Everyone is talking about green-washing, it's time to talk about humane-washing

Go into a supermarket and you’ll see labels like these plastered all over the meat, dairy and egg products that we buy.

Company names like the Happy Egg Co. A company that advertises their products with images of chickens in lush green fields, even though an investigation in 2021 into three farms that supply them eggs revealed that the hens were packed in industrial sheds, their beaks had been cut off and there were dead birds rotting on the floor.

So just a little different to the imagery the company uses to sell their products.

In fact, even when we look at free-range as an industry-wide standard, free-range farmers can legally house 16,000 birds in a barn, which means they can house 9 birds per square metre of space, which gives each hen 11 square centimetres of space each inside the barns. Not exactly the image of being ‘free’ that you would expect.

The Happy Egg Co and the term free-range are both examples of humane washing. But wait, what is humane washing? Well to understand what humane washing is, let’s first look at greenwashing.

In recent years, some of the biggest food corporations in the world, such as Starbucks and McDonald’s, have ditched plastic straws in response to growing public concern about their impact on the environment. Great news, right?

Well, not exactly. This is an example of greenwashing, a term that describes a form of marketing and PR which aims to persuade the public that an organisation is environmentally friendly, even when their wider actions show the opposite.

In the case of the plastic straw, the strawless lid that Starbucks introduced to replace the straw actually contains more plastic than the original lid and straw combo did. And McDonald’s, well where do we even begin? Selling food that is linked to rainforest deforestation is probably a good place, not to mention the fact that they don’t recycle their new straws and the drinks still come in the same plastic-lined cups as their old plastic straws did.

The meat, dairy and egg industries also regularly greenwash their products as well. For example, Danish Crown, the largest meat producer in Europe, have created their own sustainability certification which the farmers who are suppliers for them have then signed up to, and as a result the pork products they sell now come with a sticker that says they are ‘climate controlled’.

But what has this got to do with humane washing?

Well, humane washing is basically the same thing but instead of trying to make you think that their products are sustainable, it’s a tactic the meat, dairy and egg industries use to try and convince you that their products are ethically produced and good for the animals they raise and kill.

Free-range, cage-free, high welfare, humanely raised, responsibly sourced, family farmed, local, traceable, and the list goes on. Yep, they’re all examples of humane washing.

And humane washing isn’t just about the labels and terms that you read on the packaging, it’s the imagery as well. Happy animals grazing in fields, chickens with lots of space, photos of smiling farmers next to their animals, or images of the animals themselves. For example, laughing cow cheese and St Helen’s goat milk, who also use the word ‘gentle’ on their packaging to describe the milk.

In the case of laughing cow cheese, a supplier for laughing cow was exposed hitting newborn calves, performing painful mutilations on them and leaving them out to die in freezing temperatures.

And with St Helen’s, a farm that supplies milk for them was exposed last year, with workers shown kicking and punching the goats, twisting their tails, hitting them with poles, holding them up by their necks, slamming them against objects, and much more. Not so very gentle.

Supermarkets have even branded their own-brand animal products with fake farm names, such as Tesco’s Woodside Farm and Lidl’s Birchwood Farm, which are used to conjure up a romanticised image in the mind of consumers about where their animal products come from and distract us from the reality, which is a far cry from the image these companies want us to picture.

Marks & Spencer even made up their own Scottish Loch, called Lochmuir, which, even though it doesn’t exist, is displayed on their packaging of salmon products to create the impression of wholesome Scottish salmon farming. But the truth is, there’s nothing wholesome or ethical about salmon farming, and investigations on Scottish salmon farms, including ones that supply Marks & Spencer just further prove this.

And of course, there’s the soundbites and lines of dialogue that every animal farmer repeats like a mantra:

“Animal welfare is the most important thing on our farm”

“I love my animals”

“I would never let anything bad happen to one of my animals”

“We have the highest animal welfare standards in the world”

The consistent repetition of these statements and others like them plays into something called the illusory truth effect, a phrase that refers to the notion that repeated statements are perceived to be more truthful than new statements. In effect, the more times we hear farmers humane wash what they do, the easier it becomes for us as consumers to fall into the trap of believing them.

