Animal activists may mean well, but act badly
It’s news to me that gangs of pig thieves are roaming southwestern Ontario by night, dressed in biohazard suits and sneaking into barns to snatch piglets. What they do with them, they will not say.
What they want, apparently, is chickens but one night in 2016 they happened upon some sows, same difference, and a flame to a lonely human heart was lit. Being a city person, I automatically assumed their purpose was sexual — I once googled “dog brothels” and suggest you don’t — but no, they are genuine animal rights activists.
Star columnist Tom Walkom has written about this phenomenon and it is fascinating. These guerrillas do “open rescues,” which means, among other things, that they don’t use balaclavas. On themselves, I hasten to add, not the pigs.
Again, these are fresh pastures. The first thing dog owners say is, “He’s a rescue” and I don’t know what that means. A stray? Was about to drown?
Walkom talked to Jenny McQueen, a retired Ontario civil servant who belongs to Direct Action Everywhere — it sounds like the Baader-Meinhof Gang but incompetent — a group trying to free animals from their prisons.
She and her crew photograph ugly scenes in industrial chicken farms and packed sow barns and send them to the Ontario Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. It responds that the animals’ living conditions meet government rules.
But it’s still terrible to treat animals this way. Fully 60 per cent of mammals, fish, birds and reptiles have vanished worldwide since 1970. Humans are horrible.
The whole human-influenced Anthropocene era has been a disaster and when climate changes kills humans, it will kill animals too. There’s no morality to it. This train will run.
McQueen is right to protest and campaign. She is not right to have broken in somewhere and stolen two piglets, one she named Noel and another one she refused to name, as if it’s still sourcing a fake passport.
She will appear in court this month claiming moral innocence, and that’s what mystifies and annoys people. Cranks like her are the reason veganism in all its variations is not taken seriously. McQueen and her group — plus PETA, notorious for stunts and harangues — are peculiar people. They are shunned.
They are proof of what happens to good-hearted people with too much time on their hands. Work expands to fill the time available and that’s why little Noel and Noelle were made to do a runner. It’s cruel for McQueen to withhold information on their fate. Are they huge now? Are they bacon?
For one thing, cranks anthropomorphize animals. Giving water to a random pig on a transport truck from a plastic bottle and saying “I love you,” as a weeping woman from Toronto Pig Save did in 2017 outside a slaughterhouse, is not constructive. The pig does not want your rancid human love. It has bigger problems.
The real problem is global food. Meat production is industrial and relates to climate, agriculture, drought, subsidy and human nature. Humans will eat meat until it’s no longer available. Then they will eat meat bred and grown in labs like Margaret Atwood’s futuristic ChickieNobs in Oryx and Crake.
Until then, animal cranks will bully small Toronto restaurants, law-abiding family pork farms, hunters who eat what they shoot and Indigenous people who trap for their livelihood. They will steal two piglets, leaving 2,598 behind, and for what?
Worst of all, they are smug about the rightness of their cause, which rather detracts from the fact that their cause is basically right. Like every group from bitcoiners to hedge-funders, they have their own private language, which makes them members of a club few want to join.
I am not apologizing to animals I’ve eaten. It’s a dead issue. Am I to apologize for the hum of my protein energy? The hideous torment we inflict on animals will end, but not by calling piglets “Biggles” and sending them on an animal Underground Railroad. Science will put an end to it and we will be grateful or starve.
Heather Mallick is a columnist based in Toronto covering current affairs. Follow her on Twitter: @HeatherMallick