All of God's creatures have rights, a fact that most people don't seem to recognize. This includes both human and non-human animals, but not all of them can speak for themselves. As we continue to disregard the value of the lives of the billions of animals we eat, we also are destroying our air, land and water.
Michael Goldberg, Direct Action Everywhere (DXE)
September 2015
This week it was announced that Perdue Farms, the third biggest U.S. factory
farm company raising chickens, has purchased Niman Ranch.
In addition to running the Niman Ranch Pork Company, in years past Willis
has raised between 2500-to-3000 pigs a year on his Willis Free Range Pig
Farm in Thornton, Iowa, two hours north of Des Moines. He still raises 100s
of pigs each year.
At about six months of age, Willis’s pigs are driven to the Sioux-Preme
Packing Company, a slaughterhouse in Sioux Center, Iowa, where they are
gassed and their throats slit.
Following Perdue’s purchase of Niman Ranch, and McDonald’s move to “cage-free,” it’s time for us to ask: what does “humane” actually mean?
With his thinning white hair and black Polo-style short-sleeved shirt with a Niman Ranch “Raised With Care” logo over his heart, Paul Willis looks like a kindly grandfather. This soft-spoken man certainly isn’t my idea of a pig killer.
But that’s exactly what he is.
Willis, a high-profile spokesman for the “humane meat” movement, co-founded
and manages the Niman Ranch Pork Company, a division of Niman Ranch.
This week it was announced that Perdue Farms, the third biggest U.S. factory
farm company raising chickens, has purchased Niman Ranch.
In addition to running the Niman Ranch Pork Company, in years past Willis
has raised between 2500-to-3000 pigs a year on his Willis Free Range Pig
Farm in Thornton, Iowa, two hours north of Des Moines. He still raises 100s
of pigs each year.
At about six months of age, Willis’s pigs are driven to the Sioux-Preme
Packing Company, a slaughterhouse in Sioux Center, Iowa, where they are
gassed and their throats slit.
Willis is responsible for the deaths of far more pigs than the ones he
raises on his own farm.The Niman Ranch Pork Company is a network of over 500
farms that provide a total of over 150,000 pigs each year, who are
slaughtered and sold under the Niman Ranch brand. The company’s reputation
is based on raising pigs in what is alleged to be a humane way, and its
operation is considered the gold standard for compassionate animal
agriculture. Companies whose success is based on their “compassion” and
“values,” including Chipotle Mexican Grill and Whole Foods, are supplied by
Niman Ranch.
False advertising. About seventy-five percent of Niman pigs are raised
indoors, according to a Niman spokesman, and yet this is the photo that
appears on their website.
Willis, who refers to the dead body parts of pigs that Niman sells as
“product,” told the New York Times in early 2014 that Niman oversees the
raising and killing of about half of the pigs in America that are considered
pasture-raised, or “humanely” raised, though most of those pigs are actually
raised indoors.
Though in his early seventies, Willis has become the poster boy for Niman
Ranch, the human face of a system that doesn’t value the lives of nonhuman
animals. He’s the subject of an eight-minute video created and funded by
Chipotle, one of Niman’s biggest customers.
The video tells a folksy story about Willis growing up on the farm in
Thornton, and shows him wearing denim overalls, petting pigs who are hanging
out in a large pasture, and letting his granddaughter’s chickens out of a
barn. Willis has been favorably written up in numerous publications,
including Fast Company, and has been quoted in both the New York Times and
the New Yorker.
In the video, Willis speaks of himself as an “activist” fighting the good
fight against factory farming. It’s a good story, and it’s helped assuage
the guilt of upscale meat eaters who think they have a humane alternative to
the violence that goes on at factory farms.
“We do the best we can with raising the animals as humanely as we can,”
Willis said while hanging out at a Berkeley, CA butcher shop, Magnani's
Poultry, one afternoon in early June. Willis was there to promote Niman
Ranch “product,” and the event was billed as “Demo and Q&A.”
I was there with Direct Action Everywhere (DxE). We wanted to question
Willis about Niman farming protocol, which is, in fact, anything but humane.
But even if they did raise the pigs with care, there is nothing humane about
killing an animal that wants to live. There were about 30 of us, and at
least a half-dozen DxE members fired off questions at Willis for about 15
minutes before he abruptly ended the conversation.
DxE fights for animal liberation and against speciesism, which is similar to
racism and sexism. Only where racism and sexism describe privileged humans
discrimination against humans of color or the female sex, speciesism
describes humans discriminating against other species.
Just as there is no moral justification for racism or sexism, there is no
moral justification for speciesism. There is no moral justification for
humans to exploit and torture and kill animals because they “like the taste
of meat,” as more than one carnist has said. Yet that’s what humans do. More
than nine billion land animals are killed each year in the U.S. alone for
food. It’s mass murder on an unimaginable scale.