Similar to greenwashing, the fundamental purpose of humane washing is to convince you to buy their product. It is a marketing ploy to drive sales. The Director of Technical Marketing of Mountaire, one of the largest chicken producers in the US, said as much at a 2020 industry webinar: “The one thing you want a label to do is to reduce consumer concerns with buying your product.”

Now using labels to sell products isn’t a problem if the product you are trying to sell is an ethical product and if the labels being used are honest. However, this is where the animal farming industries find themselves stuck between a rock and a hard place.

Simply put, their products are not ethical. By the virtue that animals are mutilated, forcibly impregnated, caged and confined, exploited and ultimately killed needlessly, the concept of animal farming being ethical is a juxtaposition by its very nature.

Animals are sentient beings, who can feel, suffer and have subjective experiences, which makes everything that we do to them automatically unethical, regardless of how we do it, or what label we use to describe that exploitation.

So these industries have to use terms and labels that purposefully hide the reality behind these products and humane wash the truth, because if we were shown the objective reality of what happens to animals if the images and labels were honest depictions of what animals are forced to endure, well we wouldn’t want to buy their flesh and secretions in the first place.

These industries and companies literally hire people whose job is to find ways to make us buy these products and attempt to distract us from the truth of what is going on.

Take this guy, Richard Berman, a Washington DC lobbyist and PR strategist. Richard Berman has been given the nickname Dr Evil by his critics. Why? Well, he’s attacked the charity Mother’s Against Drink Driving for trying to introduce drink driving regulations, he’s been given millions of dollars by the tobacco industry, and he’s been paid by some of the biggest players in the animal farming world, like Tyson.

It’s perhaps unsurprising then that he has turned his attention to plant-based meat in recent years.

Another term we hear used a lot is ‘responsibly sourced’. Take Tesco, for example, they claim on their website that, “Our approach to responsible sourcing, and our use of the terms “Responsibly Sourced” and “Sustainably Sourced” on our packaging, are governed by the Sustainable Seafood Coalition (SSC)”

That sounds great. What is the Sustainable Seafood Coalition?

Well, it’s an organisation founded by some of the biggest seafood companies in the world like Birds Eye and Young’s and is a partnership between many of the biggest retailers, seafood companies and supermarkets in the world. The only problem is, that doesn’t sound very objective, but what about their codes of conduct?

“The SSC Codes of Conduct are voluntary agreements on responsible sourcing and labelling, developed by SSC members,” according to the SSC website.

Voluntary codes of conduct are codes that are created by businesses and industries and are then self-enforced. As their codes of conduct state, “Ultimately, it is the responsibility of individual businesses to ensure alignment with the Codes”

So in essence, many of the biggest sellers of seafood in the world have created their own set of voluntary codes. They have then placed themselves in charge of making sure that they themselves are abiding by the codes that they created and now because of this they claim that the seafood they sell is ‘responsibly’ or ‘sustainably’ sourced.

But what about family farms, shouldn’t we just support them. Well, 98 per cent of farms in the US are classed as family farms, which even when just viewed alongside the fact that USDA data shows that 99 per cent of farmed animals are factory farmed in the US, makes you realise that perhaps the notion of a family-run farm has nothing to do with an animal’s actual wellbeing, but is instead a marketing ploy to make you think of a romanticised ideal of farming which quite frankly doesn’t exist.

The same is true of local farms as well. Every farm is local to someone. Plus how does geographical location determine the morality of what happens on a farm? Does a farm get more ethical the closer you get to it? Yet we’re always told to support our local family farmers.

All of this is just the tip of the iceberg.

It’s time for us to see through the labels, marketing ploys and phrases that these industries use to hide from us the horrific reality of what is happening to animals. These industries are reliant on humane washing, which is why they relentlessly do it. But once we recognise the big lie that they perpetuate, they’ll soon be forced to realise that the blood they have on their hands is a lot harder to wash off.