25,000 Are Dead, But "No One" Is Hurt, and Others Were "Spared"

On my post "Thousands of Chickens Burn Alive; CCF Is Amused" this past week, commenter Sue remarked, "I'm surprised the media didn't use the typical 'no one was killed' line, when reporting the story."

No worries. The media had yet another chance to use the insensitive, illogical line this week--because the sad truth is that fires and other tragedies of this sort, in which great numbers of animals die and humans pay nary a bit of attention to anything but how much money their dead bodies would have been worth if they'd died the way we wanted them to, aren't rare. Indeed, two different media reports, one from AP and another from a local paper, give us something to shake our heads about in the case of the 25,000 adolescent turkeys who were killed in a fire on Friday, in the second major fire this turkey farm has seen in the last 18 years:

Just days after the thousands of chickens died in the Washington State fire, 25,000 turkeys died in a blaze in Minnesota on Friday, "but no one was hurt," the first AP news piece, published in the Minneapolis-St. Paul Star Tribune on Saturday morning, explains with relief. Those turkeys? Silly me--they didn't get hurt. I mean, they died, sure, but dying via smoke inhalation and burning alive while trapped with no means of escape--that's not really, technically a matter of being hurt unless you're a human, right?

But then the Star Tribune published its own expanded article on the fire Saturday night that actually does say "no humans" were hurt, but even that remark is laid out not in contrast to all the individual turkeys who died, but in contrast to the loss of the barn: "While the 60,000 square-foot barn was a total loss, no humans were hurt." (And feel free as you're reading the article to roll your eyes and guffaw at the assertion that 80,000 factory farmed, intensely confined turkeys crammed into these sheds were living in "comfort" pre-fire.)

And this article clues us into the fact that this is the second such fire this operation has had--in 1991, a similar blaze killed thousands of turkeys too. But in both cases, young poults were also just days away from arriving at the time of the fire:

"We're all kind of in shock right now. It's a very significant loss. This is a season's production worth that is definitely gone," said John Peterson after surveying the damage. "But if there is a silver lining, it is that we didn't have those baby poults here and that they were able to be spared and go someplace else."

"They were able to be spared and go someplace else." Spared. These babies will be confined and fattened up for the next four months and then slaughtered while still adolescents, as the 16-week-old youngsters who perished in the fire would have been in just a couple short weeks. They're not being spared squat--the farm's bottom line was spared.

Indeed, Gary Francione of The Abolitionist Approach wrote a post last night on this fire and the "no one" language in the AP piece. Among other remarks, he pointed out,

For Mr. Peterson, what is “terrible” is that his property was damaged and that the turkeys did not live long enough so that they could be jammed into crates, hung upside down, had their throats slit, be immersed into a tank of scalding water—and provide a profit to Mr. Peterson and a benefit to all who eat animal flesh and animal products.

And remember that the people who are ultimately responsible for animal exploitation are not those who own and operate the farms or the slaughterhouses; those who consume meat and animal products, who create the demand, bear the ultimate moral responsibility. Mr. Peterson would be doing something else with his life if we did not demand flesh and other animal products.

I'll let him say the rest.

Photo of Uta at top courtesy of the Maple Farm Sanctuary; photo of Opal, immediately above, resident of Poplar Spring Animal Sanctuary, by Deb Durant of Invisible Voices. Both are someones, like all the turkeys and other animals killed, whether in fires or in slaughterhouses.