(Beth Clifton collage)
Kansas “ag-gag” was oldest in the United States
WASHINGTON D.C.––The U.S. Supreme Court on April 25, 2022 rejected without comment an appeal by the State of Kansas against a January 2020 verdict by the U.S. District Court of Kansas, upheld by the 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which in effect erased the oldest so-called “ag-gag” law in the country, adopted in 1990.
“Ag-gag” laws take various forms, but have in common that they seek to prohibit undercover investigations that expose cruel, offensive, and often illegal activities on farms, in slaughterhouses, and in other facilities belonging to animal use industries..
The U.S. Supreme Court left intact the finding by a three-judge appellate panel that the “ag-gag” violated the First Amendment “by stifling speech critical of animal agriculture,” Associated Press explained.
(Beth Clifton photo)
10th Circuit ruled that laws may not discriminate based on intent
The 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals panel ruled 2-to-1 “that even if deception is used to enter private property, Kansas may not discriminate based on whether the person intends to harm or help the enterprise,” Associated Press continued.
“The Kansas law made it a crime for anyone to take a picture or video at an animal facility without the owner’s consent or to enter the facility under false pretenses,” Associated Press said.
The constitutionality of the Kansas law was challenged in December 2018 by a coalition led by the Animal Legal Defense Fund, also including the Center for Food Safety, Hope Sanctuary, and the vegan sanctuary Shy 38, Inc., represented by the First Amendment defense organization Public Justice.
The U.S. District Court of Kansas in January 2020 rejected a State of Kansas motion for summary judgement, and at the same time “granted most of the coalition’s motion for summary judgment, thus barring the state from enforcing the ag-gag law,” an Animal Legal Defense Fund media release summarized at the time.
(Beth Clifton collage)
Court upheld only portions of “ag-gag” addressing actions which were already crimes
“The court’s decision only left intact portions of the law that would criminalize causing physical damage to animals and facilities, and the civil remedy for violations,” the Animal Legal Defense Fund said.
Said Associated Press of the April 25, 2022 U.S. Supreme Court rejection of the State of Kansas appeal, “Federal appeals courts considering similar laws in Iowa and Idaho split over the [constitutionality] issue, raising Kansas’ hope that the high court would step in.”
Both the Iowa and Idaho ag-gag laws, however, have been repeatedly struck down by appellate courts on First Amendment grounds.
See Farmed animal product certifications “lack integrity,” investigators find.
(Beth Clifton collage)
“Agricultural facility trespass”
In March 2022, for instance, the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Iowa for the second time found unconstitutional an attempt by the Iowa state legislature and Iowa governor Kim Reynolds to criminalize undercover investigations at agricultural facilities, including factory farms, slaughterhouses, and commercial dog-breeding kennels, colloquially known as “puppy mills.”
The first Iowa ag-gag law, passed in 2012, was rejected by the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Iowa in 2019.
The lowa legislature then tried to end-run the verdict by passing a similar law which created a new crime called “agricultural production facility trespass.”
“The law makes trespassing at a food operation an aggravated misdemeanor that carries up to two years in prison and a fine of $8,540. A second offense is a felony that carries up to five years behind bars,” reported David Pitt of Associated Press in August 2021.
“Those are far harsher penalties than trespassing elsewhere, a simple misdemeanor that carries up to 30 days in jail and a fine of $855,” Pitt noted.
(Beth Clifton photo)
Conflicting rulings from same court
The 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals on August 10, 2021 “upheld a portion of the dismissal by U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Iowa” Pitt explained, “and continued to block the provision of the law that criminalized making a false statement in seeking a job at an animal production facility.
“The court, however, reversed the judge on a second provision,” Pitt continued, “and said the state can make it illegal for someone to obtain access to an agricultural production facility by false pretenses.”
The Iowa ag-gag challenge was led by the American Civil Liberties Union, the Animal Legal Defense Fund, Iowa Citizens for Community Improvement, Bailing Out Benji, and the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals.
The Idaho ag-gag law, adopted in 2014, was struck down by the District Court for Idaho just a year later.
The Ninth U.S. District Appeals in January 2018 upheld the lower court ruling.
(Beth Clifton photo)
Other “ag-gags” challenged
Coalitions including and mostly led by the Animal Legal Defense Fund have also won verdicts striking down “ag-gags” in North Carolina, Utah, and Wyoming.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit is reviewing the decision by the Middle District Court of North Carolina that struck down the North Carolina “ag gag.”
