Letter to the editor, April 30, 2008

Letter on giving up meat a familar sight

It seems like a new group of opportunistic propagandists finds a way to hitch its wagon to Earth Day each year, and this time around it was the animal-rights nuts pushing the envelope. Not only were the claims in Bart Challen’s recent anti-meat letter wrong-headed, but it wasn’t even his own letter to begin with (“It’s not just about changing light bulbs,” April 16).

While the United Nations claims that global livestock production may account for 18 percent of greenhouse gas emissions, data from the Environmental Protection Agency show that here at home, domestic meat production only contributes 2.4 percent. Since American farmers are far more eco-friendly than their counterparts overseas, eating home-grown meat is a great way to be “green.”

More disturbing, however, is that Mr. Challen’s letter — the same exact word-for-word message — also ran appeared in more than 50 other newspapers this month. In each case, a different “author” signed it. This isn’t a coincidence. It’s a program of the deceptive Farm Animal Rights Movement (FARM), a Maryland-based radical group which misleads countless Americans by hijacking hundreds of newspaper opinion pages every year.

There’s absolutely nothing environmentally unfriendly about eating a balanced diet, including meat and dairy foods. And anyone who wants to claim otherwise should articulate his own opinion instead of letting an agenda-driven form letter do the talking.

David Martosko
Research Director, Center for Consumer Freedom
Washington, D.C.

Editor’s Note: Our expectation when we receive letters to the editor is that the person who signed the letter is the person who wrote it. If we receive or discover evidence to the contrary, we do not run the letter. We independently investigated Mr. Martosko’s claim and did discover Bart Challen’s letter published elsewhere under a different name. As such, we will run no further letters from Bart Challen.