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St. Cloud State University
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Animal Day educates
By Cathy Kropp
Published:
Thursday, October 3, 2002
Media Credit: charles martin
There was a bigger turn out then expected at the discussion “Dangers of Farm Factories.” Speaker Freeman Wickland made a point to be very informative and stress the “Need for us as human to appreciate animal as equals and not inferior.”
More than 95 percent of the animal products we consume in the United States come from factory farms where the animals are overcrowded, mistreated and held in unsanitary conditions, according to Ayako Mochizuki, a student in professor Julie Andrzejewski's Animal Rights course.
Such statistics make it apparent why Mochizuki, along with many of her classmates and the campus group People United for Peace, decided to organize a World Farm Animals Day event to educate the people of SCSU.
World Farm Animals Day was created to raise public awareness of how today's agricultural practices affect the environment and human health and lead to the abuse of animals.
Yesterday at 9 a.m. the campus crowd found organizers and volunteers staffing both an informational tent on the Atwood Mall and a booth inside the Atwood Memorial Center.
Materials on topics ranging from factory farms to vegetarian and vegan diets to information on The Good Earth Food Co-op covered the tables. Inside, the video "Meet Your Meat" played constantly. Mochizuki hopes the video will "help people visualize the suffering of animals on factory farms."
Melanie Lahr, one of the many volunteers that helped run the booth in Atwood, said that the general response of the public had been overwhelmingly open and receptive.
"I have had a few people stop by who didn't necessarily agree with our message, but they were willing to discuss the material we provided them with," she said.
Along with the booths, there was a presentation at 3 p.m. in Atwood's Mississippi Room featuring speaker Freeman Wicklund, president of the Twin Cities-based Eco-Animal Allies who gives over 300 presentations every year.
Wicklund helped keep his audience's attention by encouraging audience participation through comments, questions and requests for volunteers to help act out situations such as one that portrayed the life of a broiler hen.
The re-enactment involved two volunteers who took off their shoes and stood on wire bottomed crates while squatting down to recreate the space and conditions an egg-laying hen is subject to. After standing there for only a few moments Wicklund asked them how they would feel if they had to remain there for a year or longer.
"I would want to die," said one female participant.
Wicklund said he hopes his presentations will aid in the progression of the animal rights movement by bringing a reality to the issue.
"People don't change overnight," he said. "But I believe that education makes change possible."
Mochizuki saw the event as a success.
"We had a good number of people stopping by and engaging in good discussions with us," she said. "We also gathered a lot of signatures on the petitions we had set out."
The petitions included one that demanded that the meat industry improve its treatment of animals and another one that promised support for the boycotting of Crystal Farms products until the company agrees to improve the standards of living for all its egg-producing hens.
Mochizuki said she hopes that the event helped people better understand animal rights issues and learn what their options are.
"Animal rights is as important as other social justice issues since they are all interconnected and under the same system of oppression," she said. "We want people to recognize that non-human animals are suffering because of humans and their ignorance."
