GAGGING ON THE G.O.P.’S AG-GAG BILLS
MUCKRAKING DIGS UP ANIMALS BURIED ALIVE
THE VIEW FROM THE VIRGIN ISLANDS
By John McCarthy
TMV Columnist
Idaho, Iowa, Kansas, Montana, North Dakota, South
Carolina and Utah already have ag-gag laws.
Now 18 other states – roughly half the country – also
want to use legislation to keep investigative journalists from using undercover
videos to expose animal cruelty.
All of the bills – which seek to take cameras out of the
hands of photojournalists or impose criminal penalties on activists who try to
hide their intentions on job applications – have been proposed by Republican
lawmakers.
Prince Poultry near Raleigh, North Carolina had one
poultry worker burying live chickens in a pit with dying and decaying birds. In
one scene shown on OutFront with Erin Burnett, the farm hand is asked by the
undercover intern whether he plans to first kill the chicken before he puts it
in the burial pit.
“No, we’re going to drop them in the pit just like they
are,” the worker told CNN. “You dump them in there and then Mother Nature takes
care of the rest. You go in there in the summertime, and it smells real nice
over there. If you look down in there, it’s like a gravy that’s simmering and
squirming.”
The television report also played an undercover video
shot by a PETA employee depicting lame and sick pigs on a farm in the Midwest
owned by Babcock Genetics in which the animals’ insides were left hanging
outside of their bodies with no veterinary care. The Holmen, Wisconsin-based
company has as its motto: “bigger pigs, bigger profits.”
If animal farms are left to
their own devices – with no oversight by government or private concerns – the
question becomes: will the public good be served as well as it might with the
occasional surprise inspection by amateur videographers?
“These investigations have exposed not only animal
abuse but also food safety, workers’ rights, environmental issues,” Matthew
Dominguez of the Humane Society of the United States said. “These ag-gag bills
should scare every American because Americans have a right to know what’s
happening with their food. They have a right to know where their food is coming
from.”
How Americans find out where their food is coming from
has become the issue to these G.O.P. representatives. They say it is unfair to
businesses to have animal rights activists pose as interns to surreptitiously
gain access to animal farms in the United States.
One could argue that animal cruelty could be exposed
without the help of video documentation, but in the age of TMZ, CNN and YouTube
– if it doesn’t exist on video – it might as well not exist at all. Undercover
journalism has been practiced since at least the beginning of the last century
when Sinclair Lewis became famous with “The Jungle.”
“The Jungle” not only exposed the health hazards of
early 20th Century meatpacking plants, but also cast a jaundiced eye
at human rights abuses by corporations that Jack London said engaged in “wage
slavery.”
When told that his North Carolina farm was burying
chickens alive, the owner of Prince Poultry, Tim Prince, initially denied the
allegations. But when confronted with the video evidence, Prince acknowledged
that some mistakes were made.
“She's taken six weeks of work and narrowed it down to
a few bad things I’ve done,” Prince complained about the intern. “And I’ve done
it. It's obvious. She took just a few very minute little things that we’ve done
wrong.”
And it is these kinds of “minute little things” that
Sen. Brent Jackson (R-NC) and his Republican colleagues hope to remove from
public scrutiny with legislation. The politicians are responding to big
farming’s interests in having as little oversight as possible of their
operations. But the question is why?
“I don’t have anything to say to CNN,” state lawmaker
Jackson told the Atlanta-based news source when asked for comment.
Meanwhile Dominguez said that recent undercover
investigations were key to exposing chickens being buried alive in North
Carolina, pigs left with their intestines hanging out in Wisconsin and cows
being sexually assaulted in Idaho.
"At the
heart of the matter, it's unconstitutional," Dominguez said. "It says
a lot about an industry that wants to criminalize someone for simply taking a
picture of their operation."
As Kristen
Rasmussen of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press writes, at least
one of the proposed laws would prohibit any person – including a non-journalist
– from snapping a photo of livestock in a public place.
"For
example: a photograph taken from a public road of a farm animal grazing in an
open field would expose the journalist to up to a year in prison or a $1,000
fine," Rasmussen said.
If
Republican lawmakers hold sway nationwide, the food producing industries of
America will be subject to watchdog public inspections when pigs fly.
© 2014 John Francis
McCarthy/Secret Goldfish Publishing House, LLC
John McCarthy is an
investigative reporter, fine artist and photojournalist based in the U.S.
Virgin Islands. Please send comments to: johnfmccarthy807@msn.com
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