“I’ve always raised outdoor pigs, pasture pigs. Ok?” Willis continued.
“Factory farming started coming in on us big time [in the early ’90s]. I
wanted no part of that.”
Willis’s words are misleading. While he may actually raise his own pigs
outdoors when the weather allows, most Niman pigs live their entire short
six-month lives inside warehouse-style buildings with as little as 14 square
feet allotted per pig – equivalent to the footprint of a small desk and
approximately the size of a gestation crate, which are now illegal in
California.
David Marin of Tendergrass Farms wrote in a June 11, 2013 post on the
“Mark’s Daily Apple” blog that he considered raising pigs for Niman before
founding Tendergrass. He changed his mind when he learned from a Niman
“field representative” that “only a small percentage of Niman Ranch pigs are
actually raised on pasture. In the whole east coast region he [the Niman
rep] said that there are virtually no pasture-based Niman producers.
Paul Willis on his farm in Thornton, Iowa.
“In preparation for this blog post,” Marin continued, “I sent him [the
Niman rep] an email this week to make sure that this was still true. He
confirmed just yesterday that by his estimate well over 75% of Niman Ranch
pig farms utilize warehouse-style buildings with straw for bedding, referred
to [on the Niman website] as ‘deeply bedded barns.’”
Willis talks quietly and calmly. While conversing with him he never raised
his voice, though when challenged about the morality of killing pigs and
calling it humane meat, he seemed to become agitated. At one point in the
Q&A he skirted the issue of whether there is a difference between a plant
and an animal.
Me: You’re saying a carrot is no different than a pig?
Willis: It’s a living thing.
Me: Mr. Willis, you don’t really believe there’s no difference between a
carrot and a pig, do you?
Willis: What I believe is we eat living things. Whether it’s a plant or an
animal. Some people prefer to eat just plant material, some people have a
more varied diet and they eat animals and plants.
DxE’s Sapphire Fein: You’re not equating an animal life to a plant life?
Willis: I’m just saying people eat different things.
Thanks to numerous undercover investigations of factory farms and slaughter
houses by PETA, Mercy For Animals, the Humane Society of the United States
and others, films such as “Food, Inc.” and “Speciesism” and books like John
Robbin’s “Diet For A New America,” many people have learned about the
cruelty that goes on at the factory farms where most land animals are raised
for food. A 2015 Gallup Poll showed the vast majority of Americans believe
that the welfare of farmed animals deserves considerable protection, with
almost a third claiming animals warrant as much protection as humans.
However, the public doesn’t yet know of the cruelty inherent in raising
animals at so-called ‘humane’ farms, and there is an upscale market for
‘humane meat’ sold by companies such as Niman Ranch.
This is why DxE investigated a humane-certified farm last year that supplies
Whole Foods with eggs. That investigation, the first of its kind, produced a
video documenting horrendous conditions at Petaluma Farms in Northern
California. DxE has mounted on-going campaigns, protesting at Chipotle
restaurants and Whole Foods grocery stores – companies whose success is
based on perpetuating the humane lie.
A fourth generation farmer, Willis grew up on the Thornton farm. For Willis,
raising animals for food has always been what psychologist and author
Melanie Joy calls “normal, natural and necessary.” Those are the “Three Ns”
of Carnism, “the invisible belief system, or ideology,” Joy writes, “that
conditions people to eat certain animals.” Most Americans are carnists, and
have chosen this ideology without even realizing that they have made a
choice.
After conversing with Willis at the butcher shop, my sense was that he knows
there’s something wrong with killing pigs. He told us “my contention is, if
people raised dogs the way factory farm animals are raised, there would be
an outrage.”
There would also be an outrage if dogs were raised the way pigs are raised
at Niman-approved farms. More importantly, there should be an outrage over
the fact that they’re killed, given that pigs, like dogs, are sentient
beings.
DxE’s Brian Burns confronts Willis in butcher shop.
DxE’s Brian Burns, who was standing in front of the butcher shop display
window, behind which lay numerous cuts of dead meat, confronted Willis: “How
about a Niman Ranch dog farm? You’d make a lot of money…”
Willis turned to face Burns. “Are you advocating this?”
“What I’m saying is you’re advocating this,” Burns said.
“No, I’m not advocating this at all,” Willis said.
“What if we were to take baby dogs, [make them live in] five square feet of
space for their whole lives [it ranges from five square feet to 14 square
feet depending on the weight of the pig], castrate them two weeks after they
are born as you do [with pigs], shove metal rings in their noses…,” Burns
said. “Just as you do with pigs [sows], and at the end of six months, even
though dogs can live 15 years, just like pigs, why not kill them? You can
make a lot of money. And I see no difference between what you’re doing [with
the pigs you raise] and the idea I’m proposing right now.”
