Today, on National Animal Advocacy Day, we’re spotlighting a truth too often untold:
The same system that tortures animals in laboratories fuels the mass farming and slaughter of animals for human consumption.
(The current controversy over federal grants to universities for animal research exposes this ugly reality in real time.)
Just like Big Tobacco and Big Oil before them, Big (Animal) Ag is funneling money into public universities – i.e., paying researchers not to come to objective conclusions or discover any truths, but to (i) make animal exploitation more profitable and (ii) mislead the public.
The animal agribusiness industry has weaponized university researchers – cloaked in the false credibility of modern-day animal “science” – as public relations tools, because it recognizes that these researchers offer something it cannot buy anywhere else: a facade of legitimacy.
Behind this facade, the industry pays university researchers to protect the industry’s “social license to operate”. To polish its reputation. To encourage increased meat, dairy, and egg consumption. To mask violence as “science”. To keep the blood flowing – and the money flowing faster.
This isn’t a new arrangement. It’s a 150-year-old alliance – a grim pact between land-grant universities and animal agriculture, forged for one purpose: to profit off the backs, bodies, and lives of nonhuman animals.
And profit they do.
Universities’ “animal science” programs are heavily funded by meat and dairy conglomerates, their trade groups, and the highly-invested U.S. government – meaning, the field is effectively controlled by the industry. Case in point: animal agribusiness research is “conducted by researchers with ties to the industry.”
The goal of this research isn’t to alleviate suffering, but, rather, to maximize productivity, to obstruct unfavorable regulations, to white- and green-wash the unspeakable, and to invent new tools of domination.
Indeed, the university-industry partnership hasn’t just boosted factory farming. It built it.
From mutilations to mass slaughter, cages to chemical feed additives, every horror of today’s intensive animal “farming” system bears the fingerprints of university researchers. They are the architects of modern animal exploitation.
As one expert bluntly puts it:
‘You don’t get the industry that we have now without the land-grant universities.’
Take “artificial insemination” – what the industry calls its “first great biotechnology” – as one glaring example. In reality, this university-derived “practice” is nothing more (and nothing less) than institutionalized sexual assault.
Public university research pioneered the forcible “collecti[on of] sperm” from male animals and the forcible insertion of this sperm into female animals’ genitals”. This grotesque violation enabled, and still underpins, the mass reproduction of animals for slaughter.
This practice remains so essential to modern, intensive animal “production”, in fact, that, if it were banned, much meat and dairy “production would grind to a halt overnight”.
Yet, researchers won’t even call it what it is . . . and they lobby to ensure one one else can, either.
Researchers sanitize the sexual assault they industrialized with “clinical and detached” euphemisms like “artificial insemination” and “genetic improvement”.
And, they campaign for exemptions from state bestiality laws that would otherwise criminalize the very practices they engineered.
This is how science gets weaponized against the vulnerable. And, it’s how public universities became and continue as agents of institutionalized violence.
Today, these same universities remain busy (and rich) “innovating” for the animal agribusiness industry – not by developing alternatives to animal farming, but by devising ways to push animals to, and beyond, their biological limits and by designing public relations campaigns to dupe the public into believing that industrial animal farming is “humane” and “sustainable”.
Meanwhile, ethical research that would benefit all animals – including humans – remains marginalized, underfunded, and dismissed.
If this sounds familiar, it should: it’s the very same playbook followed by the rest of the animal research industry, which continues to reject human-relevant science in favor of animal use and abuse.
Because money controls. It incentivizes many university researchers not only to side with violence, but to build their careers on it – and it inextricably links the blood on slaughterhouse floors to the blood spilled on animal lab operating tables.
For us advocates, this means we cannot dismantle one system of animal exploitation without dismantling the other.
Animal research and animal agriculture are not separate evils – they are different faces of the same monstrous machine fueled by greed, powered by violence, and protected by lies.
Those of us fighting to end animal research must also fight to end animal agriculture – because we’re up against the same enemy, just wearing a different mask.
Your call to action: Combat the exploitation of animals in labs and factory farms today by opposing the Food Security and Farm Protection Act (S. 1326), a repackaged version of the EATS Act we opposed last year. Like the EATS Act, this bill is designed to entrench the very systems of exploitation exposed above by stripping states of their power to ban or regulate animal agriculture.
This bill would not only erase hard-won animal protection laws but would further strengthen the corrupt alliance between animal agribusiness and public universities. We cannot allow it.