Obama administration regulators from the Food and Safety Inspection Service (FSIS) have proposed allowing meat and chicken products to be marketed as “humanely raised” even if the animals in question were raised using industry standard procedures, such as unanesthetized castration, debeaking, and prolonged confinement.
The administration will allow meat producers to leverage the new rules to use terms like “Raised With Care” or “Humanely Raised on Sustainable Family Farms” simply by making up their own definitions for the terms. Regulators would perform no inspections to verify any of their animal-welfare claims. The claims by companies of “humanely raised” would be arbitrary.
According to the FSIS, meat producers would still be able to use the label even if their “animal raising practices [were] representative of industry-wide practices.”
Claims about Animal Welfare and Environmental Stewardship [Read more…]