"Humane" means kind, and almost everyone believes nonhuman animals should be treated humanely. Putting nonhuman animals to human use is inhumane no matter how the animals are treated - it didn't start out of kindness to the animals who are used. The meat, milk & egg industries, in addition to being extremely inhumane to animals they use, are a major cause of wildlife destruction, human disease, global warming, rainforest destruction, pollution, and other dire problems. Universities should ensure that everyone knows using animals is wrong and threatens everyone's wellbeing. Instead, almost all 106 of our land-grant universities (LGUs) teach thousands of students each year "animal science" - how to breed, fatten, and kill animals used for food. Responsible Policies for Animals (RPA) has sent our LGUs in all 50 states more than 300 letters, 200 factsheets, and 50 books in the 10,000 Years Is Enough campaign to end "animal science." The first edition of this factsheet accompanied RPA's first letter to our LGUs in all 50 states. The meat, milk & egg industries should do their own training and research without taxpayer or tuition-payer dollars.
You can help get our LGUs out of the meat, milk & egg industries.

        

Human beings began farming land and enslaving nonhuman animals more than 10,000 years ago, when technology was primitive, "humane" was not yet a concept, and only about 5 million people existed. Today, while professing humane values, Earth's 7 billion people kill about 50 billion chickens, pigs, turkeys, cattle and others for food, 10 billion in the U.S., not including fish and bees. With 1,400 times more people than when agriculture began, and with ever more harmful methods, animal use is extremely inhumane and extremely destructive. Behind the animals' ever worsening plight is "animal science" - teaching students at all but a few of our 106 land-grant universities (LGUs) to take part in extremely inhumane and destructive animal use.

No university should teach any form of animal use, as we know from current ethics and science. See* Speciesism by Joan Dunayer; Introduction to Animal Rights by Gary Francione; The Pig Who Sang to the Moon: The Emotional World of Farm Animals by Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson; The Emotional Lives of Animals by Marc Bekoff. Ignoring the very thing universities are supposed to acquire and teach - knowledge - our LGUs teach thousands of "animal science" students each year the most inhumane and destructive use of animals: breeding, fattening & killing them for food. Millions of other LGU students, instructors & alumni take the existence of campus animal breeding, fattening & killing facilities to mean it is right to use animals. And because people presume universities wouldn't teach what is wrong, the existence of our LGUs' "animal science" programs untruthfully signal to people worldwide that using animals is right.

Using animals is an original source of disease in human beings and is today a major cause of soaring disease & insurance rates, global warming, wildlife & rainforest destruction, pollution, and other problems we all face. See A Green History of the World: The Environment and the Collapse of Great Civilizations by Clive Ponting; The China Study: The Most Comprehensive Study of Nutrition Ever Conducted by T. Colin Campbell with Thomas M. Campbell II; Livestock's Long Shadow by the United Nations Food & Agriculture Organization; "A New Global Warming Strategy" by Noam Mohr; The Food Revolution: How Your Diet Can Help Save Your Life and Our World by John Robbins; "Now, It's Not Personal! But Like It or Not, Meat-Eating Becoming a Problem for Everyone on the Planet" Editors World-Watch, July/August 2004; Plan B 2.0: Rescuing a Planet Under Stress and a Civilization in Trouble by Lester R. Brown.

In 1996, the National Academy of Sciences National Research Council Agriculture Committee wrote in Colleges of Agriculture at the Land Grant Universities: Public Service and Public Policy, "If the world's expanding population is to be fed and clothed at a reasonable cost and without further degradation of the natural resource base or environmental quality, then … more sustainable ways to produce food … must continually be sought." The whole truth would have helped, but almost every member of the Committee represented the meat, milk, egg, or feed-crop industry, and most taught at an LGU, held an LGU agribusiness degree, or had other LGU connections. No nutritionist, public-health expert, animal advocate, or environmentalist was included. The Committee betrayed the public by failing to expose the "animal science" problem.

