Meatonomics (9 page)

Proponents of ag-gag laws are remarkably candid about the laws' main purpose: to protect industry. “Agriculture is one of our most important industries,” says Senator Joe Seng (D-IA), who introduced that state's ag-gag law. “It's sort of a protection mechanism.”
²⁴
Protection, that is, from the harmful economic effects that often result when conditions on factory farms are made public. As one rancher wrote, undercover videos “wreak havoc on the agriculture industry, which usually results in litigation, loss of jobs and a direct shot at the markets.”
²⁵

Industrial animal farmers are as tenacious as the proverbial dog with a bone, and they've made ag-gag laws one of their main areas of focus. The lawmaking landscape changed so much while I worked on this book that I rewrote this section four times. The legislatures of Florida and New York rejected ag-gag laws in 2011 and 2012. Iowa's legislature rejected an ag-gag bill in 2011 but passed a slightly different version in 2012. When this book went to press, ag-gag laws were pending in at least six states (Arkansas, California, Indiana, Nebraska, Pennsylvania, and Tennessee) and were expected to be introduced
or reintroduced in another six (Minnesota, New Hampshire, New Mexico, North Carolina, Vermont, and Wyoming). The animal food industry's enormous economic and political muscle is all the more impressive when you consider that, according to surveys, laws prohibiting unauthorized filming in factory farms are highly unpopular. In Iowa, for example, just 21 percent of voters approved the ag-gag bill that was defeated there when first introduced.
²⁶

Another enforcement problem with state cruelty laws lies in the feeble and generally ineffective penalties imposed on violators. Consider the case of Daniel Clark, a pig farmer who, in the winter of 2009, abandoned 832 pigs to die in an unheated barn in Pennsylvania. The dead animals were discovered nine months later in a “mummified” condition.
²⁷
Clark was charged with 832 counts of animal cruelty, but he pled guilty to only ten counts and was fined $2,500. The remaining 822 counts were dismissed, and he received no jail time.

Compare Clark's penalty to that of C. C. Baird, an Arkansas dog broker whose routine abuse of dogs bound for research facilities was documented in the HBO documentary
Dealing Dogs
. Baird, who had 750 dogs in his facility, was charged with laundering money and violating the federal Animal Welfare Act. In addition to being sentenced to six months' home detention and three years' probation, Baird was fined $262,700 and permanently stripped of his dealer's license. He forfeited another $200,000 plus seven hundred acres of land worth an estimated $1.1 million. He also paid $42,000 to animal rescue groups who helped care for and re-home the animals abused in his facility. In all, Baird paid monetary penalties totaling more than $1.6 million.

The difference in punishments accorded to Clark and Baird for their mistreatment of roughly the same number of animals shows the enormous difference in our legal system's view of dogs and pigs. Dogs are companion animals we see every day, whose individual owners advocate for them, and they're protected under a variety of state and federal laws (although, many would argue, still not adequately). Pigs are farm animals we rarely see or think about, whose quality of
life runs contrary to the profit motive of the $52 billion pork industry. Yet pigs are smarter than dogs and, like dogs, seek mental and physical stimulus and want to engage in various natural behaviors.
²⁸
Is it appropriate that the law allows farmers to abuse pigs with virtual impunity?

Hundreds of scientific studies published in respected, peer-reviewed journals link meat and dairy to obesity and disease (
see
chapter 6
). Having successfully used comparable studies to extract cash from those who make cigarettes, asbestos, and other harmful products, plaintiffs' lawyers have begun testing the waters to see whether obesity studies can be used to impose liability on the food industry. So far the Magic 8-Ball says, “Ask again later.” Although a court dismissed the first lawsuit against McDonald's for obesity, what's frivolous to one judge might be meritorious to another—or what lacks merit today could yield a million-dollar judgment in a few years (especially if evidence of industry wrongdoing comes to light). In response to this threat, the National Restaurant Association has led food industry groups in a campaign to beef up their immunity to damages from such lawsuits by urging lawmakers, often successfully, to pass what they call cheeseburger laws.

