Corporate Crimes Against Animals
pattrice jones
Eastern Shore Sanctuary & Education Center
http://www.bravebirds.org

(c) & @ 2004 pattrice jones. Permission to print or distribute for non-profit purposes is granted. Changes must be approved by author unless author's name is removed and the changed text is placed in the public domain, with no other author or publisher claiming the right to control access to it.

Every animal advocate ought to be concerned about corporate crime and efforts to fight it. After all, however many unique atrocities are committed by depraved individuals motivated by personal psychopathy, the fact remains that the vast majority of everyday animal abuse is perpetrated by corporations motivated by an amoral drive for profit. Factory farming, vivisection, and genetic engineering of animals are all practiced primarily to serve the aims of corporate profiteers. Furthermore, the rapidly growing worldwide movement against corporate crime comprises energetic activists who have already made changes in their consumption habits for ethical reasons and might be convinced to go further and go vegan.

Russell Mokhiber of Multinational Monitor has just released a reckoning of the "Top 100 Corporate Criminals" of the 1990s. Using a strict definition of "criminal," Mokhiber has ranked corporations that pled "guilty" or "no contest" to crimes according to the fines they were forced to pay. Of course, this leaves out the corporations that were able to get away with their crimes as well as those with enough political power to ensure that their destructive activities are not considered crimes. But it does offer a useful overview of the corporations that everyone must agree have violated the law significantly.

Animal advocates may be interested to note that the category of environmental crimes tops the list, with 38 of the 100 corporate criminals fined for actions that significantly harmed ecosystems. Environmental crimes virtually always have animal victims, whether or not the animals who are killed or hurt capture the attention of the public. From birds coated with oil from dramatic spills to frogs with extra limbs due to less visible forms of pollution, animals always pay the price for environmental corporate crimes.

Speaking of oil spills, it's also interesting to note how many of the corporate criminals making the top 100 are oil companies. From big names like Exxon (a recidivist coming in at both #5 and #96), Chevron (#41), and Marathon (#85) to relative unknowns like Colonial Pipeline Company (tied for #39), Eklof Marine Corporation (tied for #39), and Doyon Drilling (#82), companies involved in the oil industry appear to feel free to pollute the environment with impunity. That's not surprising, since extractive industries are based on an inherently exploitative attitude toward the environment. That's the same attitude that excuses the exploitation of animals.

The oil industry hurts the animals in three ways: (a) by polluting the ecosystems on which they depend; (b) by fostering the cultural attitudes that underlie their oppression; and (c) by contributing to the climate change that has already disrupted the habitats of many animals and that threatens to disrupt the lives of countless communities of animals if human patterns of fossil fuel consumption continue. What can people who care about animals do? In this instance, being vegan means more than not consuming animals themselves. While a vegan diet does require considerably fewer petroleum resources than a meat-based diet, many vegans still do use far too much fossil fuel. So, just as we ask environmentalists to extend their environmentalism by going vegan, we must extend our veganism by being more careful to reduce, reuse, and recycle in relation to petroleum products (which include plastics as well as gasoline). We must also find ways to support the work of those who challenge the oil companies because, whether or not they are personally vegan, whatever they can do to make life difficult for the petroleum industry will surely make life easier for the animals.

Turning back to the "Top 100 Corporate Criminals" of the 1990s, we see that another group of animal abusers -- pharmaceutical companies -- also dominate the list. All pharmaceutical companies engage in animal testing and most are vociferous advocates of vivisection. It's true that the government mandates that new drugs be tested on non-human animals. But powerful pharmaceutical firms are hardly impotent in the face of government regulations. To the contrary, these companies influence government policy to an extraordinary degree. Furthermore, most engage in non-mandated vivisection. From tests of non-drug products like cosmetics to experiments in genetic engineering, pharmaceutical companies torture animals for profit in a variety of ways. Typically, these companies have little more respect for human animals, profiteering at the expense of sick people and patenting the traditional knowledge of indigenous peoples.

The industry's disrespect for people, animals, and the environment is evident from the number of pharmaceutical companies making the top 100. The top corporate criminals include F. Hoffman-La Roche Ltd. (#1, for price fixing); Haarman & Reimer [a subsidiary of the corporate giant Bayer] (#10, for price fixing); Genetech, Inc. (#15, for marketing a synthetic human growth hormone for uses for which it had not been approved); Pfizer (#17, for price fixing); Copley Pharmaceutical, Inc. (#27, for defrauding the Food and Drug Administration); Warner-Lambert (#30, for withholding negative information about certain of its drugs); Ortho Pharmaceutical Corporation (#44 for obstruction of justice); Bristol-Myers Squibb (#62, for dumping chemical pollutants into New York waters); and Warner-Lambert (#62, for filing false reports concerning the discharge of pollutants into Puerto Rican waters and for 337 instances of excessive discharge of pollutants into those waters).

As with oil companies, pharmaceutical companies routinely hurt animals in a multiplicity of ways. Again, it behooves animal advocates to make alliances with the people who are working against these behemoths. Two issues jump out as potential points of consensus: genetic engineering and patents on life. Working together on those emerging and emergent problems might help us to achieve a mutual understanding of the underlying ideologies that lead to abuses of both people and animals. It's no accident that the same companies that withhold medicine from people in impoverished countries feel comfortable withholding food from animals in vivisection laboratories.

