Apparently PETA and the Humane Society are engaging in terrorist activity by secretly filming the terrible conditions inside meat-producing plants.
Do you enjoy eating meat? I know I do, even being vaguely aware of the costs in terms of the environment and inhumane treatment of the livestock - I'm aware of my own hypocrisy. What I did not know is we also seem to be paying a huge political price: our free speech.
The article starts with a PETA exposé in 2008 of a hog confinement facility in Greene County, Iowa. Activists secretly filmed the physical abuses of employees at the facility over a number of months.
The recordings caught one senior worker beating a sow repeatedly on the back with a metal gate rod, a supervisor turning an electric prod on a sow too crippled to stand, another worker shoving a herding cane into a sow's vagina. In one close-up, a distressed sow who'd been attacking her piglets was shown with her face royal blue from the Prima Tech marking dye sprayed into her nostrils "to get the animal high." In perhaps the most disturbing sequence, a worker demonstrated the method for euthanizing underweight piglets: taking them by the hind legs and smashing their skulls against the concrete floor—a technique known as "thumping." Their bloodied bodies were then tossed into a giant bin, where video showed them twitching and paddling until they died, sometimes long after.
PETA won a huge PR victory, with the County Sheriff charging multiple
employees at the plant with animal cruelty. Author Ted Genoways notes the Pyrrhic nature of that victory was not lost on PETA itself.
It was a major PR win for PETA—which often appeals to local authorities to make arrests but rarely gets the kind of cooperation they got from the Greene County Sheriff's Office—but it was also a hollow victory. "Who in their right mind would want to work in a dusty, ammonia-ridden pig shed for nine bucks an hour but somebody who, literally, had no other options?" asked Dan Paden, the senior researcher at PETA who helped run the investigation. "And at the end of a long, frustrating day, when you are trying to move a pig who hasn't been out of its crate in [months], that's when these beatings occur—and people do stupid, cruel, illegal things." PETA was urging prosecutors to go beyond plea agreements for farmworkers; they wanted charges against farm owners and their corporate backers, to hold them responsible for crimes committed by undertrained, overburdened employees.
This example and many others like it over the years have had the predictable consequences. Rather than clean up their act, industry whined to their legislators. In many mid-western states, also predictably, their whining got them what they wanted. Not content with merely evading the legal consequences of having their horribly inhumane practices exposed, Big Ag (with the probable help of ALEC, no less) bought model legislation that criminalizes the exposing itself.
BACK IN SEPTEMBER 2003, the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) released a piece of model legislation it called the Animal and Ecological Terrorism Act. Like so many bills drafted by the free-market think tank, AETA was handed over, ready made, to legislators with the idea that it could be introduced in statehouses across the country with minimal modification. Under the measure, it would become a felony (if damages exceed $500) to enter "an animal or research facility to take pictures by photograph, video camera, or other means," and, in a flush of Patriot Act-era overreaching, those convicted of making such recordings would also be placed on a permanent "terrorist registry."
The actual national legislation that was passed in 2005 was a de-fanged version of the ALEC bill, renamed the Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act (AETA). The ban on shooting of video was altered to "damaging or interfering with the operations of an animal enterprise" and removing the terrorist watch list provision. The bill was passed in the senate by unanimous consent, and easily passed on the house with Rep. Kucinich voicing sole opposition to the bill.
At the state level, laws pushed through to shield livestock operations from exposure vary. The most draconian laws were bought mainly by poultry industry groups in Minnesota, Iowa, Florida and Utah outright ban filming by defining it a misdemeanor "agricultural operation interference," or by outlawing "employment fraud" - gaining access under so-called false pretenses, even if the whistleblower is a regular employee.
Perhaps sensing that these laws may run afoul of the First Amendment, which is kind of hard to get around (not for lack of trying), Big Ag evolved their legislative strategy. PETA and HSUS activists trying to expose inhumane practices at these operations need a month or more to capture enough footage to prove systemic abuse, laws designed to curb whistleblowing require "quick reporting" of witnessed abuse. Under the guise of protecting animals, the effect of these laws makes it impossible for the activist or whistleblower to prove sustained or pervasive abuse. The laws also often require the gathered evidence to be turned over to authorities immediately, preventing the groups from being able to inform the public.
As is becoming increasingly common these days, the people behind all this industry-bought legislation have no shame in outing themselves as the nut jobs that they are. One industry activist, Rick Berman, wrote an op-ed in New Hampshire's Union Leader that PETA and the HSUS "have developed a cottage industry in filming alleged cruelty for weeks or months and then releasing it with a big media splash later. They get their faces on TV and their names in the paper when they think timing is right for a good PR campaign. And the animals? A few of them might suffer longer bouts of abuse while the activists film and wait."
Tennessee state Rep. Andy Hoyt had this to say in an e-mail to the HSUS:
I am extremely pleased that we were able to pass HB 1191 today to help protect livestock in Tennessee from suffering months of needless investigation that propagandist groups of radical animal activists, like your fraudulent and reprehensibly disgusting organization of maligned animal abuse profiteering corporatists, who are intent on using animals the same way human-traffickers use 17 year old women. You work for a pathetic excuse for an organization who seek to profit from animal abuse. I am glad, as an aside, that we have limited your preferred fund-raising methods here in the state of Tennessee; a method that I refer to as 'tape and rape.' Best wishes for the failure of your organization and it's true intent.
Even the organization that saves thousands of Kittens and Puppies every day throughout the country is not off limits to the rhetorical vitriol of the defenders of Big Ag being able to do what it pleases.
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