On farms you find chickens, farmers and veterinarians…
… sometimes even journalists and activists.
We at M.A.C. observe with some bewilderment the activities of anti-farming activists who seem unable to see even the most obvious things that contradict their denunciations.
In addition to this, there is a kind of de facto alliance between journalists and anti-livestock activists, in the sense that activists find it easy to find a communicative foothold in the willingness of some journalists to fabricate news stories with information that poultry experts and insiders have no difficulty in categorising and calling fake.
But generally these fakes pass as truths because the poultry industry does not really care to waste too much time on organisations blinded by personal and basically fundamentalist convictions. However, the anti-poultry activists have very specific aims.
They publish photos and videos of a few (more often than not only one) animals with health problems, leading to the assumption that all animals bred are in the same condition.
It is important to understand that what those photos or short filmed sequences document, however, does not represent the true reality of a farm. They are images that, in the absence of objective, serious and responsible explanations, trigger misleading thoughts and have the sole purpose of impressing an unprepared and basically uninformed public
Let’s take an example: if reports were made with the same intentions, but to document what happens in the lives of humans, we would still see people with diseases and ailments of various kinds, because diseases are a presence on our planet that occurs everywhere and in percentages that, if taken as a model by activists, would turn into catastrophic narratives.
That one chicken in ten thousand falls ill is indeed normal… but the other thousands are healthy. That a journalist reports facts instrumentally collected in collaboration with activists distorting the overall reality and without an overview is not normal and is not acceptable.
Being a journalist does not give one a licence to alter the perception of things in an instrumental way by exploiting the fact of having a space in a media outlet.
Livestock farmers never hide the function of their work and have as their ‘guiding star’ the welfare of the animals they breed that they would otherwise not be able to send to the human food chain. Of course the issue then becomes that those animals are destined for slaughter, but this opens up a discussion on the world’s food needs and how they can be managed… issues that the activists are certainly not capable of arguing given the way they deal with issues and content, in a sectoral way and without an overview.
The environmental and food impact of the poultry sector is constantly monitored and scientifically analysed for constant improvement. The same cannot be said of the sector of journalists, many of whom, once certified journalists, often make important reports and investigations… however, even in their sector, as on farms, some of them also fall ill … of protagonism, however, by becoming self-styled disseminators of well-packaged fictions, but fictions… that the public has neither the habit nor the means to confront with the same critical spirit that it would have if it were really informed.
If the public were properly informed, they would know that:
- veterinarians assigned to poultry farms are specialists;
- that each veterinarian assigned to a farm inspects each individual animal during the slaughter phase, having the professional obligation to discard any chickens with evidence that they do not comply with consumer health protection regulations;
- that throughout Europe and almost everywhere else in the world there are various levels of self-control obligations for each farm.
- The obligations consist of:
I. self-monitoring for each herd according to precise protocols that, if not fulfilled, carry administrative penalties and that checks must only be assigned to certified laboratories
II. the obligation to inform the health authorities (specific laws exist) of any non-compliance found during controls
- In addition to this, the health authorities carry out further frequent spot checks
The poultry industry’s lack of habit of informing the public about these details and the many other precautions that the farmer and the entire supply chain are obliged to take is probably the only error of judgement that the industry has been making for years. And it is ‘thanks to this’ that those journalists who are guided by activists in bad faith manage to turn a photo into news, which is not news, and to influence the thinking of a public untrained to verify sources and content.
We at M.A.C. have set ourselves the task of disseminating information, news and real but scarcely disseminated data on modern poultry farming, which is little known yet very present, and which deserves to be better known because it is capable of responding to the growing world demand for accessible, healthy, cheap, nutritious food….
The editorial staff of M.A.C.
