compassionate meat

[crt360]

http://www.statesman.com/business/content/business/stories/other/10/25/25wholefoods.html

Whole Foods will sell "animal compassionate" meat
Company setting standards for treatment of animals headed for the dinner table.

By Lilly Rockwell
AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF
Wednesday, October 25, 2006

Whole Foods Market Inc. helped pave the way for the organic food movement. Now the Austin-based company hopes to launch a similar movement to ensure that animals headed for the dinner table are treated well while they're alive.

Next year, the grocer will sell a line of meats labeled to assure consumers that the cows, pigs and other food animals are treated compassionately.

That means cattle were raised with room to roam instead of being confined in crowded feedlots, and pigs were allowed to do what comes naturally  root in the ground and wallow in the mud.

It means that chickens were not raised in tiny cages or had their beaks cut off  common practices on commercial farms.

Earlier this year, Whole Foods attracted attention, and some derision, when it said it would stop selling live lobsters in its stores because living in crowded tanks was stressful for them.

But the idea of treating food animals compassionately is no joke for CEO John Mackey, a vegan who launched the company's initiative.

Whole Foods approached the issue methodically, spending the past three years looking at the treatment of cattle, ducks, broiler chickens, pigs and sheep to develop standards.

It is wrapping up its study of laying hens and turkey, and will move on to veal and dairy cattle.

"We already have natural meat standards, and in order to sell the meat in our stores, our producers must meet a certain level of care and treatment for animals," spokeswoman Amy Schaefer said. "So this is more rigorous. It's like the gold standard. We have decided to raise the bar further."

"It's very specific," Schaefer said. "The pig document is 16 pages."

The 10 pages of standards for chickens include that they must "be caught calmly and with a minium of chasing," and preferably in dimmed light to reduce stress.

Whole Foods is discovering that finding farms that can live up to its standards isn't easy. Employees are on a mission to train farmers on how to treat their animals.

One farmer who's ready is Mike Jones, who raises pigs for Whole Foods on a 73-acre North Carolina spread. The animals are allowed to roam freely in the nearby woods and breed naturally. At factory farms, they would be confined to small pens and wear nose rings to thwart rooting.

The Humane Society of the United States and the Animal Welfare Institute have been pushing for the humane treatment of farm animals for years.

But these groups say Whole Foods will provide a significant boost to the movement because of its stature as a trendsetter in the grocery industry.

"This could have a tremendous impact," said Wendy Swann, a research associate with the Animal Welfare Institute. "If their standards are good and strong, it could really push us forward."

It's unclear whether consumers would be willing to pay extra for meat that comes from contented cows or happy chickens.

"We went from four companies that are certified to 55," said Adele Douglas, executive director of Humane Farm Animal Care, which has a certification program. "These companies wouldn't be signing up if the products weren't popular."

Central Market isn't planning its own animal welfare program but does offer products such as Buddy's Chicken, which is labeled as free-range and organic.

Whole Foods maintains that its program goes the extra mile, with auditors certifying that farmers and suppliers are meeting strict standards.

Good luck catching those chickens.

[StopTheGrays]

A lot of people have been getting food like that for a long time. I think it may have been called hunting. 

[280plus]

Come here little cow, I'm not going to hurt you. I'm just going to BASH YOUR BRAINS IN!!

 

[BakerMikeRomeo]

I dunno, this sounds like a pretty good idea to me. I'm no especial fan of "organic" produce (by God, if you genetically engineer a tomato the size of a basketball, and make sure the chemicals you put on it don't kill me, then I'll buy it), but I don't see treating food animals in a humane manner as anything negative or namby-pamby or otherwise worthy of derision (not that any previous posters have said anything like that), any more than an ethical hunter who goes to lengths to ensure that his game is killed reasonably painlessly and quickly.

Maybe I'm a wuss; I have a hard time killing mice and the like, too.

~GnSx

[SomeKid]

if you genetically engineer a tomato the size of a basketball, and make sure the chemicals you put on it don't kill me, then I'll buy it

Maybe I'm a wuss; I have a hard time killing mice and the like, too.

