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Campaigns The terrible price of ag-gag laws By Lewis Bollard, NY Daily News, May 17, 2013 Rather than shutting observers out of slaughterhouses, we should open
the doors even wider When the "pink slime" scandal exploded online last March, Iowa Gov.
Terry Brandstad called a press conference. But Brandstad and beef
industry leaders weren't there to apologize for processing scraps
through centrifuges, then spraying American meat with ammonia gas. The
event featured officials showing off t-shirts with the slogan "Dude,
it's beef!" After dismissing the public's concerns about "pink slime,"
agribusiness is now trying to stop the public from learning about
practices like this in the first place. Nationwide, agribusiness is pushing "ag-gag" laws to stop undercover
filming at slaughterhouses and on farms. Earlier this month, Tennessee
Gov. Bill Haslam courageously vetoed his state's proposed ag-gag law.
But six states have already passed such laws, and five more, including
Pennsylvania and North Carolina, are still considering them. (A proposed
New York ag-gag law died in committee last year.) These laws are modeled on an "Animal and Ecological Terrorism Act"
produced by the American Legislative Exchange Council, the group behind
voter ID laws and "stand your ground" gun laws. The laws ban filming at agricultural operations, force independent
undercover investigators to disclose their identities, or require them
to surrender videos of animal abuse to authorities within 24 or 48
hours. If they don't, they face jail time - Pennsylvania's proposed law
would jail investigators for up to 10 years, the same penalty as for
sexual assault or involuntary manslaughter. What's going on in these farms and slaughterhouses that the industry
is so worried about the American public seeing? Why are they trying to
label investigators using pinhole cameras, or workers filming on their
cellphones, "terrorists"? The answer begins at the Hallmark/Westland slaughterhouse in Chino,
California. In 2007, a Humane Society investigator went undercover there
and filmed "downers," cows too sick or injured to walk, dragged by
chains and pushed by forklifts to the kill floor. (The Obama
administration has since banned the slaughter of downer cows, which pose
a higher risk of having mad cow disease.) The footage aired on network news and spurred the U.S. Department of
Agriculture to announce what was at the time the largest meat recall in
U.S. history. But by then it was too late - most of the meat had already
been consumed, much of it through the National School Lunch Program. Abuses like these are all too common in the meat industry. A 2011
Mercy for Animals investigation revealed dead hens left to rot in cages
alongside live hens at Sparboe Farms. The footage caused McDonald's to
drop its egg supplier to all restaurants west of the Mississippi. Meanwhile, two studies published last summer found that chickens are
routinely fed banned antibiotics, arsenic and even Prozac. Agribusiness can't defend these practices, so it's trying to hide
them. State Sen. David Hinkins (R), who sponsored Utah's law, said it
was aimed at the "vegetarian people who are trying to kill the animal
industry." But it's meat eaters, not vegetarians, who have the biggest stake in
ensuring a safe meat supply. And if practices are so bad that exposing
them will kill the animal industry, isn't that a reason to reform the
practices? Agribusiness has tried this heavy-handed approach before. In 1996,
Oprah Winfrey told her viewers that hearing about tainted meat and Mad
Cow Disease "has just stopped me cold from eating another burger!" Texan
cattlemen promptly sued Winfrey for food libel. But after a two
month-long trial in Amarillo, Texas, the jury returned a verdict for
Winfrey and millions more Americans learned about meat contamination. It's time for agribusiness to realize that consumers want more
information, not less, about where their meat comes from. When European consumers learned that food producers had secretly
added horsemeat to frozen meals, they were rightly outraged. If
agribusiness wants to avoid similar scandals here, it should open its
doors wide. A century ago, legislators took a more proactive approach. After
Upton Sinclair went undercover in Chicago slaughterhouses to reveal food
safety abuses in his book, "The Jungle," President Theodore Roosevelt
sent officials to the slaughterhouses to investigate. Later that year,
Congress passed the Pure Food and Drug Act, the nation's first food
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