One recurring theme in the so-called humane treatment movement is the glorification of the family farm. The Animal Welfare Institute says...
Only family farms can earn our seal. Families who own, labor on and earn a meaningful livelihood from their farms have a true commitment and connection to their animals that is lost on factory farms managed by distant, corporate owners and run by hired hands.
And in keeping with that "true commitment and connection to their animals," they slaughter them. Using this logic, the animal welfare institute obviously considers the person who murders a friend morally superior to the person who murders a stranger.
Humane treatment advocates are always contrasting the family farmers to the "distant, corporate owners." They rail against the impersonal factory farms, using the same kind of stock populist language that has always been used to demonize corporations. They're appalled by the way industrialization of agriculture has separated us from the land and the food we eat, i.e. on the deleterious effect it's had on humans. The suffering of the farm animals is nothing more than a support point in their indictment of greedy, impersonal factory farms and their yearning for their lost agrarian utopia.
You want proof that concern for the suffering of animals isn't the primary motivation of these self-proclaimed animal advocates? How about this? They eat them.
