Editorial: Mainstream no longer accepts meat at humane events

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, November 2005:

“With friends like theseŠ” was the first
thing that came to mind after reading the Carbon
County Friends of Animals raffle ticket I’d just
bought,” wrote Michael J. Frendak of Lansford,
Pennsylvania, in the August 2005 edition of
Reader’s Digest.
“I could win one of the following, it
said: a 10-pound box of chicken legs, one
smoked ham, four T-bone steaks, five pounds of
fresh sausage or hot dogs, or a box of pork
chops.”

Such laments are often voiced in ANIMAL
PEOPLE and other pro-animal and pro-vegetarian
media, but Reader’s Digest is more deliberately
representative of mainstream Middle American
values than the U.S. Congress.
Founded in January 1922 as a source of
sermon material for ministers, Reader’s Digest
describes itself in its Popular Culture Guide as
“traditionally never sensationalistic and rarely
controversial, with a tendency toward
inspirational self-help stories. The magazine
has been criticized,” it admits, “for espousing
a generally right-wing, conservative point of
view and for evoking nostalgia for a simpler,
less diversified America.”
When even Reader’s Digest hints that
humane societies should avoid either promoting or
participating in meat consumption, in an
anecdote submitted from coal mine country by a
reader of no animal advocacy background
discernible through online searching, any humane
society that still raffles meat or serves meat at
official events needs to take note.
Even much of the meat-eating public now
views the involvement of a humane society in meat
consumption by human beings much as it views
fornication by the clergy.
People may politely ignore indiscretions
by others of ordinary moral stature, but
guardians of public morality, including humane
workers, are expected to exemplify a higher
standard.