Losing his cool briefly, Willis said, “Well, I’m not doing this. I’m not
interested in doing this. I don’t advocate this. You’re comparing one
species with another.”
There it was: speciesism, alive and well at Magnani's Poultry, coming out of
Niman Ranch poster boy Paul Willis’s mouth.
Paul Willis served in the Peace Corps in Nigeria for three years after
graduating with a BA in psychology from the University of Iowa in 1966. As
Willis tells it, by the early Nineties, factory farming, with its economies
of scale and cheap but grossly inhumane ways of raising pigs, was driving
him and other smalltime Iowa farmers out of business. So he contacted Niman
Ranch founder Bill Niman in 1994 and after Niman tasted Willis’s pig
corpses, Niman wanted to do business with Willis. In 1998, Willis and Niman
created the Niman Ranch Pork Company, a network of farms that raise pigs
according to Niman’s ‘humane’ protocol.
The Niman Ranch Pork Company is half owned by Niman Ranch, and half owned by
the farmers in the network. Niman supplies pieces of dead pigs, in Willis’s
words, “product,” to upscale restaurants including Chez Panisse in Berkeley,
grocery stores including Whole Foods, the Ritz Carlton hotel chain, Dodger
Stadium, the Google campus, and Chipotle.
In July 2006, Chicago-based Natural Food Holdings, owner of the Sioux-Preme
slaughterhouse, purchased a major stake in Niman Ranch, which was losing
money at the time, and was nearly $3 million in debt; a new management team
was put in place, according to San Francisco Business Times. The following
year, 2007, Bill Niman left Niman Ranch after fighting with the new owners
over changes in how Niman animals are treated.
“I left Niman Ranch because it fell into the hands of conventional meat
and marketing guys, as opposed to ranching guys,” Bill Niman told Business
Insider in 2014. “You can't really ferret out how [the cattle] are being
raised [now].”
In 2009 Natural Food Holdings took over Niman Ranch. At the time Natural
Food Holdings was a subsidiary of billion-plus dollar Hilco Global, one of
the largest distressed investment and advisory companies in the world. Two
years later, in late 2011, Hilco sold National Food Holdings to the private
equity company, LNK Partners.
In early 2014, the Nebraska newspaper Kearney Hub reported that the Niman
Ranch Pork Company “generates $200 million annually.”
Jim Perdue, chairman of Perdue Farms since 1991, is the new owner of
Niman Ranch.
In mid-August of this year, The Street reported that there were multiple
companies interested in purchasing Natural Food Holdings, after Austin,
Minnesota-based Hormel purchased Bridgwater, N.J.-based Applegate for $775
million, more than double that companies annual revenue of $340 million.
This week (early September 2015), Perdue Farms purchased Natural Food
Holdings, including Niman Ranch and the Sioux-Preme Packing Company, from
LNK for an undisclosed price. Perdue Farms has $6 billion in annual revenue.
While Paul Willis is willingly used by Niman to portray its operation as a
downhome family farm (along with the images on the Niman website and other
marketing), Niman Ranch is now owned by one of the biggest factory farms in
the country. Since Niman became part of Natural Food Holdings six years ago,
it’s also been under the corporate umbrella of a company that makes money
murdering as many 4000 pigs a day at its own slaughterhouse.
Pigs in a holding pen at Sioux-Preme Packing Co. who will soon be
killed.
Perdue was accused in two lawsuits (one in 2010, the other in 2013) filed by the Humane Society of the United States (HSUS) of false advertising. HSUS claimed that Perdue was using the phrase “humanely raised” on it’s Harvestland chicken packaging labels even though the chickens were from factory farms. "Perdue has simply slapped 'humanely raised' stickers on its factory farmed products, hoping consumers won't know the difference," an HSUS lawyer said in 2010. Last October HSUS agreed to drop the lawsuits and Perdue agreed to remove “humanely raised” from the labels, although they ”vigorously” denied HSUS’s claims. In December 2014 this video showing how Perdue Chickens are raised was released by Compassion in World Farming, an animal welfare organization.
At Perdue-contracted farms chickens are packed into dark sheds.
This year, Niman Ranch client Whole Foods is spending $15 million to $20
million on its “Values Matter” campaign in which they bizarrely proclaim:
“PICK A CHICKEN, COOK A CHICKEN, KNOW YOUR CHICKEN,” and “CHOOSE A FISH,
COOK A FISH, SAVE A FISH.” In June of this year, PETA filed a false
advertisement complaint against Whole Foods for claiming to be selling
“humane meat,” and wrapping the meat it sells in paper printed with the
slogan, “Thanks for Caring about Animals.” Chipotle Mexican Grill has had
great success with its own “humane meat” campaign, in which it has marketed
itself as “Pro-Chicken” and said that the animals it murders and sells were
“raised with care.”
