Pages

Wednesday, August 18, 2010

Animal Rights Groups' Not-So-Hidden Agenda

There's an interesting commentary on the animal rights movement and its ultimate goal on The Pork Network site.

The author of the commentary, Pork magazine editor Marlys Miller, lays out the not-so-hidden agenda of animal rights groups. Miller notes that at a recent animal rights conference in Washington, D.C., Carrie Packwood Freeman, an assistant professor of communications at Georgia State University, told the audience, "We should distinguish a message from less meat, because we want no meat.”

Packwood's agenda clearly isn't covert. From the abstract of her graduate thesis on press coverage of, what she calls, the "industrialization of animal farming": "Findings show news discourse largely supports the speciesist status quo by representing farmed animals primarily as resources for human use through commodifying them, failing to acknowledge their emotions and perspectives, and failing to describe them as inherently-valuable individuals. ... Social change for animals is more likely if the media begin to construct stories which respect both human and animal interests."

We guess this means that, after they free all the animals, groups such as the Human Society of the United States and the Animal Liberation Front will champion for their right to vote.

No comments:

Post a Comment