Farmscape for April 12, 2013

The executive director of the Center for Consumer Freedom suggests the farm community needs to take direct action to make the public aware of the true agendas of animal activist groups.
Understanding and Defeating the HSUS Anti-Farming Agenda was discussed earlier this week as part of the Manitoba Pork Council 2013 annual general meeting.
Rick Berman, the president of Burman and Associates and the executive director of the Center for Consumer Freedom, says the animal activist groups all have separate targets but, for the most part, they have the same agenda which is to make animal protein more expensive and to get people to stop eating meat and dairy products of all kinds and from time to time they're successful in getting consumers to believe that if they eat certain products they are contributing to animal abuse.

Clip-Rick Berman-Center for Consumer Freedom:
Not prior to the advent of the internet were these groups very powerful but with the internet they're able to organize, they're able fund raise in ways that they never could have before and they can manage public opinion.
Let's face it most people are too busy to investigate some of the claims that these groups make and so they take them at face value and in doing so they are making animal production look like an inhumane business.
No one wants to see an animal abused and these groups will go out of their way to do that.
What the farm community needs to do is to recognize they're playing a very different game today than they were 15 to 20 years ago and they need to get the public to understand who these people are and what their agendas are all about.
It's just a communications business.
They need to understand that unless they are going to spend some money communicating about these groups they are going to get overwhelmed by these groups messaging.

Berman suggests he would like to see pork producers, chicken producers, egg laying hen producers, all of the people involved in animal agriculture having a coordinated campaign.
For more information visit humanewatch.org.
For Farmscape.Ca, I'm Bruce Cochrane.

       *Farmscape is a presentation of Sask Pork and Manitoba Pork Council