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Would you Like Fries with those
Lies?
The Satya Interview with Bruce
Friedrich
Last year McDonald’s made the unprecedented
announcement that they would establish animal welfare guidelines and hold
its U.S. suppliers accountable for following them and terminate contracts
with those who failed unannounced audits. This was largely in response to
a two-year campaign that People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals
(PETA) and thousands of activists maintained against the fast food giant.
Last month America’s largest grocery chain, Safeway, also announced its
concessions to PETA’s demands for the more humane treatment of the animals
who are raised in factory farms and whose body parts are sold in their
stores. Last month McDonald’s shareholders voted on a PETA proposal to
apply the animal welfare guidelines to its suppliers worldwide.
Bruce Friedrich is PETA’s Director of Vegan Outreach and is a
well-known voice among animal activists. Bruce took a moment out of his
busy schedule to talk to Catherine Clyne about recent developments in
PETA’s McDonald’s campaign.
What has the relationship been
between animal rights and McDonald’s?
The longest-running trial in
British history—civil or criminal—was, as dubbed by the press, the McLibel
trial. McDonald’s sued Dave Morris and Helen Steel, a couple of unemployed
activists for the “What’s wrong with McDonald’s” flyer that they handed
out [see interview with Morris in Satya, May 1997]. The judge’s verdict,
handed down in June of 1997, held that in about half a dozen ways,
McDonald’s was culpably responsible for animal cruelty. By the judge’s
definition, that meant that any reasonable person would hold these
practices to be cruel and abusive to the animals involved despite the fact
that they were legal. The responsibility had to do with whether McDonald’s
could prevent the practices of its suppliers, and the judge ruled that
with regard to certain parts of animal agriculture, McDonald’s used few
enough suppliers that it could be held to be culpably responsible for
cruelty.
Tell us about PETA’s relationship with McDonald’s.
At that point we wrote a letter to McDonald’s headquarters
distilling the verdict into the key issues, and we held press conferences
around the country with videos of the “standard agricultural practices.”
McDonald’s was doing audits of its cattle and pig suppliers and beginning
to do audits of its chicken suppliers, but was refusing to give us any
timeline for severing ties with suppliers who failed audits. McDonald’s
just refused to do anything to improve life for even one animal. It’s sort
of like monitoring how many people are speeding, but never giving a
speeding ticket—it doesn’t give any incentive for people to stop. So we
launched a campaign to try to push some things out of McDonald’s,
throughout which we remained in contact with them, as well as with their
animal welfare panel.
After about 11 months, McDonald’s agreed to
an array of improvements, including an end to forced molting of hens,
which involves starving the hens for up to two weeks to shock their bodies
into another laying cycle. They agreed to audit all of their chicken,
cattle and pig slaughterhouses, and to sever ties with any of the
slaughterhouses that failed audits. Dr. Temple Grandin, [a humane
slaughter systems specialist and a member of the McDonald’s animal welfare
panel], told the BBC that she had seen more improvements during the
campaign’s final six months than she had seen in her previous 20 years,
which is significant because she had been working for McDonald’s on the
issue for more than five years at that point.
So, would you say
that a lot of it had to do with PETA?
Well, you know we don’t
really care whether any of it had to do with PETA. Back in 1994, Henry
Spira had gotten them to convene their animal welfare panel and start
auditing slaughterhouses. We launched our campaign in 1999, at which point
they had still done nothing. Then in early September, McDonald’s announced
new guidelines with an array of improvements, at which point we got them
to make some clarifications, including making sure that they were going to
have independent auditors with regard to chicken cage space. McDonald’s is
the number one buyer of eggs in the country. They moved from an industry
average of seven or eight hens per cage, to a maximum of five hens per
cage (last year, four undercover investigations found ten and 11 hens per
cage, so the industry is probably lying about their average), and the
death rates fell from almost 20 percent down to two or three percent per
year. For those who are alive, that’s a significant
improvement.
What kinds of actions were the most effective with
McDonald’s?
That’s very hard to gauge, but I think it was public
pressure and grassroots that really did it. The fact that we had hundreds
of demonstrations in front of McDonald’s restaurants; celebrity
involvement, which generated massive media interest; activists who were
making phone calls and writing letters: all of these certainly helped. I
think having people standing in front of stores passing out unhappy meals,
holding signs that show [Ronald McDonald] done up like a Satanic bloody
butcher, is probably not something a corporation wants to have happening.
