered for food production. Yet, these are the animals that have the least legal protection and oftentimes, the fewest people working on their behalf for their protection and their well-being. So, what Mercy for Animals does is focus almost exclusively on farmed animal advocacy issues, and exposing factory farm cruelty through undercover investigations and consumer education and awareness campaigns, and empowering consumers to make humane and compassionate food choices as a practical way to prevent and reduce the amount of suffering that farmed animals endure.
And you founded the group?
Yes, I founded the organization back in 1999.
How did you become interested in these issues?
I grew up on a farm as a child. I was surrounded by animals, really, since the day I was born, and it was these animals and the dogs and cats that I grew up with and shared my home with that really taught me that animals are unique individuals and they have their own desires and they have their own needs that need consideration. And when I was eleven, I learned about factory farming, and how vastly different that was from the sort of farming that I had grown up with and the way animals were being treated as machines and resources and commodities, and how very little consideration was given to their well-being. I challenged myself to consider, “What is the real difference between dogs and cats and farmed animals?” Many of us give consideration to dogs and cats, but fail to extend that same consideration to farmed animals. And when I ask myself that question, the only real difference that I could think of between farmed animals and companion animals is our perception of them. Their ability to suffer and feel joy and pleasure is just the same.
So, I became a vegetarian when I was eleven, and we formed Mercy for Animals after a local animal abuse case in rural Ohio illustrated the need for an organization to work on behalf of farmed animals. This was a case at a local high school which involved the agricultural teacher, who was also a pig farmer, bringing to school a bucket of day-old piglets to be used in a dissection project. So, these were piglets he had attempted to kill that morning on his farm. And when he arrived at the school, one of the piglets was still alive. So, a student in the class who was also an employee of the teacher’s pig farm, took the piglet by her hind legs and slammed her head into the concrete in front of all of the students. This piglet was still alive. She was vocalizing, blinking, obviously breathing, she had a fractured skull, breathing out of her mouth, in obvious pain and distress. One of the students who was just absolutely appalled by this act of cruelty, took this dying piglet, rushed her out of the classroom, into the arms of another teacher who was known for being vegetarian and sympathetic towards animal suffering. She left the school and had the piglet euthanized at a local veterinarian. She tried to get cruelty charges filed against the student and the teacher for this act of abuse. It went to trial, and on the very first day, the cruelty charges were dismissed because it’s considered standard agricultural practice to kill pigs in this way, and it’s acceptable within the industry.Ohio is similar to about 30 other states in having what’s called a common farming exemption, which means that as long as something is done across the board and considered standard by practice the industry, it is exempt from cruelty prosecution. So, it’s these sorts of exemptions that allow egregious cruelty to run rampant on factory farms across the country, because the legal system has placed the power to decide what is cruel and what is acceptable in the industry’s hands. So, this case really proved to us the need for there to be an organization locally that worked on behalf of farmed animals, because they just simply were being egregiously mistreated and had such a lack of protection.
