Farming & politics
The agribusiness establishment, grown paranoid between extremists and an ignorant society, now employs verbiage as cleverly as its opponents. Well, it tries. I shouldn’t have been surprised by the edict to use “harvest” instead of “slaughter” my my sheep society’s newsletter: a few years ago, the Farm Bureau, having fled from the beautiful concept “agriculture” for “agribusiness,” and stuck with its foes’ epithet “factory farms,” unveiled a new word for its sector to win hearts and minds: “agbioresource.” Rolls off the tongue, doesn’t it?
Politics is war, and truth, or at least a particular word, often is its first casualty. A new friend had been disgusted here in my new suburban environs when a hog farmer told Kiwanians that without Issue 2, the mainstream ag standards board written into Ohio’s constitution, to protect farmers from extremists “we’ll all have to become vegans.” Meanwhile, she said, in its pre-election advertisements HSUS cleverly positioned the issue as one of “food safety,” preying on fears of e-coli and antibiotics, a screen for its animal rights agenda.
As euphemisms go, “harvest” isn’t very misleading—such a concentrated philosophical argument and so deeply and obviously political. But we do kill animals as well as harvest them. Our society can’t wash its hands of physical labor and blood and get off the hook for what results: industrial agribusiness. At least the Muslim students took direct responsibility. But Americans seemingly refuse to accept that we live by death. This leads to the sentimentality of the brute; to mistreatment of weaker people, not just animals.