Let’s Talk About Animal Agriculture – Part II
Let’s talk about validity. Validity, as defined by Merriam-Webster, is “the quality or state of being valid.” Valid, also defined by Merriam-Webster, means “having legal efficacy or force,” “well-grounded or justifiable: bring at once relevant and meaningful,” and “logically correct.”
In any news piece, story, movie, radio broadcast or gossip session, validity is of the utmost importance. If a source is invalid, then the story is no longer credible and is “null,” as some say.
Cowspiracy is, without a doubt, an invalid source.
Abe Lincoln grabbed online from Thought Co
https://www.thoughtco.com/abraham-lincoln-and-the-gettysburg-address-1773573
Although this column may be boring to some, this is a crucial point to the argument of Cowspiracy being untrustworthy. I’ll try to get through this as efficiently as possible. For now, it’s time for me to regurgitate a lesson I learned during my short stint in Grad School from Gary Wingenbach, Ph.D. about validity.
Wingenbach is a phenomenal research teacher. If there’s one thing the majority of Texas A&M’s Agricultural Leadership, Education and Communications program can agree upon: Winger knows research (side note: No disrespect meant to Dr. Wingenbach here, I heard him refer to himself as Winger countless times in class).
What I remember from Wingenbach’s research class regarding validity was this:
Academic sources are only valid if they have been reviewed and published.
Sources are only valid for seven years prior to publication.
Never, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, EVER trust secondary sources.
Cowspiracy does a good job of listing their sources throughout the film and on their website, I will give them that. However, these sources proved to be questionable.
I don’t know if Cowspiracy was peer reviewed, but I do know it was produced by A.U.M. Films & Media, a non-profit organization with no academic affiliation indicated on their website.
As for the seven-year rule: Cowspiracy was released in 2014. This means that at the time of production, all of its sources would need to be published after 2007. As you can see from the film and the Cowspiracy website, some of these sources were published in 2006, 2004, 2003 and some references didn’t even provide a year. Even for 2014, some of these sources were completely invalid.
In 2019, people are still using Cowspiracy as a source (which is partially a secondary source, I might add). Therefore, following the seven-year rule, all references should have been published before 2012 — a criteria only a handful of the sources listed meet.
Personally, I tried to follow all the sources linked on the Cowspiracy website. Many of the links were broken and some even pulled up pages which had been updated with more accurate and ag-positive facts and figures. I can’t say if these figures were there in 2014 when the film was produced, but they are now in 2019 – leaving a major chunk of Cowspiracy untrue and invalid.
Cowspiracy covered themselves by providing this statement on their website:
“The science and research done on the true impacts of animal agriculture is always growing. The statistics used in the film were based on the best information we had available while producing the film. We will continually update this list with further resources as they become available.”
As of today, November 19, 2019, these sources have not been updated with any information for the year 2018 or 2019. Which, I would like to note, is not surprising considering there may not be data for 2019, and data from 2018 could still be in the process of compilation.
As mentioned before, Cowspiracy is somewhat of a secondary source. Many of the scenes from Cowspiracy show industry professionals commenting on animal agriculture and the environmental crisis. However, Cowspiracy also uses various written and online sources. These sources are called a “primary source,” meaning they were produced by a group or individual who actually did the research to back their claims. Cowspiracy, the film itself, is the perfect example of a secondary source as it cites numerous other sources. This column, too, is considered a secondary source because I’m not actually conducting the research that I report. If someone were to reference this column or Cowspiracy, their statements would technically be invalid because these examples are not primary sources. If someone wanted to cite one of the facts from this column or Cowspiracy properly, they need to track down the original, primary source and use that as their reference.
Validity can be somewhat of a blanket statement when it comes to sources. To be valid, sources must also be credible, unbiased and reliable.
Side note to the reader: Make sure the news you’re consuming is credible, unbiased and reliable. Before you share an article on Facebook, check the source. Don’t just hit “share” because it has a catchy title. I promise you, those outrageous articles about Nancy Pelosi and Donald Trump aren’t always truthful and come from tabloid and even sometimes satirical websites. So please, before you share an article, make sure it’s coming from a valid, unbiased and reliable source!
A source which has a reputation of providing their readership with biased, one-sided information may not always report the most truthful statements. Some may say this column is biased, and to that I say this: I do support agriculture, but I also acknowledge agriculture has its faults. Do not insult my intelligence and integrity by assuming everything I report is unreliable because it is pro-ag… it’s pro-ag because the valid information out there is the academically-produced and government-backed truth.
If a source has a reputation of printing several, crucial misprints, it may not be the most reputable and credibly source to use.
If a source is not backed by an academic resource or government funded agency, it may not be reliable.
Basically, this can all be summed up into one phrase: check your facts.
