Originally published at: HelloFresh still using illegal primate labor, says PETA: "Monkeys are chained around the neck and forced to toil" | Boing Boing
…
1 Like
Unless there’s another good primary source, I’m not trusting anything from PETA. Could it happen? Yeah, humans kind of suck. But any claim from them is immediately suspect.
40 Likes
I’m glad i decided last year to not continue to buy their meals. For me it was mainly a cost thing, but i was always bothered by the fact that the food was shipped to me from the next city over via a courier instead of finding a local distributor. Plus their veggies were not terribly fresh and could spoil within the day of me getting the delivery.
That said if anyone here likes HelloFresh and doesn’t mind a little bit of prep work, they actually offer their recipes online for free.
5 Likes
The packaging is also wasteful.
5 Likes
Yeah, in addition to often spurious assertions, they tend to single out one beneficiary of a supply chain, often one that appeals to a presumptively liberal customer base, and massage the wording to make it seem like Hello Fresh has a black ops team running around capturing monkeys. The reality is that everyone in that supply chain is, in one way or another and consciously or not, participating in exploitation. If a company buys chocolate on the commodities market, there is no real doubt that they are participating in exploitative labor practices. But PETA and Greenpeace get headlines every damn time they make these claims and it does force companies to sometimes re-examine their purchasing decisions.
But I’m not losing any sleep over Hello Fresh getting publicly shamed, either.
ETA:
Yeah, I won’t even trust the local grocery store curbside service for this. I’m picking my own damn bell peppers!
19 Likes
I don’t have a problem with trained monkey harvesting coconuts, as long as they aren’t being abused. If they are being abused then that’s no good. Same with oxen, mules, dogs or other animals even more commonly found on farms.
22 Likes
My buddy and I used to fantasize about the End Times and how, if push came to shove, we would anoint ourselves protectors of the Nelson Atkins Museum of Art and post trained monkey snipers on the roof to protect the lawn sculptures.
TBH, it’s still a possibility.
10 Likes
12 Likes
Istm use of any non-domesticated animal this way is a big problem. The labor force is being poached from wild populations.
It’s one of the fundamental problems with circus elephants too.
5 Likes
Animal cruelty is horrible and should certainly be stopped.
That said, taking animals from the wild and training them is HOW they became domesticated in the first place.
10 Likes
4 Likes
Screw PETA. They are a bunch of hypocritical grifters, at best.
Not to mention that “shelter” they ran that euthanized the vast majority of animals brought there.
18 Likes
Please, please, please stop posting anything involving PETA as a source of information. They are unreliable at best and downright evil and fraudulent at worse. Give them voice is like feeding an internet troll. Ignore them or you make them stronger.
19 Likes
Back in a time when the wild was big and diverse instead of penned in and over-exploited by Homo sapiens interested in maximizing short term profits, yeah. Our relationship with it should be different now.
7 Likes
I live in Thailand.
There are coconut trees in front of my house, and everywhere nearby, both farmed, or on residential land.
Every few months, a local team comes buy with a monkey on the back of their pick-up, and they spend a day harvesting the coconuts with a monkey on a long leash. For residential and hotel properties, the trees must be cleared regularly for safety, because falling coconuts are common, and no joke. The nuts of course find their way into the local supply chain.
I’ve never seen* a working monkey be deliberately mistreated or abused. They seem to go about their business quite pragmatically. I have more sympathy for the way the immigrant laborers (Myanmar, Laos etc) are exploited by their bosses.
I don’t see that working monkeys are any better or worse than our other working animals, like guide or guard dogs, race or show horses, water buffalo, or yes, even elephants. Bad conditions and mistreatment can occur anywhere, and is to be deplored. But normal working requirements make it in the owners best interests to keep their animals safe, comfortable and sane**.
The linked video, despite being their most emotive hidden camera “gotcha” exposé they could get, showed no mis-treatment that I haven’t seen much much worse applied to chained-up guard dogs around the world.
I’d have more concern about the clear misery of battery hens, caged pigs, the occupants of Chinese manufacturing plants, and immigrant labour workers in camps around the world. But not enough to stop eating bacon and eggs.
“Chained around the neck” = “Has a collar and leash” just like everybody’s dog.
“Day in and day out” = goes to work regularly, and works for less time than its handler does. They certainly take breaks. Pity the wage-slave in all walks of life if you want to, but this activity is hardly unique.
As this is PETA, then of course my whatabout-ism may be met with “Yes, those are all horrible too, we should ban guide dogs”. This is indeed suggested in one of the links in this post. And I can’t argue with that end of the spectrum.
I’m no animal psychologist, but I don’t think that many Wild vs Domesticated arguments go far when a baby has been hand-reared from birth. Is that argument distinct from keeping caged birds or aquarium fish?
Taking a baby from a wild mother to do so is probably the worst part of the hypothetical scenario, but I dunno if that’s a common scenario in the industry. But objectively worse fates happen to wild venison and salmon.
To be consistent in this sort of boycott, I think we would have to cease doing business with any company who had any properties guarded by chained or ill-treated dogs. I genuinely do feel that a manic guard dog chained up all day has a much worse life, and shows more suffering, behavioural problems and mental damage than the local tree-climbers do.
I’d actually endorse a campaign to phase out the use of dogs as attack animals in “ethical” businesses.
* Not that it may not happen somewhere else, of course
** Until market forces push them to over-do it in some direction
40 Likes
I can’t believe you’re forcing me to choose between PETA and monkey slavers.
5 Likes
I don’t think fine motor skills are a monkey’s forte. You’d be better off with face-ripping monkey infantry. I think a hawk in a skinner box might make a good sniper. They definitely have the eyesight and precision motor skills for it.
5 Likes
“Yes sir, all the voles within a kilometer have been taken down.”
13 Likes
In the mists of prehistory, yes. But it’s not really an ongoing process. Turns out that vanishingly few species are actually amenable to it.
3 Likes
