Caleb Hart | Activist Post

In “A Critical Mass for Real Food,” Anim Steel began with “The old logic of the slave plantation is still the logic of our industrial food system, 500 years in the making.”

The idea that a slave mentality is still woven into production of food showed up as well in an article referencing the KKK.

It describes the similarity between grossly discriminatory laws that were used to remove black voting rights (poll taxes and literacy tests) and the current discriminatory laws that are crushing small food producers (exorbitant certification costs, and irrelevant yet intentionally impossible to achieve food safety standards), and calling the food movement the most significant civil rights (and human rights) movement in history.

Using this template of slavery allows the public to recognize the extreme and corrupt measures being taken to remove livestock producers markets, leaving them no means to sell their products other than through the big corporate meat packers, and then at a pittance, reducing independent (free) producers to contract farmers, or tenant famers, on their own land.

The current system is without question working to break the back of free farming and ranching. But full-blown slavery* already exists for industrial food animals. Recognizing that reality can help explain a great deal else.

They are trapped in concrete and metal prisons known as CAFOs (Confined Animal Feeding Operations), where they are denied both normal movement and their natural diet and are fed GMOs that are linked to organ failure, diseases, and sterility.

The point here, is not to focus on those abuses which many groups are addressing now. The point is to see as fully as possible the ways in which the industrial food system is still functioning as it did during slavery, so people will recognize it and it can stop.

During slavery, harboring a slave was a felony. Today, the slaves are animals.

A digression. Today the industrial food system is connected to the biotech industry which is involved in genetically engineering animals and patenting them. That is a new and extreme form of ownership of animals. For even if a farmer were to buy such an animal, they would never actually own it or its offspring, just as those buying genetically engineered seeds do not own the seeds, and are not allowed to produce their own seeds from the crops. Patented genetically engineered animals or seeds are meant to be an infinite form of ownership. It creates a plantation system wherever the seeds or animals would be sold, because the farmer would simply be working for the owners of the patents.

Knowing two facts – that harboring slaves was a felony and that today’s animals are the slaves – allows the public to look with fresh eyes at what is happening to animals here and around the world.

In Michigan, small farmers’ hogs have been declared “wild” or feral, and any and all farmers “harboring” them are now deemed by law to be committing a felony. The hogs in question are not feral but are being raised as part of the farmers’ small livelihood. Their crime is that those hogs have “escaped” living in CAFOs. They are off the plantation. They do not eat industrial feed and are cheap to raise. The farmers raising them are growing in numbers because an increasing number of people are seeking just such clean and locally raised meat.

The big pork producers in Michigan got laws put on the books to declare the small farmers’ pigs a danger, acting just the big slave owners did, who had the political power to declare any black person outside of slavery a danger and anyone protecting them a criminal.

Today the slaves are animals and they need only be declared a threat, however fictional, to have them destroyed. With them all destroyed, there would remain, of course, only the slave animals owned by the agribusiness. The free hogs are the biologic diversity that the biotech industry wants eliminated just as it has to eliminate the great diversity in seed stocks, as it came forward with its own GE-seeds.

It doesn’t matter what fear is used to accomplished this. If one listens carefully, one can hear, applied to animals, a repetition of old slavery methods used to demonize blacks in order to control or kill them – savage, wild, a threat to the genetic stock of white people, filthy, etc.

The Department of Natural Resources in Michigan declared small farmers’ pigs an invasive species.

I got ahold of the director of Wildlife Management for the state, and he’s actually gone to DNR in Michigan to consult on feral pigs. Feral pigs are an issue for the environment, unquestionably. I just don’t understand how they link that to small farmers and pastured animals. It’s the fear that they will escape. Or mingle with other wildlife and pick up disease.

So I asked, do you think pigs should be on pasture at all? And he replied ‘Hey, the state of Texas won’t let me keep tigers. I might be a very conscientious tiger farmer, but the threat to the public is too great, so I don’t get to farm tigers.’

Wow. So pigs (no specified breed, just any farm pig) on pasture are akin to tigers. [Emphasis added. Pigs on pasture are not inside a CAFO, they are not slaves.] …. http://vbs20.com/bakers/

The law is to stop pigs being outside or on pasture, a form of freedom. These pigs are living behind fences and are livestock – they are not feral. But in being outside or on pasture, they are owned by small farmers and thus are “free” of the slave system of industrial agriculture.

The Government of the state of Michigan has taken action against hog farmers through the unlawful use of the Michigan Department of Natural Resources. By means of implementing an unconstitutional ISO (Invasive Species Order); all breeds of swine that are raised outside or on pasture are subject to be depopulated as of April 1st, 2012.

Mark Baker, a twenty year Air Force veteran, Roger Turunen, Greg Johnson, and Matt Tingsted are the only remaining hog farmers in Michigan outside of the corporate pork industry who have revolted against this order. Roughly 2,000 farms have been affected and many farmers have been threatened with felony arrest and large fines to massacre their herds of heritage swine. http://vbs20.com/bakers/

The means to slaughter these animals are many, beyond calling them invasive and equating them to tigers. Invented diseases have become a major one because across all justifications for slaughter, fear is the common denominator.

If an agency says animals are suspected of having a disease (they do not have to be proven as such) and wants them destroyed, those “harboring” the animals to save them – and their biologic diversity – are declared felons. In a recent case in Canada, a rare breed of Shropshire sheep was slaughtered and farmers accused of felonies, provides a good example. As with plantation owners’ efforts to catch escaped slaves, fear is used to influence public.

The 31 sheep were thought [by authorities] to possibly harbor scrapie, a fatal degenerative disease that can spread among sheep and goats. When 28 sheep were found by Canadian authorities in late June and slaughtered and tested, they were negative for scrapie.[Emphasis added.]

And just such a false attack and slaughtering of healthy sheep has happened before. From the Organic Consumers Association: MAD SHEEP (source).

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