Man, think of the kind of man-wich that could be made with a tomato that big.

As to the mice comment, I always enjoyed letting feral cats have them. Makes for a nice show.

[Brad Johnson]

Good grief, what a load of bunny-hugger crap.

Obviously these people have never been around a real beef operation. The calves are born "free" and roam with their mommies until they are about a year old. After they reach about 750 lbs they are shipped to a feedlot where they are finished out with a balanced diet of grains, protiens, fats, and all kinds of high-powered vitamin suppliments to keep them healthy until time to process them.

As for "being crowded into pens", well..  Go open the gate on a feedlot and see what happens. The cattle will rush to... stay there. They have fresh water and all the food they can eat. All they have to do all day is sit around eating to their heart's content. If some blissninny thinks the cattle are "stressed" by all this then they have a few screws loose, or they just have an axe to grind with the beef industry in general. Heck, if it was stressing the cattle it would have been changed a long time ago. Stressed cattle gain less weight and have more health problems (translation, they are not as economically viable as stress-free, healthy cattle).

The chickens? Can't speak for them, but I have some neighbors who are into the whole "free range organic chicken" thing. They serve it all the time. It sucks. Small, tough, expensive, and it usually has a gamey taste. My neighbors swoon over it because it supposedly has more "easily absorbed nutrients" and is better for you because the bird hasn't been "genetically altered with processed foods a food suppliements". Gag, for educated adults in the information age, people can be such idiots.

Brad

[Art Eatman]

Brad for sure has it right about feedlots.  Until around the 1930s, "aged beef" was a four-year-old steer that was corned off for a couple or three months and then slaughtered/butchered.  That type of handling is still common in Mexico.  The meat is a helluva lot tastier than what you get from the Choice or Select feedlot stuff, here, but chewier.  Regardless, feedlots are nowhere near "cruel".

Chickens?  Eggs?  About all I can say is that if you want to be able to feed some high percentage of 300 million folks their bacon and eggs, or supply the fried-chicken chains, you have absolutely no choice but to have "chicken factories" and "egg factories".  The labor force and transportation does not exist to deal with backyard suppliers.

As a kid, I once had 400 laying hens.  You couldn't get me back to doing that with an army!  In later years, my wife and I had a dozen or so hens out back.  Plenty for us.  Some occasional extras for friends.  That was aplenty, period.  

I've plowed behind a horse; a tractor is a damned sight better.  I've choused cow-critters out of mesquite jungles; hard on both me and the horse.  I've doctored for screwworms and vaccinated for blackleg.  I'm quite happy to let somebody else do all that.

Art

[Sindawe]

Hmmm...how is this different than the "free range" avian and mammal sources meats that stores like Whole Foods, Alfalfa's and Wild Oats have been selling for years?  I used to buy free range organic ground beef to feed to the cat in early 90s ( she was on a BARF-Biologically Appropriate Raw Food diet to address some GI issues she had) from such stores.  This blurb smells like naught but a P.R. campaign to me.

On feed lots and factory farming: Is the protein feed to the animals still sourced from other rendered animals?  How about antibiotics in the feeds, growth enhancers and other stuff?  If so, I think I'll continue to pass on the beef/chicken/etc for most meals. Just don't get 'tween me and the boiled/steamed/roasted sea-bugs (lobster, crab, shrimp)

[280plus]

Heh, around here the coyotes seem to think the range chickens really ARE free. I think they liken it to going to the supermarket, "Well, I guess I go on over and grab me one of them free chickens."

 

[Sylvilagus Aquaticus]

All our cattle roam around in the pasture most of their lives unless we pen them and run them through a squeeze chute for vaccinations and the like. Eventually, we hit one in the head with a hammer and butcher it up for meat.

Seems fair to me like that.

Regards,
Rabbit.

[LadySmith]

Compassionate Meat = assuaging the guilt of carnivorous consumers who prefer or rely on others to do the dirty work.
I'm one and I'd buy it.

[Headless Thompson Gunner]

If they can make more money that way, then I say more power to them.  Go for it!

