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ESSENTIAL DESTINATIONS
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NOVEMBER 2005
Mainstream no longer accepts meat at humane events
“With friends like these…” was the first thing that came to mind after reading the Carbon County Friends of Animals raffle ticket I’d just bought,” wrote Michael J. Frendak of Lansford, Pennsylvania, in the August 2005 edition of Reader’s Digest.
“I could win one of the following, it said: a 10-pound box of chicken legs, one smoked ham, four T-bone steaks, five pounds of fresh sausage or hot dogs, or a box of pork chops.”
Such laments are often voiced in ANIMAL PEOPLE and other pro-animal and pro-vegetarian media, but Reader’s Digest is more deliberately representative of mainstream Middle American values than the U.S. Congress.
Founded in January 1922 as a source of sermon material for ministers, Reader’s Digest describes itself in its Popular Culture Guide as “traditionally never sensationalistic and rarely controversial, with a tendency toward inspirational self-help stories. The magazine has been criticized,” it admits, “for espousing a generally right-wing, conservative point of view and for evoking nostalgia for a simpler, less diversified America.”
When even Reader’s Digest hints that humane societies should avoid either promoting or participating in meat consumption, in an anecdote submitted from coal mine country by a reader of no animal advocacy background discernible through online searching, any humane society that still raffles meat or serves meat at official events needs to take note.
Even much of the meat-eating public now views the involvement of a humane society in meat consumption by human beings much as it views fornication by the clergy.
People may politely ignore indiscretions by others of ordinary moral stature, but guardians of public morality, including humane workers, are expected to exemplify a higher standard.