From:
To: Mary Gourley
Subject: "right to rescue" resolution
Date: Monday, May 01, 2023 7:52:21 PM
Dear Sir/Madam:
Please support the "right to rescue" resolution at tomorrow's council meeting and the defendants who risked their freedom to raise awareness about the systematic mistreatment and abuse of birds on a corporate factory farm. Intentional cruelty to animals is a crime in most jurisdictions. Private citizens can be arrested and charged for doing things like intentionally leaving a dog or cat in a hot car or depriving them of water or enough room to comfortably move about or failing to provide veterinary care for obviously sick pets. The strong arm of the law regularly comes down on people who do any of these things to single pet animals. But when minions of large corporations do the same sort of things, this time not to a single but to thousands to hundreds-of-thousands of animals under their care on factory farms, nothing ever happens.
When a citizen breaks a window on a locked car to rescue an animal dying of heat stroke or seeks to provide life-saving medical attention to a dying animal on someone else's property they are usually hailed as a hero. But when someone does essentially the same thing for a dying chicken or pig from a factory farm they are threatened with a fine and/or jail time. The hypocrisy and moral dissonance on display in such circumstances ought to be self-apparent to anyone with a conscience. As a veterinarian who has been on many factory farms I know firsthand the misery experienced by many of the animals confined in such facilities and wish that individual acts of cruelty on factory farms were investigated by law enforcement with the same vigor apparently reserved for city streets and residential areas. Because that is not the case it should surprise no one that brave individuals sometimes feel motivated to intervene where law enforcement has abdicated its responsibility and is not doing its job.
Please do the morally right thing here and pass this resolution.
Sincerely,
George Bates, DVM