Arguing alongside the coalition of animal advocacy organizations urging that the decision should be upheld are the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press and 17 other news media organizations. Joining the coalition of animal advocacy organizations is the American SPCA, seldom if ever before a part of anti-“ag gag” cases.
Challenges to the Arkansas and Missouri “ag-gag” laws are still underway.
(Beth Clifton collage)
“Attempts to pass ag-gag laws have failed in 17 states, including Washington, California, Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado, Nebraska, South Dakota, Minnesota, Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, Tennessee, Florida, Pennsylvania, New York, Vermont and New Hampshire,” according to Progressive Farmer reporter Todd Neeley.
“Ag-gag” laws “currently remain in effect in Montana, North Dakota, Missouri, Arkansas and Alabama,” Neeley added, and are also in effect in the provinces of Alberta, Manitoba, Ontario, and Prince Edward Island, Canada.
Lab rats file briefs. (Beth Clifton collage)
USDA inspection records back online
Also moving in the direction of what the online vegan advocacy periodical Sentient Media called “transparency in food production,” the U.S. Department of Agriculture in January 2022 settled a lawsuit brought by the Animal Welfare Institute and Farm Sanctuary by publishing records pertaining to Humane Methods of Slaughter Act and Poultry Products Inspection Act slaughterhouse visits.
(Beth & Merritt Clifton)
The records, formerly public, were withheld throughout the Donald Trump presidency. The U.S. Secretary of Agriculture throughout that time was George Ervin “Sonny” Perdue III, a former agricultural veterinarian who from 2003 to 2011 was governor of Georgia.
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wow – this is some news !!
I’m kind of surprised that they used this rational in their ruling:
The 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals panel ruled 2-to-1 “that even if deception is used to enter private property, Kansas may not discriminate based on whether the person intends to harm or help the enterprise,” Associated Press continued.
This part at the end, where “transparency in food production” is mentioned, if only the masses really knew and understood where and how their food came about, I feel that would be a real wake up call.
Hopefully this really helps get the ball rolling.
Outstanding article, made my morning 🙂
The idea that “if only the masses really knew and understood where and how their food came about,” popular though it is among animal advocates, vegans, and vegetarians, is both contradicted and confirmed by history, public opinion surveys, and psychological research.
Counter-intuitive though this may seem, most people rapidly become inured to the sight of animal slaughter. Indeed, until very recently, most animal slaughter in most of the world was done in public, at open-air markets, in public sacrifice, even in high school home economics classes, where as recently as 70 years ago most girls were expected to learn how to kill poultry and clean poultry carcasses. Public animal slaughter is still the rule, not the exception, in most of the Islamic world, most of the developing world, and even much of industrialized Asia.
Conversely, most people appear to be profoundly disturbed when they see for themselves how animals live on factory farms, in distinct and obvious contrast to how most people imagine poultry, pigs, and cattle should live, from their earliest experience with picture-books as children. How animals live their lives before slaughter is what animal agribusiness most zealously tries to keep from the public, because marketing research has demonstrated for decades that this is what most disturbs consumers and is most likely to change their animal product and byproduct consumption habits.
The idea that “if only the masses really knew and understood where and how their food came about,” popular though it is among animal advocates, vegans, and vegetarians, is both contradicted and confirmed by history, public opinion surveys, and psychological research.
Sigh…..
Yes, I can see where that is true, and how my wishful thinking is just that: wishful thinking based on hope, which is a word that is slowly no longer being a part of my lexicon or thought for that matter.
May every attempt to enact, or keep, these laws be defeated.
Sharing with gratitude.
I doubt that ANY manufacturing company allows stranger on the property, into facilities, etc. to photograph anything at all, including safety hazards for workers.
Here is the problem with the animal rights radicals on farms. First, they are breaking biosecurity measures put in place to PREVENT transmission of disease.
Second, they take actions which HARM the animals.
Third, they take photos which they then make statements about that have nothing to do with the realities involved. For example. An animal being treated for a medical condition will be kept housed in a small area so that it does not have to be chased around to medicate. However, a photo of that animal accompanied by a statement that housing animals in small containers is abuse.
That is why ag-gag laws were created…to deal with the fakes and the trespass and the breaking of biosecurity. I am surprised these trespassers are not getting shot. That is what would occur in the old days with this kind of illegal behavior. These trespassers are seeking PR and attempting to destroy animal agriculture.
