Once again, PeTA is counter-productive. Let’s support the Impossible Burger!
A PeTA article is doing the rounds, undermining the Impossible Foods burger as it had to be tested on 180 rats.
When you have a serious rat problem at home, with large colonies having moved in under your house and in your attic, what do you do? This can easily happen in many parts of the world, including here in Melbourne for example. The rats damage your house and make a lot of noise at night.
At this stage, the only accessible way to get rid of the rats is poison, which kills them. It’s awful and sad and it happens every day at a school, a medical centre, a house or a park near you.
My point is that we do live in a world where animals are not yet adequately taken into consideration. In the United States alone, approximately 9 billion chickens are killed for their flesh each year.
180 rats were used in an experiment. I think that one can choose to focus on these 180 rats in the context of a speciesist world where their death would not even register or one can focus on the consequences of producing more animal friendly food for everyone, targeting meat eaters.
Now, I do find these tests unethical and superfluous but the system is such that they had to be done for the product to reach the masses. So let’s do something about it and confront the anti-GMO organisations such as Friends of the Earth who lobby for these unnecessary tests because of their unscientific fear mongering propaganda. Read more about this in Setting the Record Straight: Don’t believe anti-science fundamentalists or their preposterous propaganda by Rachel Konrad, Chief Communications Officer, Impossible Foods. This is crucial in order to stop this situation from happening again and again.
An organisation called Vegan GMO has been saying this for years: “Animal Testing: Insisting on unfounded safety testing leads to more animals being harmed in order to perform this testing. For example, the Seralini rat study, which was widely criticized for failing to meet animal-welfare standards and has since been retracted for poor methodology, allowed rats to die of their tumors rather than by euthanasia, well past the point at which their quality of life took a nosedive. This study is an extreme case, but when the safety of GMOs is not in question by the scientific community, animals suffer needlessly when anti-GMO activists push for safety testing solely on ideological grounds.” from why are we pro-gmo?
Whether you are reticent when it comes to scientific progress or a science enthusiast (and anything in between and beyond!), the fact remains that if you’re genuinely upset about these 180 rats (and I think it’s fair), then undermining the Impossible Burger is not going to help one iota.
Now, if you are still thinking of those billions of chickens killed in the United States alone each year and want to do something about it, please visit and support One Step For Animals.
Also on the topic:
31 July 2018 Update 1: Link to a PDF document from Impossible Foods correcting PeTA’s many errors
31 July 2018 Update 2: Impossible Foods’ response
