I get a lot of email from people urging their product, cause or point of view on me as blog fodder. 99% of those unsolicited emails are deleted unopened. If it came from a PR firm, or some purveyor of manufacturing equipment or service wanting me to endorse them in the blog, I'm not interested.
I received one too interesting to ignore, however. It was from a PETA spokesperson, trying to sell me on supporting an anti-McDonalds campaign over chickens. What piqued my interest is that am the most carnivorous person I know. I am the poster boy for that which PETA crusades to eradicate. The likelihood of me agreeing with PETA on anything is so remote as to be unworthy of consideration. Don't get me wrong- I oppose cruelty to animals, but I draw a very clear distinction between people and animals. This particular PETA campaign has to do with the humane treatment of chickens in slaughterhouses. Call me naive, but the words 'humane' and 'slaughterhouse' strike me as polar opposites. There is no avoiding the fact that things are going to get very un-humane for the chicken who finds himself in a slaughterhouse.
The PETA campaign includes a picture of McDonalds' CEO, Jim Skinner, with the clever caption, "How many chicks has this guy burned?" across his image. The play on words, of course, is that at first read the ad appears to be talking about his treatment of women, only to actually be about chickens. I found that just a tad hypocritical – there could just as easily be an ad in Poultry Growers Weekly with a picture of PETA hero and benefactor Bob Barker with the same words, leading people to assume Bob was mean to chickens, only to have the ad include a laundry list of Barker's out of court settlements of sexual harassment and discrimination suits. PETA slams the McDonalds guy for being mean to poultry, although he presumably has respect for women, while PETA endorses Bob Barker who seems to see women as something of lesser stature, but has enormous regard for poultry.
All of that said, however, it seems PETA is probably more right than wrong when it comes to the best way, all things considered, of converting live chickens into chicken McNuggets. I base this not on the illogical, emotional opinions of PETA ranging from the nonsensical to the borderline insane (click here to read about their opposition to fireworks on Independence Day because they scare dogs, why the popemobile should be cow-friendly and their passionate opposition to butter sculpture). I base my view on the thoughts of Temple Grandin, a woman with an extraordinary talent for lean thinking.
For those unfamiliar with Grandin or her work, she is a professor of animal science at Colorado State University, and she has single-handedly overhauled the beef slaughterhouse business. Her insights have made the process much more cow-friendly (as cow-friendly as mass killing of cows can be, anyway), and at the same time reduced the cost and improved the quality.
What differentiates Grandin from PETA is that, while a night with me in Chicago eating deep dish pizza heaped with sausage and cheese, or better yet, at my favorite Brazilian joint where you turn the disk to the white side and sixteen guys run to your table each with a different, delicious slab of meat, would turn the PETA folks into a quivering mass of shattered nerves, Grandin would probably enjoy it. She has no emotional interest in animal rights whatsoever. In fact, she has no emotional interest in people either. She is a high-functioning autistic genius who says, "the part of other people that has emotional relationships is not part of me." To her, animals are just meat. For that matter, so are you and I.
In her incredible, cold, analytical way of seeing the world in the form of geometrical processes, she has logically deduced that more humane treatment of animals in the slaughtering operation improves quality, reduces cost and increases slaughterhouse throughput. If you read her treatise, "The Effect of Economics on the Welfare of Cattle, Pigs, Sheep and Poultry" you will see it is nothing less than a brilliant assessment of the value stream from farm to meat, complete with the economic case for controlling quality at the source; the case against compensating employees for volume rather than flow and quality; and example after example of the results of asking why as many times as it takes to get to the root causes of problems. It is the product of lean thinking of the highest order.
The moral of this long story is that PETA-type passion, rooted in emotion, but unsupported by facts and a view of the overall process is rarely persuasive. Trying to shame people into change and do things your way simply because you believe you are right doesn't get the job done. On the other hand, when the case for change is made in the form of a business case, supported by homework proving the change is in the best interests of those involved – Temple Grandin style – entire industries can be transformed. PETA and their blubbering nonsense didn't convince me of the McDonalds error, but Grandin and her facts did.
Jayadeep Purushothaman says
BTW, hard core lean way of eating meat is to grow them in your backyard and eat them(and the eggs too. No transport, pick it when it is ready and move it to the oven! But I agree with PETA on one thing, drinking any animal’s milk is indeed against animal(calf) rights!
Matt Holst says
Good post, Bill. But I was having a hard time following towards the end because all I kept thinking about was Brazzaz!!!!!!!!
Bill Waddell says
Not surprised to hear that you are more of a Brazzaz guy than a PETA supporter Matt. Shows you are a man of distinction.
Jim Fernandez says
A long long time ago one cave man said to the other cave man, “I’m good at finding plants to eat. Your good at hunting. So you hunt for us and I’ll grow and forage the plants for us. Then our families can have a more balanced diet.”
Then one day another cave man came along said to the other two cave men, “If you two guys give me some of your meat and plants, I’ll show you how to hunt and forage more efficiently and I’ll show you how to continually improve the process.”
