Don’t be surprised if you see the American Egg Board start running ads during TV and streaming broadcasts of NBA basketball playoff games this month. The largest organization of egg producers would probably like to get equal time with a group of protesters that have interrupted two games in the past week or so.
A group called Direct Action Everywhere has managed to disrupt two games involving the Minnesota Timberwolves as a form of protest against the team’s soon-to-be-former owner Glen Taylor. Rather than walk around outside of the arena holding their cardboard protest signs, or showing up in a sick-looking chicken costume, Direct Action is taking its publicity stunts right to the court–and getting on camera thanks to ESPN.
The first incident was during a play-in game between the T-Wolves and the Los Angeles Clippers at the Target Center in Minneapolis–where a woman walked out onto the court and managed to super glue her hand to the playing surface under one of the baskets. As Direct Action hoped, the woman was shown on national TV wearing her t-shirt “Glen Taylor roasts animals alive”. The shirt refers to the group’s allegations that another company owned by Taylor which runs a chicken farm in Iowa used a technique to kill birds in an effort to stop the spread of avian flu that involved shutting off ventilation to the building they were in–causing the temperature to rise and for carbon dioxide levels to rise until the birds died.
That stunt was followed by another woman chaining herself to the basket during the Timberwolves’ series opener against the Memphis Grizzlies at the FedEx Center in wearing the same shirt. She too got onto national TV–although ESPN did provide less screen time and the announcers acted like nothing was going on while security figured out how to remove the woman from the stanchion.
These incidents lead me to ask two questions: 1–Who is in charge of NBA arena security when people can just walk out on to the floor–while the game is going on–to conduct their protests? And 2–Who is going to give up eating eggs because someone super glued themselves to a basketball court?
The average American consumes 288 eggs a year. You probably don’t buy that many in the cardboard containers at the store–but think of how many you eat as ingredients in such basic things as pasta, waffles, breads, and donuts. America produces 97-billion eggs annually–the vast majority coming from “factory farms” like the one owned by Glen Taylor’s company. And that is not the type of production that can be achieved by the “free range” chickens that some animal activists “tolerate”.
Prior to the latest avian flu outbreak, there were an estimated 325-million laying hens in the US. That is just about one chicken laying eggs for every American. And it does not include male chickens–which usually end up being used for meat. All told, the number of chickens in the country is 518-million. If all of them were allowed to “roam humanely”, our country would look like the Hawaiian island of Kauai–where you can’t go anywhere without seeing feral chickens running all over the place. Not to mention roosters that start crowing a good two hours before the sun comes up every morning.
So while the folks at Direct Action Everywhere are self-congratulating themselves on all social media platforms for “doing something” about cruelty to chickens, Americans continue to enjoy their eggs sunny-side up, and in their Starbucks biscotti, and in their fettuccini alfredo. If reading The Jungle by Upton Sinclair in high school didn’t get you to give up on “mass produced” foods. T-shirts on a basketball court aren’t going to do it either.
