With the organizers not budging, we turned to the state legislature. There, surely, lawmakers not beholden to this community would outlaw such barbarism. That, too, proved an optimistic assumption. It was during this process that I learned my earliest political lessons. It was hard for me to believe that a majority of elected officials in Pennsylvania, or in any state for that matter, could conclude that pigeon shooting was acceptable. But I soon figured out how they really looked at these issues: that it was not worth antagonizing the NRA.
Lawmakers, especially from rural areas, wanted to show off perfect scores from the NRA and to associate themselves with the right to bear arms and the right to hunt. Though target shooting could certainly continue uninterrupted if pigeon killing were outlawed, the NRA treated any limitation on shooting sports or hunting as a first step toward banning them all. “Pigeon shooting is an historic and legitimate activity steeped in tradition with many participants throughout the Commonwealth and around the world,” read an NRA alert to its members. “For over one hundred years, shoots have been held in Pennsylvania by law-abiding, ethical shooting enthusiasts, hunters, and sportsmen who would not tolerate an activity that would constitute cruelty to animals.”
Here again was an anticruelty bromide—just like Dr. Goodwin’s above—without any rational application of the principle. These shoots bloodied and killed real animals—with their bodies pierced by hot lead. It wasn’t done for any purpose but target shooting, and alternatives were aplenty. You couldn’t even call this conduct hunting, since there was no licensing and the birds were captive. It was no more than a hollow imitation of hunting. In this case, the NRA was saying it was against cruelty, but it was doing everything in its power to protect the cruelty and keep it legal.
For a decade, the issue stalled in the legislature—with anti-shooting and proshooting lawmakers in a standoff, and the resulting inaction favoring the NRA. But in 1999, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court delivered good news. In a case brought by a Pennsylvania anticruelty officer and backed by the Fund for Animals, the court ruled that state humane agents could arrest pigeon shooters under the state’s anticruelty law. That was enough to convince organizers of the Hegins event to call it off that year. There was a hitch, though. Other shoots, defying the threat of prosecution, quietly persisted—without the big crowds or beer and hot-dog vendors. HSUS and other animal advocates have continued to gather intelligence and provide the information to law enforcement, but a few shoots still survive to this day. Pennsylvania needs an unambiguous state law banning shoots, but the NRA continues to stand in the way.
If you were to take a survey of NRA members, most would probably favor an end to pigeon shoots. The group’s leaders, though, rally members by playing the antigun, antihunting card. “National ‘animal rights’ extremist groups, led by The Humane Society of the United States, have organized and funded efforts in Pennsylvania and around the country to ban this longstanding traditional shooting sport,” wrote the NRA to its members. “Make no mistake, this isn’t just about banning pigeon shooting, but banning all hunting species by species.”
By stirring up the hard-core sportsmen, hunting groups attract more donations, and lawmakers score with gun-rights activists. I’ve seen this same political dynamic again and again. It’s one reason why HSUS has pursued ballot initiatives on hunting and trapping issues. Pennsylvania doesn’t allow such initiatives, but about half the states do. By bypassing lawmakers so closely aligned with the gun lobby and placing reforms directly before the voters, we’ve helped to pass restrictions on abusive practices like the use of steel-jawed leghold traps and bear baiting. But there is no national initiative or referendum process, and the political dynamics I saw in Pennsylvania, and in California with Judd Hanna, can be seen as well in the Congress of the United States. The NRA has pretty much captured Republicans, with the exception of some suburban members of the caucus, and many rural Democrats, too. With this combination, the NRA has warded off efforts to halt the most reckless practices, such as commercial trapping on national wildlife refuges and even the shooting of animals in fenced enclosures in canned hunts.
No case better demonstrated the political challenge in dealing with the NRA than the debates in Congress over protecting bears. The organization has never been too fond of bears in general. For example, it fought off an effort in Congress to crack down on the trade in bear gallbladders, which poachers sell into the traditional Chinese medicine market for thousands of dollars apiece—a truly vile practice that has nothing to do with hunting. But the NRA really put its stake in the ground in the case of bear baiting.
The National Park Service and the Fish and Wildlife Service have strict regulations barring the feeding of any wildlife, including bears, because it is ultimately a threat to them and to visitors who might encounter a habituated bear. But the Forest Service and the Bureau of Land Management, America’s two largest land managers, allow bear baiters to set out food piles on federal lands in states that allow the practice. The bait piles set by hunting guides virtually guarantee their fee-paying clients an opportunity to shoot a bear. “In a normal season we will go through 10 tons of pastries and about 8 tons of meat,” boasts one hunting guide on his website. Some guides will even burn honey to attract their targets from miles around. Others use “walk-in” baits, in which they load up an old horse or mule with food, walk the animal into a forest, shoot him, and then add his carcass to the bait pile.
In the fall, bears feed for up to fifteen hours a day to build fat reserves for a long period of dormancy. In the spring, bears emerge from their dens hungry, and berries and other favored foods often don’t ripen or develop until the late spring or early summer. The bait piles are a welcome buffet for the bears. Somehow, under the current policy, it is wrong to lure bears with food if you want to shoot them with a camera, but just fine if you want to shoot them with a gun.
