Feb 15 2010
I Dare You to Disagree with Mike Rowe

Does anybody not like Mike Rowe? The filthy-handed Dirty Jobs host is equal parts Paul Bunyan, Ralph Kramden, and Andy Griffith. And this cable-television everyman has some pretty strong feelings about how the Humane Society of the United States views the future of American farming.
Here's Rowe, wiriting about the 2008 "Proposition 2" political campaign that already has some California egg farmers scouting land in Guadalajara:
I don’t believe that keeping a chicken in a cage, free from bad weather or predators and feeding them well and making sure they stay healthy is a bad thing. My grandparents had chickens. I know what the chickens did all day and what they were happy doing and it didn’t include much else besides eating, “talking” to all their pals and laying eggs. Seriously (no disrespect to all the chickens out there) ...
I love animals. I also love to eat and my favourites include a good steak for dinner and bacon and eggs for breakfast and I’d prefer not to spend a fortune on those things or get my beef and eggs exported from some other country. Nothing wrong with all that, right?Then what smacks me in this [Wall Street Journal] article is this:“Of course, moving to another state could be costly, too. Moreover, Wayne Pacelle, president and chief executive of the Humane Society, said farmers who flee California may wind up facing tougher rules anyway, because more retailers are seeking food raised under strict animal-welfare standards.
“It’s not surprising that some of the factory farms would flock to states that are deregulated when it comes to animal welfare,” said Mr. Pacelle. But “that is not a long-term answer.”
Maybe it’s just me but Mr. P’s “that’s not a long term answer” comment sounds like it carries a threat. What does that mean? Is Mr. P and the Humane Society and all the well meaning animal savers going to go get these laws passed in every single state in the nation so that one day we wake up and every single farmer is out of business unless they grow vegetables? Are we going to go from watching the ruin of the auto industry to watching the ruin of the farmer? I ask you – what is in America’s future?
For anyone who watches Mike Rowe, none of this should come as a surprise. Except, maybe, the fact that he spells "favourites" with a "u."
His point, though, is well taken. If you were to look at what HSUS did in California (and is doing this year in Ohio), and you didn't know the organization was a chicken's-rights lobby, you might conclude that their chief interest is in getting as much as possible of our domestic animal farmers to pick up and move—as far away as possible.
Is that good for America?
Would it even be good for the chickens? It's not like the Mexican countryside is dotted with the most humane, stewardship-oriented farms in North America. We'd argue that those farms are here in the United States.
What do you think?
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The really scary thing about this is that California either passed or tried to pass (I can’t keep up with the state) an amendment that would require any eggs coming into the state to be from farmers that are following the same Prop 2 law.
I don’t know where CA is going to get food from. Guess they didn’t think about this either when they fell into the web of the HSUS.
Always remember, when the spider welcomes/invites the fly into the web, the end result will be the destruction of the fly. Now put HSUS as the spider and the CA population as the fly. Who will be destroyed?
Go Mike! Let’s see 330 million people divided by the few twigs and berries that are on the HSUS good to eat list equals 300 million dead Americans plus a half a billion dead from around the world who count on food from our fruited plain.
Ted, you better get busy raising those free range bison quick, once all the farms and ranches are regulated out of existence, and all the kelp is consumed, they will zero in on the buffalo and chew thru them quicker than a 1800’s railroad construction crew.
Mike Rowe rocks!
And the point he makes is, I think, one of the central problems with the AR agenda. That you have people with NO EXPERIENCE whatsoever making judgments based on ill-informed emotion and then using those judgments to enact laws and policies. All the time ignoring the people who do have real-life experience in the relevant area of animal husbandry. Some of the laws they pass actually cause increased harm and stress to the animals.
Correction: “What’s in America’s Future?” on the mikeroweWORKS website was not written by Mike Rowe. It was written by “SRW”, a frequent contributor to the site.
I would like to say that the leaders of HSUS have no care for animals,(as we all know), it is just a topic that gathers extreme emotional responses from their contributors. They HSUS top officials are very aware of what animal agriculture is, they are just relying on the uninformed and naive public to contribute. If there were “sweatshops” present in the U.S. they would more likely concentrate on them as they would cause an even great emotional response, and thus bigger contributions to increase their bankroll. Just my thoughts.
The biggest problem is the lack of Americans who have lived on a farm or owned livestock or even been around livestock. Once upon a time it was hard to find an American who at some point was never around livestock. That makes it easy to play on their sympathy. They see a video of a cow’s tail being twisted and think oh they are so right that is so cruel. They don’t or can’t comprehend a cow is not a dog or a cat that you can just pick up and put into a trailer. Twisting a cow’s tail will get them in the trailer and a little pain is better than a person getting injured or the cow or other cows getting injured by a cow that doesn’t want to load.
They see a chicken in a cage and think how cruel it has to live it’s entire life in that little space. They don’t see the other side of the picture of the chicken out pecking and scratching in the green grass and a chicken hawk or an eagle swooping them up carrying them off for a meal. They don’t see the dog, fox, coyote, etc. ripping them apart and then eating them.
They see the pig in the pen and think they’d have to be happier with other pigs. They never see the side of the pig with it’s guts ripped out, when another pig decides it wants to fight, they don’t see the pig farmer who has his legged ripped open from ankle to thigh.
Some way, somehow, people have to be educated on animals by the people who have the experience not someone in a suit making millions of dollars a year without any experience raising an animal and whose sole purpose in life is to make money putting the few farmers out of business.
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I read what he said and felt his comments were sane. He says Mr “P’s comment sounds like it carries a threat.