The oddest part of the animal rights group People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (Peta) is the inclusion in its name of the word ethical, a concept without which the dichotomy of good and evil cannot be apprehended. Odd — and brave — because it declares ethics, the assessment of right and wrong conduct, as its defining principle and one by which it must fall or flourish.
Peta agitates against cruelty to animals by humans, arguing that the suffering of animals is unnecessary and avoidable in the exploitation of animal products. This, it says, is achievable by following a set of absolute (as opposed to habitual) rules in human interaction with animals.
Journalists share the sentiment. The assessment of right and wrong conduct is arguably also its primary occupation and perhaps the greatest source of misery for the perpetrators of the craft. Yet, despite the temptation to avoid applying their code of conduct for the sake of expedience, budgetary constraints or any number of the pathetic excuses they are likely to present, this is what journalists must do to protect their credibility as their stock-in-trade.
What then, readers may wonder, is the excuse the venerable Washington Post will roll out for the shoddy report on leading clothing brands abandoning mohair products? The newspaper’s reporter, Abha Bhattarai, refers to a short film produced by a so-called investigator for Peta about conditions on mohair farms in the Karoo.
The film is based on the investigator’s undercover visit to 12 Karoo farms and is clearly biased to serve Peta’s cause and, in the main, distorts the facts and tells several barefaced lies. The viewer’s overall impression is that Angora goats on Karoo farms are brutally mistreated, neglected and unnecessarily slaughtered.
A simple fact check would have exposed the Peta report as misleading, but nowhere in Bhattarai’s report is there evidence of any effort to verify the assertions made in the film, and nowhere does the writer explain context or give voice to those who might be worst affected by the report.
Further, nowhere in the report are the motives of Peta, its main source, questioned or elucidated. Nowhere is there any mention that the investigator lied to gain access to the farms he filmed, which is unacceptable except under unavoidable conditions.
This amounts to unethical conduct by the Washington Post and its reporter. To verify this, check the Society of Professional Journalists’ code of ethics.
Peta does not purport to produce journalism: it can say whatever it likes, tell lies and pursue its agenda. However, when the Washington Post elevated Peta’s investigator to reporter, the rigours of journalistic ethics started applying besides the generally accepted rules of moral conduct it claims to apply to itself.
In either instance, Peta too is guilty of unethical conduct, the consequence of which is likely to severely harm about 30,000 people employed in SA’s 150-year-old mohair industry, most of whom are farm workers in a part of the country with high poverty rates.
The chances are that if fashion houses such as H&M, Zara, Gap, Banana Republic and Abercrombie & Fitch carry out their undertaking to phase out mohair products based on a single unverified and biased report, it is not only the Karoo industry that will be destroyed, but the others too. Presumably, this is what Peta wants.
What the Washington Post should have done was to contact just one mohair farmer on SA’s estimated 1,000 Angora farms, who would have told the paper that cruelty is not in the interests of stock farmers anywhere, that a dead goat can be sheared only once and that SA’s farmers adhere to internationally audited principles and protocols of sustainability and best practice.
The claims should have been verified, but they were not and now a largely ethical and sustainable industry stands to be ruined. Peta must be held to account for generating a fake story, but so must the Washington Post for perpetuating the drivel and failing in its journalistic duty.
• Blom is a flyfisher who likes to write.
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