Congress established our LGUs to help farmers by teaching agriculture - cultivation of fields - when more than half of Americans made their living farming, in 1862. But our LGUs shifted more & more from health-promoting agriculture to chemical-, drug-, oil-, and animal-intensive agribusiness, promoting crops for animals on death row over food for people. Consolidation under corporate agribusiness drove millions of farmers from their land, many committing suicide. Now less than 1 percent of Americans make their living farming; 70 percent of farmland is used for feed crops; feed-crop production contaminates & wastes water & topsoil, killing fish with chemical runoff; many fruits & vegetables people eat provide less nutrition than in the past; and more & more extremely inhumane animal facilities, large & small, operate throughout the world even as more people become vegetarian. See The Unsettling of America by Wendell Berry; Broken Heartland: The Rise of America's Rural Ghetto by Osha Gray Davidson; Meat Market by Erik Marcus; The Meat You Eat: How Corporate Farming Has Endangered America's Food Supply by Ken Midkiff; "Crop Yields Expand, Nutrients Decline," Alana Herro, World-Watch, January/February 2008; "Factory Farming in the Developing World," Danielle Nierenberg, World-Watch, May/June 2003.

Corrupting higher education to serve private meat, milk & egg industry interests is part of a much larger university conflict-of-interest problem. See Campus, Inc. edited by Geoffry D. White; Leasing the Ivory Tower by Lawrence C. Soley; University, Inc. by Jennifer Washburn; Science in the Private Interest by Sheldon Krimsky. University profiteering does not prepare students for constructive citizenship and sound professional lives - it destroys a key university function: "free discussion of social and political issues," as Howard Zinn, author of A People's History of the United States, puts it. "Animal science" isn't even the science of Earth's million-plus animal species: That's zoology. "Animal science" must go - so our LGUs can truly educate and help farmers provide the non-toxic ("organic") plant foods all people need while conserving fresh water & topsoil. Keeping "animal science" would spell unending eco-destruction and ever increasing misery for people & other animals.

"Animal science" has no basis in human nature. Human beings evolved as herbivores: we naturally live on plants, not animals - see "The Comparative Anatomy of Eating" by Milton R. Mills, M.D. "Aboriginal" gatherer-scavenger-hunter societies, often inaccurately called "hunter-gatherer," came much later and still mostly ate plants. See Seed to Civilization: The Story of Food by Charles B. Heiser, Jr. and An Unnatural Order: Uncovering the Roots of Our Domination of Nature and Each Other by Jim Mason. Originally, human beings and hominids were prey to carnivores, like other primates. The "man the hunter" myth, used to rationalize meat-eating, war, and other violence, does not hold up. See Man the Hunted: Primates, Predators, and Human Evolution by Donna Hart & Robert W. Sussman and A View to a Death in the Morning: Hunting and Nature Through History by Matt Cartmill.

Help Responsible Policies for Animals (RPA) get our LGUs out of the meat business. For a list of LGU presidents in all 50 states, contact RPA or see Campaigns at www.RPAforAll.org. RPA also contacts LGU trustees, officials, reporters, NGOs, and others. Twenty-two LGUs have replied to RPA so far, some of them multiple times. But these are big, popular, prestigious, well-funded schools. They need to know you don't want our LGUs to teach inhumane treatment of animals and promote disease & eco-destruction. Your officials need to know you care, too - or they'll keep pushing meat through LGUs, farm bills, school lunches, and more. Let them know you care - be a part of the solution to the "animal science" problem. RPA is glad to help you understand it, tell about it, and solve it.

Support RPA. Visit www.RPAforAll.org and www.ExpertsOfConscience.org. See RPA's brochure Vegetarianism: Why Plants-Only Eating Is Necessary and How Political Vegetarians Can Make It Happen. Host an RPA presentation.

Because human beings have legal rights enabling them to use, own, and harm other animals, humane treatment of animals can only become public policy rather than personal choice when all animals have basic legal rights of autonomy, integrity of their natural homes, and more. See Animal Rights at www.RPAforAll.org.

RPA is a 501(c)(3) educational nonprofit organization - donations tax-deductible as allowed by law. Contact RPA using the information at the top of this factsheet or at 215-886-RPA1.

* Sources named in this factsheet are just a few of the many available on each point. Mention of a work does not indicate the author supports Responsible Policies for Animals or its goals, though some do.

Revised February 2008

Donations to Responsible Policies for Animals, Inc., are tax-deductible as allowed by law.

Responsible Policies for Animals, Inc., P.O. Box 891, Glenside, PA 19038