As the climate crises and inequality worsen, it’s crucial to look at the inaccurate public interest impact claims and business models that hid the horrors now unfolding.

Animal impact claims are often the most falsifiable, and culpable, in this regard.

If one were going to look for how the U.S. animal rights movement contributed to hiding of the polycrisis, as the movement became coopted by food investors, few would be as responsible as Rachel Atcheson. 

 

 

A key aid to disgraced Mayor Adams, she has made wildly inaccurate claims about the environmental and other beneficial impacts of veganism, impacts that have been easily undone by child inequity and the disenfranchising growth that relies on it.

Despite all her talk, Atcheson’s impact on animal protection relative to the countervailing impacts of growth is negligible. 

But why is she so problematic? The wealthy who threaten our future use people like Atcheson to hide the full negative impacts of their wealth, and in a place like New York City, that’s a big deal. In many ways she also represents how animal rights became monetized as a food industry, at a time when inequitable growth has put more animals into suffering than ever before, and New York is undergoing unprecedented inequality and commercialization. For people who want to on balance benefit animals, selling out is one of the worst things one can do.

Real animal activists could never compete against those, like Atcheson, who are willing to be part of a system that does more harm to animals than she does good. And they need not compete – because the model she uses is probably illegal. 

Fair Start and TruthAlliance.global are now going beyond her claims, and asking whether she and Adams used an illegal business model to hide the worst impacts of the climate crisis, the decline of democracy, and vast inequity.

In a letter to the New York Attorney General, Fair Start and TruthAlliance.global explore how illegal baselining – making up standards to claim victory when things are worsening for the worst off – has hidden the deadly impacts of the climate crisis, growing inequity, and political disenfranchisement.

Our research shows equity fraud (the discounting of future lives, and disenfranchisement of persons of color in particular) has been the largest driver of the terrible harms caused by factory farm entities like JBS. The state’s recent settlement with JBS raises questions about the standards state officials use with regard to that driver.

Did Atcheson, a vocal animal rights activist and opponent of factory farming, use the same fundamental metric as JBS to exploit future children? Even as that drove more animals into suffering than her work took out? Time and further research will tell. 

Take action: Urge Atcheson here to start the process of truth and admit that her work ignored inequitable growth in a way that did more harm than she did good. How much harm remains to be seen, but she can at least right now dispel any illusion of helping animals on balance or accurately accounting for inequity. In the future Fair Start activists will be testing her support for a preemptive legal standard that would reorganize basic entitlements to elevate animal protection, as well as other key values. That test will show whether she cares about animals, or is still shilling for food investors.