September
2002
Vegetarian
Advocate
What’s so Funny About Murder? A New
York Times Advert Insults Vegetarians
By Jack Rosenberger
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If you read The New York Times, you’ve
probably seen The Ad. It promotes The Post House, a swank Manhattan
steakhouse, by mocking
vegetarians. The ad’s main visual element is an upright, foot-long
serrated steak knife. Beside the handle of the knife are three mini
restaurant reviews from Gourmet (“The restaurant remains a haunt
of dedicated carnivores and lobster-grapplers...”), Zagat (“All
that a steakhouse should be...”), and the Wine Spectator (“One
of the Ten Best Steakhouses in America”). Featured in large
type at the top of the advert is The Post House’s catch phrase: “Horrifying
Vegetarians Since 1980.”
The Post House ad is funny—unless you’re an ethical vegetarian,
intelligent, faintly sensitive, or all of the above. I suppose
the less
you know about animal agriculture, especially feedlots and slaughterhouses,
the funnier the ad seems.
I’ve visited a few slaughterhouses, but not one while cows—whose
artery-clogging flesh is The Post House’s main product—were
being slaughtered. The closest I’ve come to witnessing the killing
of cows occurred several years ago when my wife and I were vacationing
in rural Connecticut. Rani and I were trespassing through a farmer’s
fenced-in pastures when we unexpectedly discovered, lying on the well-hoofed
ground, the severed heads of a pair of adult cows. With the cows’ blood
having only begun to dry, it was obvious that the killing of the animals
had just occurred.
Personally, I don’t think what happens to cows and other farmed
animals inside a slaughterhouse is funny. Cows, of course, don’t
enter slaughterhouses of their own free will. Once they are aware that
the slaughterhouse is a place to be avoided, they are forced, by men
wielding cattle prods and blunt clubs, to step (or crawl) into the
slaughterhouse.
Once inside, the cows must wait, one by one, while the cow ahead of
her is shot in the head with a captive bolt gun. The impact of the
bolt
stuns the cow, who falls down. A worker grabs her rear legs and shackles
her to a chain, which hoists her off the ground. Now upside down, the
terrified cow waits her turn on the production line, and her other
three
legs kick at the air in fear. Ahead of her, the stunned but still-alive
cows, one by one, are having their throats slit.
Let’s not pretend any of this is humane, let alone funny.
One contemporary writer who has witnessed cows being slaughtered is
Eric Schlosser, author of Fast Food Nation. While conducting
research for the book, Schlosser visited a slaughterhouse in the midwest.
He lasted only a few minutes on the killing floor.
“I watch the knocker stun cattle for a couple of minutes,”
writes Schlosser. “The animals are powerful and imposing one moment
and then gone in an instant, suspended from a rail, ready for carving.
A steer slips from its chain, falls to the ground, and gets its head
caught in one end of a conveyer belt. The production line stops as workers
struggle to free the steer, stunned but alive, from the machinery. I’ve
seen enough.” Apparently sickened, Schlosser left the slaughterhouse.
Humorless Humor
Like any company that sells meat, The Post House is an exploitative
business. Its profits are earned by selling the flesh of cows, lobsters,
and other dead animals. Without The Post House and its brethren, animal
breeders, factory farms, and businesses that slaughter nonhuman animals
for profit won’t exist.
I don’t think The Post House ad is funny because it mocks the
beliefs and practices of ethical vegetarians, who are truly horrified
by the
meat industry. The Post House ad trivializes and belittles our concern
for nonhuman animals. And the main way we express our concern and respect
for nonhuman animals is by, on a daily basis, not eating them. Which
is why The Post House ad strikes me as insensitive, callow, and rude.
Like millions of other ethical vegetarians, I don’t think animal
cruelty is funny. If you disagree, I challenge you to imagine a similar
ad that uses a religious, cultural, or other group aside from vegetarians
as the punch line, and which you would see advertised in the pages of
The New York Times. “Horrifying women since 1980”? “Horrifying
Christians since 1980”? “Horrifying gays and lesbians since
1980”? I think we can all imagine the outcry if an advertisement
in the Times openly mocked the beliefs and concerns of any one of the
above mentioned groups. Which is why I’d like to see The New York
Times quit publishing The Post House ad.
Contact: Arthur Ochs Sulzberger Jr., Chairman, The New York
Times Company, 229 West 43rd Street, New York, NY 10036-3959.
Big Meat’s Clout
Ever wonder how powerful the meat industry is? Just remember when you
read headlines like the recent “19 Million Pounds of Meat Recalled
After 19 Fall Ill” (New York Times, July 20, 2002) that
Big Meat is so powerful the U.S. government has never given a single
federal agency the legal power to order a meat company to recall its
tainted products. All recalls are voluntary.
As the Times noted, “After the nation’s largest recall
of beef, 25 million pounds produced by Hudson Foods in 1997, Congress
mounted an effort to increase the number of inspections and tighten
safety standards in packing plants. The meat industry blocked that
effort.”
At press time, the Centers for Disease Control estimated that at least
38 individuals had been sickened from the contaminated beef. Of the
38 persons, one, a 68-year-old woman who lived in Ohio, had died.
