Photo Tegan Kristine, sourced from the youtube 'Where does my meat come from?
First of all
there has been the Meat Free Monday’s campaign with its sweeping statements of
helping to stop climate change, saving the environment, health improvements and
even helping world hunger. Fiona Lake answered very well these promoted benefits
of abstaining from meat once a week in her blog article, Meat Free Monday Propaganda.
Now thanks to
Voiceless this very week, March 18thto 24th, has been promoted as the designated week to go without meat in their Meat Free Week campaign. The
same sweeping misinformed statements about saving the environment and also
reducing perceived animal cruelty from what is an emotionalised manufactured term, ‘factory farming’.
If we were
taking notice there was a warning of this event back on the 1st of
March in his Choice Cuts opinion blog on farmonline Brad Cooper wrote in Voiceless campaign gains traction:
A CAMPAIGN urging
Australians to eat less meat proves that some people truly do have more dollars
than sense with a reported $60,000 already pledged to the cause.
…The majority of the
funds raised go to my old friends Voiceless, who wasted no time in climbing
into me last week after I called them a “pro-vegan organisation opposed to
producing food from animals”.
Well, given that
Voiceless is prepared to pursue its own profit from a campaign aimed at discouraging
people from eating meat – peddling misinformation, sucking in the gullible and
misinformed, and undermining free enterprise – it’s not difficult to see which
lifestyle it prefers
The Beef Central
article, Farm leaders question Meat Free campaign, gives quotes from NSW Farmers president Fiona
Simson and VFF Egg president Brian Ahmed. From Fiona Simpson:
Ms Simson said the
campaign seem like a good way to raise the profile of groups such as Voiceless
campaigns like these organised by animal activist group Voiceless, but failed
to take into account the people it was affecting the most.
She said there were
44,000 farming families in NSW whose livelihoods depended upon consumers eating
the produce they worked hard to grow and this campaign lacked compassion for
farmers - many of whom had recently experienced multiple natural disasters from
bush fires to floods.
Ms Simson said farmers
were committed to high animal welfare standards and many had been extremely
distressed witnessing the deaths of their own livestock during recent natural
disasters.
"I find the timing
of such a campaign ill thought out and I encourage consumers to ignore the
pleas of such groups and get behind our farmers who work extremely hard every
day at growing the best for us to eat," she said.
But the best
response so far to the Meat Free Week misinformation comes from Tegan Kristine,
a NSW beef producer in a youtube clip, Where does my meat come from? Tegan
writes in the introduction to the youtube clip:
This Meat Free Week, Voiceless asks consumers to learn more about where our
meat comes from. Come for a tour of Yandilla Beef Farm to find out more about
beef production, animal welfare and the environment!
So let’s do just that and play the youtube, available at the link immediately above.