And McDonald’s was claiming that they cared about animal welfare, while
they were being called on the fact that they wouldn’t even address the
most egregious abuse, even if there was unanimity among their animal
welfare panel on the issue. So they finally decided that they would have
to make the change.
Tell us about the proposal that was
recently voted on by McDonald’s shareholders.
The animal welfare
plan of last year was groundbreaking in the U.S.—it was the first time any
major corporation, or major entity period, had ever done anything for
farmed animals. But after the Animal Alliance of Canada and a coalition of
40 animal groups contacted McDonald’s about making animal welfare
improvements in Canada, we submitted a shareholder resolution calling on
McDonald’s to internationalize its standards. McDonald’s then convened its
animal welfare panel and talked about Canada and internationalization for
the first time. In April they actually announced a farmed animal welfare
program for Canada, clearly in response to our shareholder proposal, but
it’s way too little, too late. It involves some audits but no plan for
severing ties with suppliers who fail audits. It involves attempting to
expand bird cage space, but no indication of what the likelihood of that
is, or by when they will have that done. Nothing on chicken or pig
slaughter, nothing on forced molting, and nothing on transparency—letting
everybody know what’s going on.
Did you encounter resistance
from McDonald’s?
[They tried to block our resolution from being
proposed to shareholders, and we challenged them for the right to do so.]
In early April, the Bush administration’s Securities and Exchange
Commission [SEC] ruled with PETA. McDonald’s claimed that our resolution
was redundant, but based on ample documentation, the SEC handed us a
victory allowing us to bring the resolution—which was really quite huge,
considering this is a Bush SEC. But it’s still far from being passed. We
got five percent—millions of shares—which is a real coup considering the
vitriol that the board brought to opposing the resolution. Now, we can
propose it again next year.
But McDonald’s is still fighting it,
right? If they were so interested in improving animal welfare in the U.S.,
why wouldn’t they do it internationally?
It’s perplexing to us
especially because their claim is that they’re already doing it. I could
see them opposing it, saying it’s cost-prohibitive, or because there are
cultural issues that need to be respected; there are a lot of arguments
that are somewhat tenable. But their arguments are [simply] lies—they
haven’t already done it, we have their own paper trail to prove it.
Well, in the proxy, it’s very clear why the board suggested voting
against this. Let me play devil’s advocate here. Their public relations
vice president, Bob Langert, summed it up in the proposal given to
shareholders last month, which I quote: “No longer are extremists driving
the debate. Mainstream consumers are the primary force. Newspapers and
television stations around the world have reported extensively on animal
welfare campaigns and our company’s animal welfare standards.” Most
revealing is: “Animal rights activists have not targeted our company in
any concerted way since McDonald’s adopted guidelines and enforced them
more than one year ago.”
Basically, they no longer feel
pressured by activists, they’re not getting bad press, and it’s not in the
public’s eye, so they don’t need to do it. What’s PETA’s response to this
and where is PETA going with the campaign now?
Well, Langert hasn’t
used that argument when we’ve talked with him, and it’s a strange argument
to make, considering that we easily could re-launch our campaign against
McDonald’s.
Is it a challenge from him?
I don’t know what
to make of it. It’s remarkable to me that so many of these corporate
public relations people seem to do such a bad job of public relations. We
are talking about a corporation that had its last successful product
introduction in 1983 with Chicken McNuggets, and thought it would be a
good idea to sue two unemployed activists.
As you know, some
Satya readers, taking an abolitionist stance, feel that any effort
to change an institution like McDonald’s, which profits from animal
misery, is wasted energy, or worse, part of the problem. What do you want
to say to them?
I can’t remember the precise number, but something
like 99 percent of Americans eat fast food; certainly fewer than one
percent are vegans. I think that it does the animals a great disservice to
put one’s personal purity ahead of having a practical, positive effect for
animals who are suffering. If I were a chicken in a battery cage, I would
want to move from an amount of space that kills a fifth of my bretheren to
a space that kills one fiftieth; that is a real improvement in conditions.
If I were a chicken in a slaughterhouse, I would want the “stun baths”
turned up to a level that actually kills the majority of the animals who
go through them, so that myself and others wouldn’t still be conscious
when our throats were slit and we were scalded alive. Unfortunately, we
aren’t in a place where the vast majority of people are on the precipice
of going vegan tomorrow, and these are improvements that are necessary.