[Art Eatman]

Sindawe, it is my understanding that most of the growth hormones (stilbestrol comes to mind) were outlawed by the FDA many years back.  Since the advent of Mad Cow Disease in England, animal parts are not supposed to be used in livestock feed.

I generally don't pay a lot of attention to all these good/bad/whatever arguments about foods.  There's too much "Everybody knows..." stuff that's commonly BS.

Hell's bells, I'm 72, and none of my problems, as near as I can tell, come from anything to do with diet.  Mostly from working too much by myself, lifting heavy stuff without help.  Lord knows, I've eaten about every "wrong" thing there is, as well as the so-called "proper diet" stuff.

But maybe there's something to all this diet-worry stuff.  In my family, I've noticed, we do eat a lot of wrong stuff, and we keep flopping over dead in our middle-nineties...

Art

[JonnyB]

And, when the "compassionate" hog farmer's 73 acres are reduced to torn up earth and trees with no bark at the bottom, he'll either give up raising hogs or go back to a concrete feedlot. Hogs on the loose are as bad as young men with bulldozers and backhoes.

The only thing left on his acreage will be rocks and dead trees. (granted, the young men and their toys would have grubbed out the trees and buried them, along with the rocks, so my analogy is slightly flawed)


jb

[Oleg Volk]

As I recall, freerange goats turned Asia Minor into a semi-desert...

[Tallpine]

Next thing you know, they will be talking about the poor tomato plants and corn stalks that are all stressed out from growing up so close together .... 

[Azrael256]

Since the advent of Mad Cow Disease in England, animal parts are not supposed to be used in livestock feed

IIRC, you can still use animal parts, just not brains or spinal cords.

As I recall, freerange goats turned Asia Minor into a semi-desert

I would wager that was sheep.  Goats aren't real hard on the land.  They'll mow the grass down pretty well, but they're not destructive.  Sheep, however, will pull grass right out by its roots and leave bare dirt.  Obviously that sort of thing will turn pretty much anywhere into a desert for the few thousand years it takes the land to recover.

[Art Eatman]

Goats love the bark of fruit trees; it's a choice tidbit for them.  Otherwise, they're browsers.  The ground cover plant life in desert areas (Anything under 17" of rain a year is by definition a desert.) is more browse-type plants than grass.

Sheep don't pull grass up by the roots unless they're held in one area too long.  That's why shepherd societies were nomadic.  They moved with the available food for livestock.  Contrary to the myths of the Old West movies, sheep and cattle work well together.  The cattle prefer the more tender tops of grasses; sheep prefer the lower portion.  (Sheep are stupid.)  You wind up with healthier growth of the grass.  So, you rotate pastures in modern ranching; olden days, you moved the stock from one area to another.  That's sorta Animal Husbandry 101, but don't get caught at it.

Art

[Stand_watie]

If they can make more money that way, then I say more power to them.  Go for it!

Good for American agri-choices! Chickens are incredibly stupid - almost as stupid as fish. That said, if all other things (IE fat, taste, hormones, health, etc) are exactly the same I'd prefer an ecstatic free-range chicken over a very happy caged chicken. People who can afford to pay extra for their meat to assuage their concience are good for our economy.

Little ol' mom 'n pop operations which have the time to raise "free range" chickens (etc) are great.

When the nutjob animal right wackos demand chicken/fish/beef be govermentally regulated to be 'free-range', 'humane', or whatever, by all means fight them tooth and nail, but when they are just getting these products with the power of their dollars, I say more power to them, and more cheap meat for everybody else.

Somebody already made the point that hunted rather than farmed game is the perfect example of this... I couldn't agree more. In my neck of the woods we have pork, beef, and venison on the hoof that is remarkably happy and well fullfilled in their lives right up until the instant that a lead missile terminates their life.  I think that that is better moral alternative for those people who have money to spare to buy "free range" whatever, but for the majority of the world who are just trying to desperately eke out a living, I think that "feedlot" whatever is better than "moral, let your children starve" meat.