Ag-Gag Legislation Rears Its Ugly Head In Indiana

Just when it looked like the push for ag-gag legislation had petered out, there is now a bill in the Indiana legislature that once again tries to put the kibosh on whistleblowers that document unsafe, unsanitary, or cruel animal practices on farms or meat processing plants.

            Currently being considered by the Corrections and Criminal Law Committee of the Indiana legislature, SB 101 would expand the definition of trespass and, get this, would allow agricultural operations to write their own rules of conduct that would have the authority of state law. The proposed legislation reads in part:

(a) An agricultural operation may conspicuously post a notice at the agricultural operation’s locations that lists prohibited acts that may compromise the agricultural operation’s trade secrets or operations. The notice must be posted in such a manner that is likely to come to the attention of the public.

(b) A person who knowingly or intentionally commits an act at an agricultural operation that is a prohibited act listed on a notice described in subsection (a) commits a Level 6 felony.

The bill offers no restrictions on what these “prohibited acts” could be. Basically it would allow farmers and meat packing companies to write the laws of their own agricultural fiefdoms, prohibiting not only the documenting of such things as animal cruelty, but union activities and other personal freedoms that employees would have to check at the farm gate or slaughterhouse door.

Businesses have the right to maintain rules of conduct and they can punish employees who break these codes. But if this bill becomes law and you’re a farmer in Indiana, your business codes of conduct would be felonies. By the way, in Indiana a Level 6 felony can be punished by up to six months in jail.

This Is NOT From The Onion: Undercover Activist Who Exposed Animal Cruelty Is Cited For Animal Cruelty

Worthy of the most absurd of  The Onion headlines, one that would even set Orwell’s head spinning, reads Undercover Activist Who Exposed Animal Cruelty Is Cited For Animal Cruelty. The undercover activist, Taylor Radig, went undercover to document animal abuse at the Quanah Cattle Company in Kersey, Colorado. The videos she took showed employees kicking, throwing, and performing other abusive acts on young calves. After the activist group she was working with, Compassion Over Killing, released the video, employees at the cattle facility were fired.

            As the Weld County Sheriff’s Office cited three employees of the Quanah Cattle Company with misdemeanor animal cruelty, the office went on to charge Radig with the same charge. According to Lindsay Abrams in Slate:

“Radig’s failure to report the alleged abuse of the animals in a timely manner adheres to the definition of acting with negligence and substantiates the charge Animal Cruelty,” a statement signed by the sheriff explained. They’re also accusing her of having participated in the abuse. If convicted, she faces up to 18 months in jail.

This sort of reasoning on the part of the Weld County sheriff’s department would seem to indict just about any whistleblower reporting any sort of corporate criminality. The sheriff could go so far as to indict police or FBI agents that infiltrate terrorist groups or organized crime.

Colorado, where a great deal of today’s meat packing occurs, currently has no “ag-gag” laws, legal restrictions on activists or reporters that make it difficult or impossible to report animal cruelty, unsafe working conditions, or unsanitary conditions or practices at slaughterhouses and meat pacing facilities. With sheriff departments like the one in Weld County, however, it seems that the big agricultural interests don’t need them. They can just charge the whistleblowers with the crimes that they report.

Your Food in the Future: Faster and Filthier

Under a test program that has been in effect for 15 years, the U.S. Department of Agriculture has allowed five meat processing plants to increase the speed of their processing lines by as much as 20 percent and allowed them to replace USDA meat inspectors with private inspectors hired by the slaughterhouses.

            Needless to say, the results were along the lines of a fox guarding the henhouse disaster. A long overdue report on the program found that three of the plants in the program were among the 10 worst meat processing plants in the country and the plant with the worst failing grade by far was one that is in this pilot program.

            As I said earlier, this report is long overdue. The USDA promised to study the performance of the program but never did so. That’s right, they allowed the pilot program to go forward but never looked into it. In the 15 years since the beginning of the program the USDA collected no data on the slaughterhouses in the program.

