Prop 2 and Pacelle on Oprah: A Reaction Preview

by Stephanie Ernst · 2008-10-14 15:30:00 UTC
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Update 10/17/08: The promised post is coming later today or first thing tomorrow. Really.

I'm afraid (and a bit frustrated) that I am out of town with commitments this evening and tomorrow morning and have to run off before I can write all the many, many things I want to say in response to Oprah's program today on Proposition 2. I am glad that farmed animals are getting attention on a national, respected program such as Oprah's, but I am livid and disappointed by what was—and was not—said on today's program and what misconceptions were allowed to stand or even promoted as truths in the interest of getting Proposition 2 passed. Wayne Pacelle and the HSUS betrayed the animals today, on a grand, nationally televised scale when they had a chance to both promote Prop 2 and offer a truly humane alternative and did not take it. For Proposition 2 to pass, consumers and voters must be able to see a clear good and evil, and Pacelle and company just sold out all the animals suffering—yes, suffering—immensely in supposedly free-range and cage-free operations and in slaughterhouses as well all the traumatized cows and calves who pay for humans' love of dairy, by showing people what they want to see, by fabricating a clear good. The farms you saw today on Oprah's program were the extremely rare exceptions and do not represent what most supposedly humane farms are like. Showing people what they want to see and letting them believe what they want to believe in order to achieve the deceiver's agenda—isn't that what HSUS has been accusing the factory farms of doing? That's exactly what Oprah's guests did today—her guests on both sides of the issue.

I'll elaborate more on this in a later post, hopefully by tomorrow afternoon.

In the meantime:

Photo courtesy of Peaceful Prairie Sanctuary blog post "Coming Home"

Stephanie Ernst wrote the original Animal Rights blog at Change.org until December 2009. She can now be found at Animal Rights & AntiOppression.
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