Your Opinion: Whole story or biased excerpt?

Dear Editor:

It's true that agriculture has been around longer than agribusiness, but as soon as a middleman became involved in selling any agriculture product, agribusiness was born.

Carleen Peitzmeyer was right when she stated that agribusiness came about when people moved to the cities, several thousand years ago. It was because of the union of agriculture and agribusiness that civilization has flourished. The term agribusiness may be fairly new but the concept is as old as the hills.

I had a lot of questions about the video that Joel Timonn first referred about ranch hands bashing in cows' heads with pick-axes at the E-6 Ranch but found out that the E-6 does not exist.

I wondered how an undercover investigation could get a piece of information like that wrong, but a lot on the web is not reliable.

As Peitzmeyer pointed out, the ranch hands could have taken a gun and ammo, it would have been more humane. How do we know they didn't? We don't know if they ran out of ammo and then used a pick-ax or purposely took a pick-ax out on the range to kill their cattle. It could have been staged for all we know.

The problem with the Internet is that these types of videos are posted without the whole story, all that you get are twisted blurbs designed to malign the subject.

The reason I have so vehemently defended the pick-ax story is because we don't know the whole story but people like Timonn, Jeff Flemming and Peitzmeyer not only buy into the slick hustle, but lead others to believe that this is the way it is in the rest of the industry. It's insulting.

I would never defend someone who was intentionally being cruel to any animal but I also would never ignore the slanderous attacks on agriculture that come with an agenda.

In an earlier letter to the editor, Peitzmeyer said that there was no good reason to use a pick-ax on an animal, now she says maybe if it was attacking you it would be okay. Funny how convictions can flip-flop.

I still contend that if all the facts were known this would still be an act of humanity.