During the past year groups of DxE activists, sometimes numbering over 100
people, have entered Whole Foods stores around the country (and in Europe
too), lining up in the meat department, speaking out against the “humane
lie,” and chanting “It’s not food, it’s violence!” DxE has also mounted a
national campaign against Chipotle.
DxE speak out at Magnani's Poultry in Berkeley, CA.
Along with DxE, other animal rights activists including writer James
McWilliams, a professor at Texas State University who contributes to the New
York Times Op/Ed page, don’t believe there is such a thing as “humane meat.”
Examples of why the pigs that become Niman’s “humane meat” aren’t humanely
raised:
Niman pigs are castrated within two weeks of birth with no anesthesia, a
painful procedure. In European countries including Switzerland, Denmark,
Sweden, Lithuania, the Netherlands and Germany anesthesia or pain killers
are now used when the pigs are castrated, and a handful of countries have
voluntarily agreed to end all surgical castration of pigs by 2018, according
to Compassion in World Farming, an animal welfare organization.
As previously mentioned, about 75% of Niman pigs live their cut-short lives
indoors with about as much room as the footprint of a small desk.
Although a pig can live as long as 20 years, Niman pigs are killed at six
months.
Niman protocol allows for nose rings to be inserted through the septums of
sows’ noses without anesthesia. This is excruciating for the pigs and
numerous animal welfare groups oppose it. The nose rings are both physically
and psychologically distressing. Nose rings prevent pigs from doing one of
their favorite things: rooting around in the dirt.
On the Willis Free Range Pig Farm in Thornton, Iowa, Willis himself has
maintained 200-to-300 nose-ringed sows, according to a 2008 report from
Compassion In World Farming.
In his 2015 book, “The Modern Savage: Our Unthinking Decision To Eat
Animals,” James McWilliams wrote that there now exists “academic research
showing nose ringing to be a serious welfare violation,” and, he continued,
“…there’s no doubt about the impact of nose rings on pigs: it causes them
pain every time they put their snout to the ground.” He quotes the RSPCA:
“As well as pain when the ring is inserted … this practice leads to chronic
pain.”
In fact, Animal Welfare Approved (AWA), which McWilliams calls a
“comparatively rigorous welfare label," prohibits nose ringing. Niman Ranch
is no longer certified by AWA. Instead, it is certified by Global Animal
Partnership (GAP), a questionable industry organization whose board includes
Willis and Whole Foods co-CEO John Mackey, and whose funding is mostly
provided by Whole Foods.
GAP has a “5-Step Program.” Farms must meet the minimum “step one” standards
to be certified. During an interview on Katy Keiffer’s “What Doesn’t Kill
You’ internet radio show in mid-2013, Willis admitted that Niman farms do
not meet step four or five certification.
“The very highest steps are non-castration and slaughter on the farm and
things like that,” Willis told Keiffer. “Now for us that’s not going to
happen, it’s not practical. Most of our farmers fall into steps one, two and
three.”
And of course there is no way to humanely slaughter an animal. Niman pigs
are trucked to the Sioux-Preme Packing Company – itself a harrowing
experience for animals who, until then, have typically never been in a truck
– where they are gassed in a process known as CO2 stunning, and then their
throats are slit.
It takes as long as 45 seconds after the gas is released for the pigs to
pass out. And during that time some pigs panic. Animal expert Temple Grandin
has observed pigs that, on first contact with the gas, “reared up and
violently attempted to escape.” Grandin has written that this is “not
acceptable.”
In the butcher shop, I said as much to Willis and he responded, “Well if
you have better ideas about the slaughter process and everything, please let
me know.”
DxE activist Sapphire Fein said to Willis, “There’s no way to kindly,
compassionately, exploit anybody, confine anybody, put metal rings through
their noses…”
“I encourage you to pursue your options, whatever they might be,” Willis
said.
“It’s not about our options,” Fein said. “It’s about their lives. These
animals have the right to live their lives.”
“What we’re trying to do is do right by the animals that are raised for
food,” Willis said.
“There is no correct moral ethical kind way to confine, exploit and murder
somebody,” Fein said. “You’re claiming you can do something you despise
about factory farms in a way that’s kind and compassionate. Can you do the
wrong thing in a nice way?”
“Ummm,” Willis said. “I guess I don’t know the answer to that question.”
“How can you not know the answer to that question?” Fein said. “Your entire
marketing depends on you knowing the answer to that question.”
Michael Goldberg is a former Rolling Stone Senior Writer. He is an animal rights activist and a member of DxE. His first novel, True Love Scars, was published in 2014; his second, The Flowers Lied, will be published in October. His wife Leslie Goldberg, also a DxE member, blogs about animal rights at www.viciousvegan.com.
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