opinion
Prairie PMU producers deserve congratulations for the enlightened way they are dealing with public concerns about their industry. Through the North American Equine Ranching Information Council, which has members in the three prairie provinces plus North Dakota, the producers are actively distributing information and organizing media tours of PMU barns.
The association has also hired a public relations consultant to help ensure the public gets truthful information about how horses are treated in PMU operations.
Some producers might, understandably, feel it is unfair that the industry has to pay for public relations campaigns to defend itself against the unfair attacks of animal rights extremists who have spread emotionally charged misinformation.
Read Also
Agriculture ministers agree to AgriStability changes
federal government proposed several months ago to increase the compensation rate from 80 to 90 per cent and double the maximum payment from $3 million to $6 million
Unfortunately, that’s reality. As animal agriculture enters the 21st century, public relations expenses are going to be almost as essential as buying feed.
Like thousands of other special interest groups, the animal rights activists are skilled at gaining public attention. The urban public, meanwhile, has an increasing interest in animal welfare and can be expected to demand costly new regulations if it believes animals are being abused.
It is tempting to dismiss some of the concerns as simply silly – for example, the animal rights group that objected to an Alberta “gopher museum” with stuffed gophers dressed in costumes. (Presumably the animal rights zealots feel this is undignified treatment of gopher corpses. Will the next step be demanding marble mausoleums to house their mortal remains?)
But such emotional concerns cannot safely be shrugged off. For decades, North American society has been conditioned to think of animals as cute little persons. In everything from Walt Disney movies to Saturday morning cartoons, animals speak and act with more intelligence and sensitivity than the human characters.
A few months ago, a television cartoon about a lovable family of dinosaurs featured an episode where dino junior was supposed to dissect a live woman in his school biology class, but rescued her to be a pet.
That is powerful imagery that goes far beyond an innocent cartoon. It’s probably worth more than a million dollars of advertising time to the groups that want animals to have equal rights with humans.
To defend their family businesses against these types of forces, people involved in animal agriculture must join together to create and maintain public education campaigns. Cattle ranches, poultry producers, dairy farms and llama breeders are all in the same boat as the PMU producers.
