If farms and slaughterhouses are rife with repulsive and
sadistic abuses, why should we pass laws to help hide it?
Standing outside a
slaughterhouse in Draper City, Utah, Amy Meyer was horrified by what she saw. Cows struggled to stay out of the plant and
employees hauled one cow that appeared sick or injured in a tractor. While
standing on public property, Meyer pulled out her cell phone to document the
scene. And…she got arrested.
Big Ag has found a
clever new way to keep the public from seeing footage or photographs of animal
cruelty. In six states (Iowa, Kansas, Missouri, Montana, North Dakota, and Utah),
Big Ag lobbyists succeeded in making filming or photographing agricultural
operations illegal. Similar measures are in the pipeline in other states,
although Governor Bill Haslam just vetoed one in Tennessee.
Meyer was the first to be arrested under one of these so-called “ag-gag” laws. After much public outcry, the authorities dropped all charges against her. But the case raises a fundamental question about our food system: Do we have a right to know how our food is produced?
Big Ag likes to claim that farming is messy and bloody and that when we
consumers, uneducated in farm ways, see the grim realities of farming, we won’t
understand it. “Why are you killing Wilbur?” we cry, completely forgetting
that there’s no way to produce the bacon we ate for breakfast without killing a
pig. Show us a photo of a slaughterhouse and we’ll renounce meat on the spot.
And yes, some people
do feel that way. A whopping 3.2 percent of Americans are vegetarians. The prevailing majority
of us eat meat. In fact, our culture celebrates Temple Grandin — portrayed by Claire Danes in an HBO
movie — for designing more humane slaughterhouses. On the whole, Americans
aren’t offended by the simple, unavoidable realities of farming.
Animal abuse isn’t the
only issue at stake – so is food safety. Remember that horrible video of slaughterhouse employees kicking sick cows,
prodding them with forklifts, and even applying electric shocks? The cows were
too sick to go into the human food supply — they represented a risk of mad cow
disease — and the heinous acts in the video were done by employees trying to
make the cows stand up long enough to pass their USDA inspection. Want a
burger?
Big Ag’s other
favorite claim, any time footage of tormented animals makes the news, is that
“a few bad apples” are to blame for the abuse.
Like when HBO showed
footage of hog farm employees euthanizing sows by hanging them from chains.
The Center for Food Integrity, an industry-funded front group, came out saying, “The actions of a few ‘bad actors’ in no way reflect the high
standards demonstrated daily by a vast majority of America’s dairy farmers.”
But that’s not what
an undercover investigator found. Identifying himself only by a
pseudonym – Pete — he described his work taking jobs around the country on
farms, ranches, and slaughterhouses, documenting what he finds. “Every single
facility… that I’ve worked at has been breaking the law,” he told Democracy
Now! That doesn’t sound like “a few bad apples.”
Clearly, agribusiness
doesn’t want activists documenting animal cruelty at factory farms and
slaughterhouses. Here’s an easy way to make sure they don’t: Don’t abuse
animals. If your workers and facilities follow the law, then no one can
document law-breaking practices on the premises.
On the flipside, if
farms and slaughterhouses are guilty of repulsive and sadistic abuses, why
should we pass laws to help them hide it? As Supreme Court Justice Louis
Brandeis famously said, “Sunlight is the best disinfectant.” The more Americans
know about how our food is produced, the more producers will change their ways
to match the wishes of the American people.
OtherWords columnist Jill
Richardson is the author of Recipe
for America: Why Our Food System Is Broken and What We Can Do to Fix It. OtherWords.org