Nor is it an accident that so many agribusiness corporations, including meat and dairy operations, have landed on Mokhiber's list. Borden, Inc. and Southland Corporation are tied at #52, with twin $4 million fines for conspiring to rig bids to supply milk to United States military installations and to the federally subsidized school breakfast and lunch programs. Even without bid rigging, the school milk programs hurt students and bilk communities so that corporations can squeeze money out of the sore and often infected mammary glands of confined cows. Price fixing adds insult to injury by increasing the cost to the public.

Also tied for 52nd place with a fine of $4 million is a corporation that has already gotten into trouble again. Tyson Foods, which faces continuing legal difficulties concerning the use and abuse of undocumented workers, got in trouble during the 1990s for giving "gratuities" (i.e., bribes) to Secretary of Agriculture Mike Espy while matters concerning issues such as the labeling of raw poultry were being decided by the USDA.

Coming in at a very respectable #7 is agribusiness giant Archer Daniels Midland (ADM), which supplies seed, feed, and additives to the factory farms and family farms on which exploited animals are confined. At the time, ADM's $100 million criminal fine for price fixing was the largest ever in a criminal antitrust case. ADM is one of the companies that manipulate markets in order to keep meat cheap while at the same time ensuring that the profits (from both consumer sales and farm aid) continue to flow to the agribusiness giants. Citizens pay two ways: as taxpayers and as the unwitting consumers of unhealthy food. The animals pay the biggest price of all, enjoying neither liberty nor happiness before the early termination of their lives.

Other agribusiness corporate criminals include Nippon Gohsei (#16, for price fixing and conspiracy to suppress competition); Pfizer (#17, for fixing prices of food additives); and ConAgra (#50, for adulteration, misgrading, and misweighing of grain). Like ADM, ConAgra is a 'middleman' corporation that derives its profits through tactics that disadvantage both farmers and ultimate consumers. Like ADM, ConAgra is an invisible element of the meat, dairy, and egg industries, participating in their abuses of animals through its role as a supplier of feed and other inputs.

Agribusiness is another arena of struggle in which animal advocates can and must work with other activists in order to achieve shared aims. The world food supply is almost wholly controlled by corporations based in affluent nations. These corporations control what is available to eat and, thanks to the combination of persuasive advertising and influence on government guidelines, what people choose to eat. Factory farms, along with the acres of genetically identical corn and soy grown to feed the animals in them, long ago took over the agricultural landscape of the United States. Now, both the factory farms themselves and the unhealthy dietary choices that sustain them are moving forcefully into impoverished regions, creating hunger and ill-health among humans at the same time as they expand and exacerbate animal misery.

From the Indonesian Farmer Association, which actively resists "package technologies" imposed by corporate agribusiness under the guise of "development," to the Ecuadorian dock workers who blockaded the port at Guayaquil against ships carrying genetically modified seed, people and organizations all over the world are coming together to pool their power against the immense strength of corporate agribusiness. Because we cannot hope to match the power of corporate agribusiness alone, because anti-agribusiness activists are often principled people who are open to new information and ideas; and because we need to ensure that the animals are not left out of the anti-globalization movement's vision of "another world," animal advocates must become a more vital and visible bloc within the worldwide movement for peace and justice. Vegans and animal liberationists who are already active antiwar or anti-globalization activists must 'come out' and explain the connections to their comrades. Vegetarian and animal liberation organizations must make respectful contact with their peer organizations in other movements and explore the possibility of working together on joint projects. All of us must challenge ourselves to be at least as willing to change our own behavior in relation to issues like poverty or sexism as we expect others to be in relation to animals.

Nobody likes corporate criminals. Working together to expose and punish corporate crime can be a jumping off point for even more substantial joint activism between animal, environmental, and social justice activists. Together we can reconstruct a world of peace and plenty -- for everyone, including the animals.


For further reference...
If you don't know why genetic engineering is bad for animals, read "The Gene and the Stable Door," published by Compassion in World Farming (available at <http://www.ciwf.co.uk/Pubs/Reports/Genetic_report_0102.pdf> or via <http://www.ciwf.co.uk/Pubs/CIWF_reports.htm>).

If you don't know why milk is bad for people as well as animals, read "White Poison" by Shanti Rangwani (published in the Winter 2001/2002 issue Colorlines magazine and available online at <http://www.arc.org/C_Lines/CLArchive/story4_4_02.html>) or visit <http://www.milksucks.com>.

To learn more about corporate crime and ongoing efforts to fight it, visit <http://www.corporatewatch.org> for a lesson in malfeasance. Russell Mokhiber's top 100 list is available at <http://www.corporatepredators.org/top100.html>.

For more information about the international expansion of factory farming and meat consumption, see my paper entitled "Globalisation of Industrial Animal Agriculture: Implications for South Asia," available online at <http://www.globalhunger.net/talk1102.html> or <http://www.globalhunger.net/talk1102.pdf>.

For more information about the relations among speciesism and other injustices, visit the "connections" pages of the Eastern Shore Sanctuary & Education Center website at <http:///www.bravebirds.org>.