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Can the cattle industry ever live down the Oprah Winfrey lawsuit? An Associated Press story recently noted that the Texas and Southwestern Cattle Raisers Association has set up a hotline for people in the beef industry to call if they hear people disparaging beef. As the organization’s spokesman Rob Hosford put it,
If we hear XYZ radio station carrying something about the beef industry, procedures and products that is derogatory, unfounded and untrue, with this task force we will send someone over there to re-educate, so the next time they talk they’ll be talking form the right side of the ballpark.
The hotline was apparently inspired by the ongoing controversy in Texas over a billboard People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals put up to promote its "Jesus was a vegetarian campaign." Bruce Friedrich, who coordinates that campaign, said the hotline was a sign of desperation. "Clearly, they are running scared," Friederich told the Associated Press. "All the propaganda in the world can’t sanitize their product."
The Associated Press report noted that the hotline was set up a year after the infamous Amarillo trial of Oprah Winfrey for allegedly defaming the beef industry after she proclaimed she would no longer eat beef because of the risk of Mad Cow Disease.
Although I rarely agree with Friedrich about anything, he is correct that many people might see the setting up of the hotline as the cattle industry running scared. The ill-advised (to be blunt it was idiotic) prosecution of Winfrey dealt a serious blow to the credibility of the beef industry. All it accomplished was giving the animal rights activists ammunition to use in their campaign against the industry. As Friedrich himself wrote in a recent essay, those who agree with the animal rights position are a very tiny minority. They will almost certainly remain so unless animal industries make them into sympathetic victims, which is precisely what the Winfrey trial did.