We hope you had a festive and relaxing Thanksgiving, with digestion undisturbed by bird-flu hysteria or nosy food police. But most of all, we hope you weren’t distracted from your holiday feast by the gobblings of the animal-rights activists at Farm Sanctuary. Every year the group’s “Adopt-A-Turkey” publicity-grab promises that “committed” vegans can receive their own bird — provided the recipients promise not to roast it at 350 degrees for 22 minutes per pound.
As we pointed out last week in a Thanksgiving Day op-ed, Farm Sanctuary also has a program — modeled after the Save The Children campaign — urging you to “sponsor” a turkey. “In exchange for money,” we wrote, “you get a picture and profile of ‘your’ bird. Farm Sanctuary doesn’t promise regular letters from these farm animals, but if a chicken can play tic-tac-toe, a turkey should be able to scratch out a postcard twice a year.“
In honor of this annual farce, we’ve updated Farm Sanctuary’s profile on our award-winning ActivistCash website. Judging from our research, it appears that the only thing these animal liberationists like more than Tofurkey is election fraud. And now that they’re on the move again, pushing for the same goals in Arizona that they achieved through massive fraud in Florida, it’s a good time to get the real story on these radical activists.
Here are a few highlights from our revised and updated profile:
Farm Sanctuary lobbies for “humane” slaughter laws, but at the same time insists that “there is no such thing as ‘humane slaughter.’ Whenever people eat meat, they support unnecessary cruelty and death.” When the Center for Consumer Freedom debated Farm Sanctuary president Gene Bauston on the BBC in January 2004, he had literally nothing to say when asked to describe what “humane” livestock agriculture would look like. For Farm Sanctuary, even silence is preferable to publicly declaring its real motivation.Farm Sanctuary paid a $50,000 fine after the Florida Elections Commission found them guilty of 210 counts of campaign finance fraud. The fine would have been much higher but for the fact that the commission prosecuted only the finance fraud committed against Floridians, declining to address the thousands of frauds committed against donors from the other 49 states. Of course, the fraud convictions were handed down weeks after the election — after the damage was done and pregnant pigs were written into the state constitution.A perfect illustration of Farm Sanctuary’s deceptive tactics is the New Jersey anti-veal legislation it lobbied for in 2004. Beyond the fact that there are no veal farms in New Jersey, the bill was preposterous as a “humane” farming bill because it mandates feeding practices that actively harm veal calves. Laws requiring that calves be fed lots of fiber and iron sound nice to an uninformed voter, but the reality is that Farm Sanctuary is willing to hurt animals in order to hurt farmers. A calf’s fiber and iron intake must be carefully regulated to keep it healthy and growing, a fact the New Jersey law completely overlooks.
