ANIMAL PEOPLE - July/August 1997 - Volume VI, #6

Court/Judicial Activity

From: Animal People July/August 1997

McDonald's wins McLibel case--but is "culpably" cruel to animals

McLibel LONDON––Justice Roger Bell technically found for McDonald’s on June 19, ending the second longest trial in British history, but the $98,000 defamation award against penniless defendants Dave Morris, 43, and Helen Steel, 31, cost the fast food firm $16 million to win, enabled Morris and Steel to distribute millions of copies of the 1990 London Greenpeace pamphlet What’s Wrong With McDonald’s? that started it all, and established that several of their many allegations against McDonald’s were true.
Notably, Bell ruled, McDonald’s is “culpably responsible” for “cruel practice” pertaining to factory-farmed chickens and pigs, including the slaughter of chickens by slashing their throats while conscious.
The so-called McLibel case could not have been won by McDonald’s under U.S. law, which recognizes statements of opinion as protected by the First Amendment––but because poultry isn’t covered by the 1959 Humane Slaughter Act and because routine agricultural practices are exempted from anti-cruelty laws in 30 of the 50 states, U.S. courts have never had the opportunity to rule on similar cruelty issues.
Despite near unanimous agreement by commentators that McDonald’s lost just by pressing the case, the British-based John Lewis department store chain on May 21 filed a parallel case against the National Anti-Hunt Campaign for distributing a leaflet that calls the firm “wildlife killers,” because it keeps a 3,000-acre birdshooting estate for the use of executives. {short description of image}
Illustration courtesy London GreenPeace
Two weeks later, feedlot owner Paul Engler of Amarillo, Texas, and a dozen Texas ranchers sued TV talk show host Oprah Winfrey for remarks she made about “mad cow disease” during an interview with Humane Society of the U.S. livestock expert Howard Lyman, a former beef rancher who now advocates vegetarianism. The case is seen as the first major test of the “food libel” laws passed by 14 states, largely in response to anti-meat campaigns.
The verdict in another British “food libel” case went against Colchester Oyster Fisheries on June 12, with a ruling that hygiene consultant Christoper Purslow was protected by qualified privilege in authoring a 1992 investigative report that confused two types of oyster and thus blamed the wrong kind for an outbreak of food poisoning.