            I don’t imagine that the conditions of the plants approached what Sinclair Lewis found when he entered Chicago’s slaughterhouses to perform research for his book The Jungle, but among the safety and health violations that were found at the plants was meat contaminated with partially digested food and fecal matter.

            The Government Accountability Office looked into the matter and issued a separate report, saying that it did not recommend that the pilot program be extended to other slaughterhouses. The GAO found that, with only five plants allowed to try out the faster processing, the program was too small to “provide reasonable assurance that any conclusions can apply more broadly to the universe of 608 hog plants in the United States.”

Business liked the pilot program because of increased profits and less government oversight. The meat packing industry is also behind the crop of new legislation in several states that are commonly referred to as ag-gag laws. These laws make it illegal for folks to go undercover to find and report on animal cruelty or unhealthful and dangerous conditions within slaughterhouses and meat packing facilities. The laws also severely restrict the ability of whistleblowers to report violations.

So OK, the USDA found increased health and safety violations at the plants in this program, and the GAO doesn’t recommend it either. But they still plan to expand the program to other pork plants nationwide and allow a similar program to be used in all chicken and turkey plants nationwide.

I don’t know if I should feel more outraged or nauseated.

Freedom to Farm Act: Shielding Slaughterhouses and Meatpacking From Public Scrutiny

This sounds like something out of a country with a “Ministry of Truth.” And these developments are also nauseating.

            In an effort to keep the eyes of the public out of their slaughterhouses, meat processing plants, and over-crowded feed lots, the meat and dairy industries are pushing legislation in several states that would make it a crime to notify the public as to what actually goes on in the production of our food. Bills circulating in the state houses of Indiana, Arkansas, and Pennsylvania would make it a crime to take videos at agricultural facilities. Similar legislation is being proposed in California and several other states. The American Legislative Exchange Council, or ALEC, a business backed conservative “think tank,” is providing much of the push for these laws.

            These “Ag Gag” laws are in response to academics, journalists, and activists who have shown us slaughterhouse conditions that would be recognizable to Sinclair Lewis, who chronicled his experiences in the meat packing yards of Chicago just over a century ago. Modern day men and women in the mold of Lewis have taken videos of cows being cruelly prodded with forklifts and veal calves being skinned alive. New School University assistant professor of politics Timothy Pachirat spent several years working in modern slaughterhouses and meatpacking in Omaha, Nebraska. Without the veneer of fiction that Lewis used in “The Jungle,” he describes the conditions of modern slaughterhouse work and his often stomach-churning experiences with his recent book “Every Twelve Seconds.” The book’s publication prompted the Iowa legislature to pass and the governor to sign HF 589, which makes it a criminal offence for a journalist or activist to get a job at a slaughterhouse or other agricultural facility with the intent of exposing the conditions of the places that bring us much of our food.

            In the last 30 years our food has become less safe to eat. Meat processing is now performed on a grand scale, with hundreds or thousands of pigs or cows being processed at the same time. The tainted meat from one animal now has the ability to taint thousands of pounds of hamburger or sausage shipped to dozens of states. You would think that this would prompt greater scrutiny by our government for the safety of our food, but budget cuts to the FDA that started with the Reagan administration have lead to fewer FDA workers inspecting more and more food.

            Exposing cruel or unsanitary conditions at a slaughterhouse or stockyard should make lawmakers and policy makers take notice, passing stricter food standards or providing more food inspectors, but in true “ignorance is strength” fashion, states are giving greater cover to meat and dairy producers to operate without public scrutiny. Adding to this Orwellian scenario, some of these laws label those who expose the dark underbelly of producing pork bellies as terrorists. That’s right. Taking a video of unsanitary meat processing puts you in the same league as Osama bin Laden.

And while we see less and less of how our food is produced, more people will get sick and more people will die from food poisoning. Thanks a lot, Ministry of Truth!