Animal Ag Alliance and Advocates
From the Ag Information Network, I’m Bob Larson. A new report from the Animal Agriculture Alliance shows so-called animal activist groups raise quite a bit of money for their anti-meat activities each year.
Communication’s Director, Emily Ellis says these groups can be well financed …
ELLIS … “We’ve calculated that this handful of groups that we include on the web brings in more than $865 million annually that they use towards various campaigns, including anti-meat campaigns, anti-meat lobbying efforts. So quite a bit of funding that they have behind them to target animal agriculture.”
Ellis says they’re seeing an uptick in campaigns against secondary targets like restaurants, retail and food service brands …
ELLIS … “Maybe they can't get a farm to change the way they're doing production practices. They're going to target the restaurant brand that this farm sources to. If that brand, who doesn't want any negative publicity, doesn't want any of that negative pressure, it's really hard for them to say no sometimes to those pressure campaigns. So when they do adopt those campaigns, it trickles down to the farm level.”
Ellis says the Animal Ag Alliance urges farmers and ranchers to have proactive security measures in place. It's always better to be safe rather than sorry afterwards.