The logic behind this policy was a mystery to Congressmen Elton Gallegly, a Republican of California, and Jim Moran, a Democrat of Virginia, who introduced a bill to ban baiting on federal lands. It seemed a pretty straightforward idea to their colleagues, and the measure quickly gathered 190 cosponsors. Then the NRA, perhaps seeing the momentum of the bill, announced its opposition and added the issue to its annual congressional scorecard. Just like that, twenty-six cosponsors withdrew their support—something you almost never hear of on Capitol Hill. When the matter came before the House as an amendment to an annual spending bill, it got only 170 votes, well short of the 218 needed to win. Some of the initial cosponsors of the legislation even voted against it.
The way those lawmakers folded would not have surprised Judd Hanna, who had seen the entire Republican membership of the California Assembly obediently fall into line at the summons of the NRA. These days, Hanna leads the California Game Wardens Foundation, where his efforts to enforce laws against the poaching of bears and other wildlife will doubtless run him into more trouble with the NRA. This time, however, he knows who he’s dealing with. After his forced resignation for the offense of trying to save an endangered animal, Hanna put it all in perspective. “This is not about me,” he said. “It’s about the condor. It’s about the NRA hijacking the system.”
“The Agro-Industrial Complex”: Harvesting Subsidies
IT TAKES A MAN of real backbone to stand up to the NRA and other powerful animal-use groups, and Kevin Fulton fits that description. He’s a guy who stands out in any crowd, but especially the company in which we found ourselves in the spring of 2010. We were in Ohio for an organizing meeting against factory farms. A fair number of other men attended, but mostly the room was filled with young and middle-aged women who are such an important part of the animal-protection movement. Kevin is, of all things, a Nebraska cattle rancher and a big one at that—tipping the scales at 315 pounds.
Now fifty years old, but looking a bit younger, Kevin is mostly muscle, with thick shoulders that come to a V at his neck. I had heard from a colleague that Kevin said he could take a standar
d frying pan and roll it up like a newspaper. I was skeptical, so we got a frying pan to see if he could make good on his word. I tried it first. After I was done straining for several minutes, the pan was still in perfectly good shape for the stovetop. Kevin grabbed hold of it, grimaced a bit, and proceeded to do just what I had heard he was capable of. When it was all said and done, the frying pan looked more like a rolling pin. I thought to myself, Here’s a man made for the farm, not the kitchen.
Kevin had done big-time weightlifting some years back, and at one point, he made a dead lift of more than 650 pounds. I asked how he maintained his strength these days. “Building fences and knocking in posts,” he said, “and just the stuff you do on the farm.” He said he keeps very busy running his twenty-eight-hundred-acre organic farm, raising cattle, pigs, and sheep, and looking after three children of his own.
He and I connected for a whistle-stop tour through Ohio, joined by a half-dozen other farmers from the state united by a concern over the direction of industrialized farming. Ohio is one of the biggest factory-farming states, with twenty-seven million laying hens and nearly two hundred thousand sows in harsh confinement.
“We don’t run our farms like that,” Kevin told the crowd. “We let our animals outside, so they can be animals.
“In my small town in central Nebraska, there used to be a thousand people, and now there are three hundred. It’s happening all over farm country. When they become too industrialized, there’s hardly any need for labor. I employ several people, and these are good jobs, and that’s why my state senator called and recently said ‘Hey, I’d like to come over and see what kind of stuff you are doing there.’”
Kevin didn’t think much of American Farm Bureau president Bob Stallman’s recent statement that critics of industrialized farms want to return to the days of “40 acres and a mule,” an applause line he tossed out to the crowd at the farm lobby group’s spring 2010 national convention. “My father was a veterinarian,” says Kevin, “and I got a degree in animal science from Kansas State. Stallman couldn’t be more wrong. I use modern technology, but I also use the practices of my father and grandfather and they work. Last year, my wheat crop doubled the yield per acre of any of my neighbors and I didn’t apply any chemicals at all. It’s good for me and my family, it’s good for my community, and it’s good for consumers.”
Kevin Fulton does not like the way the Farm Bureau operates, and it’s probably safe to say the Farm Bureau doesn’t appreciate an outspoken critic with his background. But Kevin is just the sort of farmer that Robert Martin, of the Pew Charitable Trusts, considers the best hope for agriculture in America. In 2006, Martin and his colleague Josh Reichert assembled a panel of veterinarians, animal scientists, farmers, ethicists, and former public officials to study major issues in livestock agriculture. The twenty-member commission, including former agriculture secretary Dan Glickman, conducted hearings throughout the nation, and deliberated for more than two years before issuing a damning analysis of industrialized agriculture and a far-reaching set of recommendations. Martin invoked President Dwight Eisenhower’s admonition, at the end of his second term, about the enormous power of the military-industrial complex. Now, Martin said, there is a new worry in America: “the agro-industrial complex—an alliance of agriculture commodity groups, scientists at academic institutions who are paid by the industry, and their friends on Capitol Hill.”