Before considering these indigestion-causing laws, it's enlightening to look at how such legislation gets started. The American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) is a conservative forum where corporations and state lawmakers meet and draft corporate-friendly legislation. With the unambiguous motto “Limited Government, Free Markets, Federalism,” ALEC is the nation's leading incubator of bills that seek to protect corporations by limiting damages in lawsuits involving issues like product liability, premises liability, and asbestos liability.

Corporations join ALEC for access to state legislators. Legislators join for perks like free trips, dinners, and theater tickets, all paid for by corporate sponsors' generous dues.
²⁹
Lawmakers introduce about a thousand of ALEC's model bills each year in their home states,
and about two hundred pass. ALEC flew largely under the radar for decades but was recently in the spotlight when it was revealed that the organization is behind minority-unfriendly voter ID laws that passed in thirty-four states. After a civil rights group disclosed this legislative agenda, a number of ALEC's corporate sponsors, including McDonald's, Wendy's, Coca-Cola, PepsiCo, Yum! Brands, Procter & Gamble, and Intuit, stopped funding the organization.
³⁰

Cheeseburger laws are typically based on a model ALEC statute titled the Commonsense Consumption Act. Although cheeseburger bills died four times in Congress, twenty-four state legislatures have rallied to the food industry's cries for help.
³¹
The laws exempt food producers, promoters, and sellers from liability to a plaintiff who claims that long-term consumption of food led to obesity or obesity-related disease.

Cheeseburger laws' proponents say the legislation stands for personal responsibility. “I recognize that obesity is a serious problem in America, but suing the people who produce and sell food is not going to solve this problem,” says US Senator Mitch McConnell (R-KY), who sponsored a cheeseburger bill that died in the Senate. “Americans need to take greater care in what—and how much—they eat.”
³²
But the laws' critics say courts already have a simple mechanism for dealing with frivolous suits—dismissing them—and that exempting industry groups from liability could preclude plaintiffs from recovering for real wrongdoing.
³³

To recap to this point, animal food producers or restaurateurs have been largely responsible for eliminating farm animals' protection from inhumane treatment in most US states, barring people from suing over obesity and related illnesses in almost half of states, making it illegal to criticize food in a quarter of states, and in one in seven states, preventing undercover investigations into the conditions that might tempt one to engage in such criticism. If any doubt remains as to the clout or determination of those in the industry who regularly convince state legislatures to pass such laws, consider another of the
animal food industry's campaigns to stifle criticism: animal enterprise terrorism laws.

Brought to you by the same group responsible for cheeseburger laws, ALEC, a particularly bizarre class of new law has been hitting the statute books in the past decade: so-called ecoterrorism laws. Typically based on a model ALEC statute titled the Animal and Ecological Terrorism Act, these laws provide enhanced penalties for disrupting the operations of an animal enterprise.
³⁴
Criminal conduct that would normally constitute basic trespass, vandalism, or theft is punished more severely when the target is a farm, restaurant, grocery store, or any other animal-related business. Law professor Dara Lovitz writes of this phenomenon:

The perplexing result is that an arsonist who burned down a building with no political motivation would be tried and sentenced as an arsonist; but if the arsonist burned down the building to protest the abuse of animals therein, s/he could be labeled a terrorist and thrown in prison for exponentially more years.
³⁵

In a wave dubbed the “Green Scare” because of its similarity to the Communist Red Scare that swept the United States in the 1950s, the federal government and at least thirty-nine US states have adopted ecoterrorism laws in the past decade. Just as the Red Scare was promoted by a handful of fear-mongering individuals, the Green Scare seems to have originated with a handful of special interest groups who profit from animals and rely on their continued ability to do so.
³⁶
With little evidence of actual terrorist activity to point to, these groups nevertheless label animal and environmental activists as “terrorists” and promote what they claim is antiterrorism legislation across the United States to protect their business interests.

