Peaceful Prairie Sanctuary has posted this video on their blog of “spent” hens rescued straight from a cage-free egg facility. As the video makes very clear, these hens have suffered more intensely than we can imagine. Some of them seem quite literally psychotic; driven insane from the extreme deprivation and conditions they endured over several months of pumping out eggs like machines.
This is the reality of “Special Label” farming (e.g. marketing labels with terms such as, “cage-free”, “free range”, “humane”, and “compassionate”). It is virtually indistinguishable from traditional Confined Animal Feeding Operation (CAFO) methods (commonly referred to as “factory farming”) in terms of the extreme cruelty endured by the nonhuman victims of it.
This brand of cruelty is what most so-called “animal protection” organizations (i.e. the “new welfarists”) are promoting while they harshly criticize traditional CAFO operations. The stark hypocrisy of these groups is astonishing when we learn how little difference there is between these “Special Label” animal products versus the same animal products produced under traditional methods.
As I explained in the essay "Proven Beyond a Reasonable Doubt", there are business reasons for these new welfarist organizations joining forces with industry to promote these “Special Label” products (aka “happy” meat), not the least of which is the fact that at least half of their donors consume these products and desperately want to feel better about continuing to do so.
It’s time for these new welfarist groups and their supporters to cut the hypocrisy and doubletalk, and get off the fence. We are either for animal exploitation and the related cruelty or we are against it. If we are against it, personal veganism and vegan and abolition advocacy are the only way to walk the talk, talk the walk, and avoid equivocation, hypocrisy, and speciesism. If we continue to promote and support the fraud of “special label” “happy” animal products, we make ourselves a bigger barrier to widespread veganism than the industry by itself could ever hope to achieve.
