True Democracy

I am a member of a Public Interest Research Group (PIRG) which is essentially an environmentally driven organisation which chases its' members to write letters to their congressional representative to vote for or against any number of bills such as bottle refunding laws, clean water etc.

For those causes with which I agree I dutifully write letters and get responses from my congressional representative thanking me for my interest and explaining how they will vote and why.  For those causes that I disagree with I write letters back to the PIRG explaining why I disagree, and sometimes I get a response.

Granted the PIRG doesn't have a congressional staff at its fingertips it is still curious to me that they sometimes don't even acknowledge my note.

But recently they hit a nerve which cut across a number of sectors and with which I was completely in favour.

Specifically they asked me to write to McDonalds to get them to stop serving meat that came from animals which had been treated with antibiotics.

The use of antibiotics in industrialised agriculture has two sources.

One is the overcrowding of animals where they are held in such close proximity to one another and in such a manner that hygiene is severely impacted thus requiring antibiotics to combat what is essentially poor animal husbandry.

The other is the overwhelming power of the corn lobby.  It has created a relationship with the beef industry that has replaced grass as the main staple of feed for beef cattle with corn- a feed stuff that makes cattle ill thus requiring antibiotics.

This disturbing practise of feeding cattle with a foodstuff that makes them ill thus requiring antibiotics is and the use of antibiotics to counter industrially induced diseases in chickens is compounded by the transmission of these medicines up the food chain to humans thus rendering many many standard antibiotics useless and accelerating the evolution of diseases which are resistant to  new and improved (my italics) seemantibiotics.

But back to true democracy.

Much to my pleasant surprise, McDonald's announced that they would stop selling chickens which are free from medically important antibiotics.  Chickens are one of the prime examples of the overcrowding of livestock.l. I am not totally comfortable with the condition of "medically important" in their announcement, But it is still a massive step in the right direction.

And surprise surprise, in addition to Purdue and Pilgrims Pride, two large producers of chicken who have announced their commitment to phasing out antibiotics, earlier this week one of McDonalds largest providers, Tyson Foods announced that they too will be abolishing antibiotics.

So through the power of the "ballot box" we were able to make a rational positive change.

Next up is the corn lobby....

Democracy can work.