Oprah’s FAIL

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My Letter to Oprah Winfrey
By Andrew Kirschner

Dear Oprah,

I watched your show on the vegan challenge yesterday. Thank you for deciding to help raise awareness about such an important issue. I wish you and your guests dedicated more time to discuss the benefits of a vegan lifestyle to the environment, human health, and animal welfare. Unfortunately, you and your guests made several terribly irresponsible and misleading statements that will negatively impact the movement. President John Adams once said, “Facts are stubborn things.”  Please allow me to address a few that were absent from your show.

You stated that animals don’t suffer on factory farms. Have you ever seen undercover videos of the sordid and inhumane conditions on factory farms? Have you ever read testimonials of former employees of factory farms? The animals’ lives consist of confinement, pain, torture, disease, and suffering. Factory workers cut off animals’ beaks, feet, tails, and other body parts without anesthesia to keep them from harming each other when they go insane in confinement. Animals are beaten, deprived of sanitary living conditions, ventilation, light, and left to die painful deaths from disease as they wallow in their own feces. They’re force fed to maximize profit to the point that they’re unable to walk, kept in constant states of pregnancy, injected with antibiotics and growth hormones, and their most basic needs of nesting, interacting, roaming, and foraging are denied. Other animals are defeathered, skinned, and scalded alive — billions of them. That bolting process your reporter couldn’t watch often fails to render the animals unconscious and leaves them to die slow deaths.

Do you believe animals’ pain is less significant or important than yours or mine? They don’t have a different threshold for pain than we do. Have you ever stepped on a pig’s foot and heard him squeal? Isn’t it presumptuous to assume that animals feel less pain or fear? They don’t. They feel pain like you and me. How do we know animals feel pain? Scientists have studied them and reported evidence of twisting and turning, facial contortions, yelping, and moaning during painful situations. These animals have nervous systems that resemble our own. Scientists have found the same rise in blood pressure in painful and stressful situations, sweating, dilated pupils, and higher pulses. They have also found blood pressure lowers in stress-free situations. An ability to feel pain increases a species’ ability to survive since it teaches animals, like humans, how to avoid painful situations. The scientific evidence all points to the fact that animals experience pain sensations at least as acutely as humans. The argument that they feel less pain because they are animals and we are humans has no scientific basis. In fact, many of their senses are even more acute than our own — many of them have a greater ability to see, hear, feel, and smell than we do. They depend on these senses for survival in the wild.

Michael Pollan stated there is nothing wrong with eating animals. He contends they only have one bad day (the day they’re slaughtered). What was the purpose of having Pollan as the featured guest on the show? All he did was advocate for eating animals. He was smug, dismissive, and patronizing. If the show was about introducing people to a vegan lifestyle, why was the featured guest an ardent animal eater? I don’t eat animals or their byproducts because I don’t believe I have any more right to inhabit this earth than an animal and I don’t need to eat them to survive. I don’t believe I am any more important than a pig, cow, chicken, or any other animal. To think otherwise is to possess an ego that does not serve the best interests of the planet or its inhabitants no matter how inculcated the opposing view is in the human psyche. It’s unfortunate that Pollan failed to mention the impact of eating animals on the planet, human health, and the animals. I encourage you to read The Food Revolution by John Robbins to gain some insight into these issues or log onto meat.org to learn about what really happens inside the 20 factory farms that wouldn’t open their doors to you.

You stated that it’s “radical” to eat a plant-based diet. I would argue that it’s radical to eat inhumanely confined, tortured, and slaughtered animals when you don’t need to eat them to survive.

Refraining from that lifestyle isn’t radical; it’s humane and compassionate. I hope you will reconsider and retract your statement. If your goal was to attract people to living a vegan lifestyle, identifying it as “radical” isn’t the most inviting approach. You missed an opportunity to discuss how mainstream the vegan lifestyle has become and how easy it is now to access so many vegan food options.

Finally, if you fear pain, and you now know that animals feel pain and suffer the same way you do, and that factory farms inflict unimaginable pain on animals, will you continue to fund the inhumane confinement, torture, and brutal killing of animals when you don’t need to eat them to survive? Do you see any hypocrisy in criticizing animal abusers while you support an industry that abuses animals? You can avoid answering the question but you can’t avoid the responsibility that you bare. It is yours to own or to change. You owe it to animals to learn about the pain and suffering they endure on their way to your dinner plate. When you have the same respect and love for animals as you do for yourself, you will be ready to live out the full potential of human decency that exists within you.

I would like to be a guest on your show to set the record straight. Please consider allowing me to face a representative from the meat industry so we can discuss the morality of eating animals, and the impact on animal welfare, the environment, and human health. Let’s have an open, cordial, and honest dialogue. As part of the show, I would also like to go undercover to infiltrate one of the 20 factory farms that wouldn’t open their doors to you so we can expose the public to battery cages and gestation crates instead of the idyllic outdoor images that Cargill packaged.  Give me an opportunity to be the voice for those 10 billion animals. Thank you very much.

On behalf of the billions of animals who live unimaginable lives of pain and suffering on factory farms, the countless millions of people who have died from eating them, and a devastated planet that has been crippled by animal agriculture,

Andrew Kirschner

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Why Vegan? Boycott Cruelty!

• Animal Wrongs
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Related:

• FAIL: Temple Grandin Wins 7 Emmy Awards
• There is nothing humane about suffering and killing. Ever.
• Context
• Murder for Dinner

the vegan way is not something one
tries for a week
7 days away from being a carnivorous
geek
it is more than a whim, or a part time
mood
it is about not exploiting animals
for the sake of food
it is about removing cruelty
from our meal time plates
and finding humane ways
our hungers, to sate

Karen Lyons Kalmenson