Today, an interlocking network of private and public institutions controls our food production system. From one perspective, it has been a raging success, consistently generating enormous yields of grains and animal products at low prices for consumers. But these prices mask an array of social costs—animal cruelty, environmental pollution, dangerous new pathogens and other food-safety concerns, and the bankrupting of family farmers and the unraveling of rural communities. It is the tension between these two contrasting pictures of agriculture that dominates the debate today.
During the twentieth century, as the U.S. population quadrupled, the federal government developed a public support system for the private food-production sector, as a hedge against food scarcity and dramatic fluctuations in production. The foundation of this system was laid with the creation of the USDA in 1862 by President Abraham Lincoln to support agriculture. The federal government also helped to establish, through the Morrill Acts of 1862 and 1890, a network of land-grant colleges and universities, which included departments concentrating on production agriculture. And it built an infrastructure to promote agriculture—a system of aqueducts to move water in the arid West for irrigation and a network of railroads to carry food and other commodities across the nation.
Massive farm bankruptcies in the 1920s had convinced Franklin Roosevelt, by the time he took office in 1933, that there had to be strong state controls to protect farmers from the self-inflicted wound of overproduction. In the 1930s, the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl dealt two unforgiving blows to the nation, causing a mass migration of beleaguered farmers from the Midwest to California. The nation had to buffer farmers from dramatic downturns in the economy and the twin threats of drought and overproduction. Massive inputs of federal dollars and advances in the science of agriculture provided an answer.
In the coming decades, the “green revolution” sparked a remarkable surge in crop outputs, with tools like genetic selection for higher-yield crops and faster-growing animals, irrigation, and chemical fertilizers and pesticides. Traditionally, farmers used manure and crop rotation to replenish the soil. But in this new era, they could keep growing the same crop on the same land each year, thanks to the rejuvenating effects of fertilizers.
During the postwar years, some scientists and industry leaders realized that keeping animals indoors could produce cheaper meat and eggs. They got a boost from private companies that specialized in breeding and genetics, reengineering the animals to grow larger and faster. The results have been startling. Since 1960 milk production has doubled, meat production has tripled, and egg production has increased fourfold. The broiler chicken of our day is twice the size he used to be and grows to that size in half the time, due in large part to the work of geneticists and commercial breeding scientists at companies like Aviagen and Cobb-Vantress.
In the 1950s, Ezra Taft Benson, President Eisenhower’s secretary of agriculture, famously said that farmers had two choices: “get big or get out.” The goal was to rationalize production, even if that meant bigger farms and fewer farmers. With hefty government subsidies favoring larger operations, production increased, and the number of farms declined at an inverse ratio. There are now about 2 million farmers, down from 3 million in 1970 and 5.3 million in 1950, and just 10 percent of the largest and richest farmers get three-quarters of all subsidies.
The USDA, a vast bureaucracy with tens of thousands of employees and a budget now approaching $150 billion, pushes this support out to the agricultural sector in endless ways. According to Ken Cook of the Environmental Working Group, “the federal government paid out a quarter of a trillion dollars in federal farm subsidies between 1995 and 2009,” principally through “an interlocking maze of subsidies that, taken together, force taxpayers to spend billions of dollars no matter what the condition of the farm economy.” These subsidies come in the form of cash payments, market loans, revenue assurance programs, federal crop insurance, and disaster payments, together adding up to tens of billions of dollars a year, mainly for the largest and most profitable farms in America. Today, federal subsidies account for about 20 percent of all farm income.
This accounting of federal subsidies does not include technical support staff, research dollars for intramural and extramural projects, surplus commodity purchases, market promotion efforts, or a range of alphabet soup programs authorized by Congress and implemented by the USDA. Nor does it include multibillion-dollar subsidies to the corn industry through the 2007 energy bill for ethanol production. The lawmakers who push for these massive payouts to farmers mostly populate the agriculture committees in the House an
d Senate. These lawmakers typically represent rural, farm-dominated regions, and in return for these subsidies, farm trade associations, their political action committees, and their members provide campaign contributions and endorsements.
When the Obama administration and Congress bailed out the carmakers and the banks in 2009 in hopes of preventing a deeper recession, it not only required full repayment of the loans, but also a series of reforms within these industries—high fuel-efficiency standards, for example, from Detroit’s car manufacturers, and no overleveraged financial instruments from Wall Street traders. By contrast, Congress and the USDA ask for nothing in the way of reform in return for their annual payouts of billions of dollars to agribusiness—no repayments and no standards on animal care, sustainable practices, manure management, or other environmental protections. In return for all of this government bounty, you would think that the industry might at least feel a mild sense of duty to consumers—that it would want to make things right with taxpayers who, largely unaware, fund all of these subsidies. But it is quite the opposite. The American Farm Bureau Federation and other leading agribusiness organizations lobby for deregulation. They have opposed reform efforts to ban the slaughtering of downer cows, to restrict the extreme confinement of breeding sows, and even to make them account for their own pollution or greenhouse gas emissions. Even as they collect billions every year in government subsidies, agribusiness leaders and corporate farmers dismiss talk of all such reforms, and lecture their critics on how the free market should work.
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