Voices Carry for Animals # 39

Hosted by Debbie Dahmer

Guest: Matt Dominiguez-  Public Policy Manager for the Humane Society of the United States Farm Animal Protection Campaign..

GAG ORDER   With "ag gag" bills, Big Ag seeks to stifle reform

Inside windowless barns, sows chewed the bars of their gestation crates, confined so tightly that they couldn’t even turn around. Brown puddles had formed from a diarrhea outbreak. And piles of dead piglets were being gutted—so that their intestines could be fed to their mothers.

These images would have remained hidden there in Owensboro, Kentucky, if HSUS undercover investigators hadn’t videotaped the dark reality. It was hard to watch, but critical: The feeding of pigs to pigs violated state law. Other practices seemed to violate human decency.

“At the end of the day,” an investigator reported, a sow “started making the worst sound I have heard since I started working [here]. I ran to her and she had gotten her nose in between the leverage bar that opens and closes the feed trough and a bar on her cage. … [She] scraped her nose about an inch long [leaving] her mouth bleeding.”

If proposed “ag gag” laws are passed, moments like these will stay concealed from the American public. Introduced in state legislatures around the country the last few years at the behest of the meat, dairy and egg industry, the bills seek to criminalize whistleblowing by making it illegal to take video or photos on factory farms or to seek employment for the purpose of exposing abuse and food safety problems. They also sometimes require mandatory reporting with impossibly short timelines so that whistleblowers must “out” themselves and no pattern of abuse can be documented.