A recent BBC News Magazine article just caught my attention. It quotes school teacher Rachael Deacon stating: “I pay more to buy healthier food. I don’t want my animals to be slaughtered horribly or to have a horrible life.” Putting aside that Ms. Deacon thinks that there is such a thing as non-horrible slaughter, is her general concern a success story for the animal advocates who promote “happy” meat as an incremental step on the path to a world with less suffering and death?

No. She was a vegetarian for 10 years but now she has gone back to eating meat.

Deacon is a “conscientious omnivore” who illustrates the problem with the “happy” meat approach that has overtaken the animal movement. Large animal welfare corporations have created labels, such as the Certified Humane Raised & Handled label and the Freedom Food label, to make consumers feel better about eating animals who have been raised and killed in ways which, if applied to humans, would be regarded without doubt as constituting torture. Animal advocates give awards to slaughterhouse designers and publicly praise supermarket chains that sell supposed “humanely” raised and slaughtered corpses and other “happy” animal products.

This approach does not lead people incrementally in the right direction. Rather, it gives them a reason to justify going backwards. It focuses on animal treatment rather than animal use and deludes people into thinking that welfare regulations are actually resulting in significant protection for animals.

The BBC article, “Some sausages are more equal than others,” further illustrates this problem. The reporter, Megan Lane, tells us that she has been a vegetarian for 14 years but that she has “started eating meat again, but only meat from animals who’ve enjoyed a happy life before being slaughtered.” She says that when she became a vegetarian, “organic and free-range meat” was not easily available, as it is now.

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