Animal Activists Can’t Handle The Truth About Veal

Consumer Freedom
April 11, 2008

If you subscribe to Newsweek and you enjoy reading creative fiction, check out page 71 in this week’s issue (dated April 14th). It’s a full-page ad from the Humane Farming Association. This group really doesn’t like veal, and it’s not above lying to make a point (and raise money). Yesterday our Director of Research FedExed a letter to Newsweek’s top brass, demanding to know how such a clearly false and misleading advocacy ad made it past the due diligence of the magazine’s lawyers. We documented a half-dozen glaring falsehoods—and that was just the “low hanging fruit.”

I would be keenly interested in learning whether Newsweek ever asked the Humane Farming Association to substantiate [its] claims—and if so, what sort of evidence the group provided that could have satisfied the attorneys performing due diligence prior to publication. The only explanation I can imagine is that perhaps someone on your central advertising staff is so blindly sympathetic to the cause of animal “rights” that he or she was willfully blind to an obviously false and deceptive ad.

In the many years I have been studying the animal protection movement, I have never encountered a more baseless, dishonest, and disingenuous advertisement than the one you published this week. Newsweek owes a sincere apology (or at least a proper explanation) to veal farmers, to members of the public who choose to eat veal, and to its readers in general.

Click here to read the rest of our letter to Newsweek with all the details.

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