NYT's Hale on Death on a Factory Farm: Missing the Point

Edit: As I was walking with dogs this afternoon, with a clearer head and a bit more distance, I started wondering if maybe this was a little too reactionary, a little too over-the-top. And coming back to it, I continue to wonder if maybe it was. I stand by my criticisms, and I won't edit anything now, but I do acknowledge that writing this immediately after reading the review and while angry may not have been the best approach or led to the most effective critique.

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No, "missing the point" is not New York Times reviewer Mike Hale's assessment of the documentary Death on a Factory Farm (which I wrote about in more detail earlier this morning)--it's part of my take on his unimpressive, remarkably biased review, titled, with telling flippancy, "How These Piggies Went to Market."

In the review, he writes,

A defense lawyer tells the judge: “This case is actually about an animal-rights group from California coming to Wayne County, Ohio, trying to tell us how to run our farms. It’s that simple.” And you can’t really argue with him.

Yeah, you can, Mike.

I haven't even seen the documentary yet, and I can tell you that the court case and preceding investigation were not about one group imposing its "views" on another or about harmless, to-each-his-own business practices--they were about the unnecessarily, intentionally cruel treatment of animals. Yes, the former defendants and farmers would love to make this all about them--and I'm sure they're grateful to you for helping them in that that effort--but it's not about them and their warped perception of being persecuted. This was about the animals and about cruelties perpetuated against them. And it wasn't even about animal rights; it was about basic animal welfare.

Also, while we're grumbling about annoying animal advocates supposedly intruding into the farmers' business, let's please remember how this investigation got started, shall we? A farm employee--not some West Coast outsider--reported the abuse and asked for help in stopping it.

The review ends with this:

Full disclosure: When I was young, I occasionally had to help load hogs onto trucks for the trip to the slaughterhouse, a job accomplished with the help of prods and two-by-fours. While I was sickened by some things I saw in the film — as was the judge, whose verdict I won’t reveal — I can also undstand [sic] why members of the Wiles’s community would be reluctant to send their neighbors to jail.

Maybe that full disclosure should have come at the start of the review--or really, maybe it means somebody else without such clear bias, someone other than a writer who can report his own past participation in cruelty so matter-of-factly, with not even an expression of regret, should have written the damn review.

And I wouldn't mind a further, clearer explanation of why you condone reluctance to hold someone accountable for obvious cruelty, Mr. Hale. Why are you OK with people shrugging their shoulders at terrible, unnecessary suffering and saying, "Eh, they're just pigs"? It seems you don't even support animal welfare. You apparently think that because you want to keep eating pigs, and this is the standard way of getting pieces of pig to your plate (and maybe even because you participated in, and don't want to be judged for, some cruel practices in your past), we should just turn a blind eye: that last paragraph continues,

As one sympathetic farmer in the gallery says, “We can’t all eat lettuce.”

Really? That's the best a writer for the New York Times can come up with? Agreement with a tired, ignorant, completely inaccurate portrayal of what people who don't condone cruelty and don't eat animals do eat?

Wily defense lawyers . . . miss no chance to portray the activists as condescending, self-righteous outsiders. “We’re not talking about Wilbur from ‘Charlotte’s Web,’ ” one of them says in summation.

He was right on this point. These pigs aren't fictional characters. They're not cartoons. They're sentient beings--living, thinking, feeling beings whose suffering matters. And they deserve better than to have their plight written about and their case presented (and dismissed) by someone like Mike Hale.