According to journalist Will Potter, whose book
Green Is the New Red
explores the Green Scare phenomenon, “‘Terrorist’ has replaced ‘communist’ as the most powerful word in our language.”
³⁷
Terrorism
is an emotionally and politically charged term without an accepted definition—in fact, it's officially defined in more than one hundred
ways.
³⁸
The terrorist label is often applied by governments seeking to marginalize or delegitimize disfavored groups, leading a
Reuters
editor to instruct writers to avoid using the term: “One man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter.”
³⁹
Under most conventional definitions, terrorism is the use of violence to achieve a political or ideological goal.
⁴⁰
But this begs the questions: What is violence? Is it violent to burn down an empty building? Is it violent for chanting activists to protest in front of a home? Activists involved in both of these scenarios have been charged with felonies under the federal Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act, although in each case, no one was injured.
⁴¹

When it pushes ecoterrorism laws, the animal food industry routinely cites the need to protect the safety of our nation's food system. The main premise of this argument is that food terrorists might disrupt factory farms and wreak havoc on the nation's food supply. However, the idea that food terrorists seek to hurt the nation's food supply has little empirical support. There have been only two known acts of food terrorism on US soil: the Rajneeshee cult's infecting Oregon salad bars with salmonella in an attempt to influence a local election in 1984, and a disgruntled laboratory worker's infecting food with shigella in 1996. Neither incident resulted in any deaths, and neither made it into the FBI's list of Major Terrorism Cases.
⁴²
Moreover, as animal food production is spread throughout more than 18,800 separate facilities around the country, a terrorist group seeking to disrupt the nation's food supply by targeting individual facilities would have to be remarkably determined and coordinated to have any meaningful effect.

In fact, experience shows that food safety is actually much better served by allowing exactly the kind of third-party monitoring that the food industry seeks to deter. After undercover investigators from the Humane Society of the United States discovered diseased cows being dragged to slaughter in 2007, food safety concerns led to the largest meat recall in US history. When legislators and law enforcement target animal activism, they chill this kind of investigation and discourage the kind of healthy inquiry that benefits consumers. Mike
German, a former FBI agent who has written about his career infiltrating terrorist groups, says about ecoterrorism legislation:

To create a law that protects one particular industry smacks of undue influence and seems to selectively target individuals with one particular ideology for prosecution. Why does an “animal enterprise” deserve more legal protection than another business? Why protect a butcher but not a baker?
⁴³

That's easy: bakers don't spend $138 million yearly lobbying lawmakers.
⁴⁴

When state laws fail, the federal government often comes to the rescue. In fact, when times call for action to protect the nation's voiceless or disenfranchised, it's usually the federal government, not a state government, that takes action.
⁴⁵
We look to the federal government in hard cases because it is better suited than states to take difficult action. State lawmakers and judges are often too regionally biased, unprofessional, or uncommitted to take important action. Many states pay lawmakers little, resulting in state legislatures filled with part-timers.
⁴⁶
Further, federal judges are appointed for life and are thus insulated from popular pressure, while state judges are generally elected to multiyear terms and are sensitive to the need to win reelection. That's why it was federal, not state judges, who were responsible for integrating the South in the 1960s and '70s.

With all these reasons to count on the federal government, you might expect it to be the main bulwark to shield farm animals from cruelty. If so, you'd be disappointed. For starters, the primary federal legislation protecting animals, the Animal Welfare Act, doesn't apply to farm animals—so we can ignore it.

Two federal laws do purport to require humane treatment of farm animals, although as we'll see, these laws have more symbolic than actual value. To begin with, the Twenty-Eight-Hour Law requires that
animals being transported across state lines for more than twenty-eight hours must be provided with food, water, and rest. If this law sounds helpful, consider that in most humans' lifetimes, unless we're stranded on a desert island or trapped in an elevator, we will
never
go without food, water, and rest for twenty-eight hours. The European Union, in fact, imposes transport time limits shorter than ours for all animals, and much shorter for cattle, sheep, goats and very young animals.
⁴⁷