Yesterday on Inside Agriculture, Don Butler of Murphy Brown LLC explained that the company is a long-time proponent of responsible and sustainability practices. Murphy-Brown and Smithfield Foods are also very serious about food safety, as Butler explains:
“Well, food safety should be a concern for all of us. Everyone wants their food to be safe. And in our business, the pork industry, safe food begins with healthy animals. So, taking care of our animals, insuring that they’re safe, comfortable and healthy, that we have veterinarians and trained people that look after their health on a daily basis, that our animal handling practices are done in a way that does not stress the animals and cause injury to them, all the way up through the processing plant and the food chain to your dinner table. Food safety is a very important matter to us.”
In the past couple of years, it would seem that organizations like PETA and HSUS are focused on making the lives of livestock producers miserable.
Butler says that at Murphy-Brown and Smithfield, animal welfare is very important:
“Well, first of all, producers have to the right thing, all day, every day. It’s very distressing to us when HSUS or any of the other animal rights activist organizations puts up a video that shows somebody doing bad things to an animal, whether it’s a pig, or a dog or anything else. That’s unacceptable no matter who does it, or when. We have an obligation to ourselves, to our animals to take care of them. You know, we’re never going to appease the PETA’s of the world, or the HSUS’s of the world, or anybody else who doesn’t want meat in the human diet. That’s not our goal, to appease them. Our goal is to do the right thing, raise healthy animals, provide safe, affordable, delicious food for our customers, and that’s what we do.”
We’ll hear more from Don Butler, director of governmental affairs and public relations for Murphy Brown, LLC.
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