These campaigns also allow us to talk to people. What I’ve found
is that people are really receptive to having conversations about
egregious abuse of farmed animals when they don’t feel so on the spot;
then you are able to point out that anybody eating meat, dairy or eggs is
supporting animal cruelty. And once corporations like McDonald’s and
Safeway are saying that birds have interests that have to be respected,
that some of these standard agricultural practices are abusive, it really
does beg the question in people’s minds—what are we doing eating these
animals at all? I think that these sorts of campaigns, whether they’re
one-on-one or grand-scale media interaction, they reach people in a way
that a lot of other campaigns can’t.
Some people might argue
that PETA spends too much time focusing on McDonald’s and promoting the BK
Veggie burger and what not, when PETA should be encouraging people to
support vegan businesses. What’s PETA’s response to that?
It’s
interesting what becomes the public face of PETA. We have spent almost
nothing on promoting the BK veggie; we certainly do want it to be
successful, but the vast majority of what PETA does doesn’t generate media
attention, so people often gauge ‘What is PETA?’ by what does get media
attention.
We sent out about 150,000 free vegetarian starter kits
last year and the most popular vegan video is our “Meet Your Meat” video,
which some activists are now passing out on CD ROM. We don’t copyright
anything. We encourage activists to take our literature, copy it and get
it out there. In every instance our goal is to speak out for the animals
who have no voice. We support anybody who’s doing anything to advance the
cause of animal liberation and we do what we think is going to be most
effective.
I haven’t seen anything that comes close to being as
effective at promoting veganism or at actually saving animals from
suffering as these campaigns. I’m sure you’ve heard that Peter Singer
called the McDonald’s concession the best thing for farmed animals in the
U.S. since he wrote Animal Liberation. I think that’s true both for the
individual animals and for promoting veganism in general.
So,
what’s ahead?
It’s tough to know for sure. We’ll continue to
pressure McDonald’s to internationalize their standards, which would
improve conditions for billions of animals, and shift the industry to
follow their lead. We’ll attempt to reach out to Kroger and Albertson’s,
WalMart and other grocery chains to make concessions similar to those that
we got at Safeway, and we’ll continue to attempt to come up with new and
innovative ways to promote animal rights. We just got the NCAA to stop
using leather basketballs, which is pretty fantastic—you get just a few
basketballs out of each cow, and they use a lot of basketballs. So we’re
continuing to push forward in our grassroots campaigning, even as we
attempt to work through legislation and direct, hands-on interaction with
animals in all kinds of situations.
How can Satya readers
help?
There are so many things that people can do to promote
veganism and vegetarianism. There’s a “What you can do” section of
goveg.com with suggestions like writing letters to local papers, passing
out leaflets in front of restaurants, etc. But really all of us can take
an hour and, instead of watching television, go and pass out leaflets. All
of us can contact our local college or university and arrange to have
people give talks or classes on animal rights. All of us can stand with a
sign in front of any restaurant that’s serving meat, or design a banner
and stand over a bridge during rush hour.
I’m very excited about
the idea of taking TVs out to clubs or festivals or even street corners.
I’ve been going out a lot with Compassion Over Killing’s FaunaVan in
Washington, DC. People will take the information and watch the “Meet Your
Meat” video and leave, some saying they’ll never eat meat again. In San
Francisco, a woman with the Food and Social Justice project has a
generator and a TV/VCR. In just four hours on a Friday or Saturday night,
she passes out five or six hundred leaflets to people who would otherwise
not have been thinking about this issue. So many things we can do don’t
even take much time—carrying around PETA’s Vegetarian Starter kit or Vegan
Outreach’s “Why Vegan?”, and leaving them on the train or airplane or
wherever; people will pick it up and read it. You don’t even know what
kind of positive effect you’re having without any additional effort.
I also really like that the Food and Social Justice Project in San
Francisco is teaching cooking classes. One of the reasons people are not
vegetarians is they get into a rut, they know how to cook the 13 meals
that they base their diet on. If you could get them to switch a couple of
vegetarian or vegan meals into those 13 meals, that’s a real victory, even
if they haven’t gone completely vegan: it decreases the number of animals
that are eaten, it decreases the amount of suffering for the animals.
To learn more about PETA’s work, to see what you can do to help
fast food and grocery chains adopt guidelines for the humane treatment of
farmed animals, or to order a free veggie starter kit, visit peta.org or
call (757) 622-7382 (PETA). For a detailed account of PETA’s McDonald’s
campaign, visit McCruelty.com.
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