So after this “consultant” cave man had spent a couple of hours teaching the other two cave men how to improve their processes, he had the rest of the day to sit around and relax. This was the point at which the human race had evolved to the point where some people had way too much spare time. And some of them began to use this spare time to dream up ways to butt into other people’s business.
And the rest is history.
Kathleen says
I know Temple personally. I wouldn’t describe her as cold. Analytical, pragmatic certainly but she’s far from unemotional or uncaring. She’s also not devoid of aesthetics or concepts relating to design integrity. For example, one time we were walking through a housing development and she just couldn’t stand the “point and click design” of all the houses. Architectural integrity may have been the opening but from there we went on to discuss CAD, product design etc but that’s a topic for another day.
Temple and I have discussed meat eating at length; it’s a huge topic in the autism community. She concurs that the optimal choice is to abstain from eating meat. However, she believes (like me), the primary motivation should be sustainability, but not because of animal cruelty per se (if only because philosophical arguments defining it are endless). The meat industry is the biggest cause of environmental degradation and expenditure of fossil fuels there is. Temple is a pragmatist in that she knows people aren’t going to stop eating it so she works to make its impact less than it could be. Based on private conversations we’ve had (I’m a vegetarian working in the leather trades so we share a lot of common ground), I would not be the least bit surprised if she became a vegetarian publicly at some point. Likewise, I take exception to the idea she’s unemotional about it. She was inspired to improve the conditions in slaughterhouses specifically because she was devastated by the terror she saw among cows. That humane treatment is also leanest speaks to the natural order of any and everything.
Autistics are noted for having rational, analytical and pragmatic minds. That the incidence of vegetarianism in the community is so high, higher than in any other population should not be considered coincidental (btw, average IQ in the autistic population is on the order of 115-120 so quite a few are geniuses). In sum, there is a direct relationship between being rational, analytical and pragmatic -and being a vegetarian. Autistic people don’t need to rely on the emotional tactics of PETA to become convinced. The sense in the community is that PETA has marginalized themselves so it is a mistake to paint all vegetarians with the same brush. People are vegetarians for all kinds of reasons, PETA increasingly being the least of it.
LITNE says
Kathleen wrote, “In sum, there is a direct relationship between being rational, analytical and pragmatic -and being a vegetarian.”
You are confusing correlation and causation, Kathleen.
Bill Waddell says
I love ya Kathleen, but I have to go with LITNE on this one. For your statement that there is a “direct relationship between being rational, analytical and pragmatic -and being a vegetarian” to be true, the following must be true:
All rational, analytical, pragmatic people all vegetarians.
All non-vegeterians are not rational, analytical and pragmatic.
I think you are reaching a bit because I don’t think you can (or would try) to stand behind either of those statements.
S Hodg says
PETA brought this up at the last Mcdonalds shareholders meeting. Apparently they own some 51 shares. According to PETA, they wanted Mcdonalds to move to Controlled-atmosphere killing from the current methods. The board opposed this (CAK is slowly becoming standard, but many industry and scientific organizations have concluded both methods are humane) and shareholders voted it down.
This must be PETA’s way of retaliating.
Kathleen says
Guilty of over reaching as charged. Correlation isn’t causation. How about:
There is a greater incidence of vegetarianism among people who are analytical and pragmatic.
By the same token, you have implied that people become vegetarians because of PETA and or that vegetarians share the views of PETA etc. There’s little correlation there either.
One further point: autistics are often described as not being interested in people or that they don’t care about them. This is untrue of Temple and autistics generally. It is painful to read “She has no emotional interest in animal rights whatsoever. In fact, she has no emotional interest in people either.”
It is better stated that autistic people lack the means to express emotional interest in ways that are meaningful to other (presumably non autistic) people. Failing to emote in socially acceptable and proscribed ways vs having emotions are two entirely different things. In fact, recent studies suggest that autistic people feel emotions more intensely than others which causes them to shut down.
Bill Waddell says
Kathleen,
I didn’t mean to pick on PETA over the carnivore v herbivore issue. What anyone wants to eat is their own business. I only brought it up to juxtapose myself from the standard PETAist.
My real point was that PETA seeks to change slaughterhouse practices via emotional heart-tugging – ‘think of the poor little chickies in so much pain and suffering’, and by trying to embarrass the McDonalds CEO as a hater of defenseless little birdies.
Grandin, on the other hand, comes across as one who doesn’t lose much sleep over how the animals feel about things – she simply makes the case that the practices PETA advocates as humane result in better quality meat, lower costs and improved flow.
In the course of things, she accomplishes PETA’s aims but without the emotional pandering and playing the guilt card.
Rick Bohan says
Kathleen says: “In sum, there is a direct relationship between being rational, analytical and pragmatic -and being a vegetarian.” I think she probably used “relationship” to mean correlation, just as one might say, “there is an inverse relationship between (two variables)”. I didn’t read that she was trying to imply causation.
Kathleen didn’t say that there was a perfect relationship so BW’s illustration of what she was saying is wrong.