That Laurella Desborough opens her argument by likening factory farms filled with suffering sentient beings to manufacturing facilities using inanimate machines and materials could not more clearly demonstrate the mentality that cries out for frequent mandatory surprise inspections of any and all animal holding facilities by independent specialized branches of law enforcement, trained to know and respond to the differences between animals and inanimate objects.
Unfortunately, no such independent specialized branches of law enforcement exist. Parrot breeders, like Laurella Desborough, are among the leaders of opposition to extending the authority of the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Animal & Plant Health Inspection Service to even begin to cover birds, let alone to cover poultry barns, where billions of birds live and die in conditions which would constitute criminal neglect if the laws nominally protecting parrots in private homes applied also to chickens raised for eggs and slaughter.
(See USDA proposes to cover birds under the Animal Welfare Act––sort of.)
By comparison, the U.S. labor movement long ago secured for the Department of Labor’s Occupational Health & Safety Administration, and equivalent state and local agencies, the authority to conduct unannounced inspections of any manufacturing facility where violations of health and safety standards have been reported.
It is worth remembering, as Laurella is old enough to recall but evidently does not, that videotaping and exposing violations of the Humane Slaughter Act, and basic humane standards from which farmed animals are exempted, began not with “animal rights radicals,” but with appalled workers themselves, who turned to animal advocacy organizations for help in addressing cruel conditions only after animal industry refused to respond in any constructive way.
The first “animal rights radicals” to infiltrate animal production facilities to videotape conditions who were NOT animal industry employees before having anything whatever to do with animal advocacy began less than 20 years ago, beginning more than a decade after industry insiders themselves began bringing out videotaped evidence of systemic animal cruelty and abuse.
The notion that undercover investigators “are breaking biosecurity measures put in place to PREVENT transmission of disease” emerged as an animal industry pretext for seeking “ag-gag” laws only after factory farmers themselves were already responsible for countless horrific pandemics racing through barns and often spreading to the public, including H5N1, exotic Newcastle, swine flu in many variants, SARS, foot-and-mouth disease, and “mad cow disease,” among others. Each outbreak was responsible for millions of animal deaths, each outbreak was spread by conditions that animal advocates sought desperately to expose before the catastrophic outbreaks, each outbreak resulted from animal agribusiness steadfastly disregarding every warning, and not one of these major outbreaks resulted in any way from actions of “animal rights radicals.”
The claim that undercover investigators “take actions which HARM the animals” begs the question of what possible harm an individual with a camera might do that exceeds the harm already done by routine factory farming conditions themselves, including––besides immobilization in close confinement––debeaking, dehorning, face-branding, and castrating animals without anesthetic.
The idea that the hundreds of millions of poultry and tens of millions of pigs kept in battery cages and gestation stalls are being “kept housed in a small area so that [they do] not have to be chased around to medicate” is a Big Lie of magnitude comparable to Holocaust deniers insisting that the gas chambers at Auschwitz really were just showers. Indeed the Holocaust itself was an extension of the attitudes and methods of industrial agriculture to human beings.
As an agricultural reporter for a decade before finding the opportunity to write for animal advocates, I often saw factory farm conditions for myself, first hand, as invited guest of farmers eager to show off their technology, with never a mention of “bio-security” as I photographed their smiling faces alongside visibly suffering pigs, chickens, and dairy cows kept chained or in stanchions. As a volunteer firefighter I once saw six thousand pigs and piglets burn alive because they were too tightly confined to release, with the upper part of a relatively new barn already fully engulfed, & only a moron could imagine that they were confined that way, in what was and is still the standard manner, for any reason other than economic efficiency.
This is why ag-gag laws are created: to keep the public from finding out the unending misery inflicted on animals by agri-business in the pretense that sentient, suffering beings are really just machinery and inanimate raw materials.
Excellent reply, Merritt. It would make for a very worthwhile article in and of itself.
Wholeheartedly agree.
Merritt’s replies are always most generous, and always appreciated – even when I may not completely agree.
But this reply from Merritt here is one of the best I have ever read – anywhere.
It’s time for me to make a donation, because such journalism is not only highly informative, but also quite necessary.
I am not against appropriate regulations or inspections. This isn’t an attempt to protect animal abusers! I speak for those who care about appropriate management of birds and animals. Please note that I am one of the individuals who initiated the idea and worked on a committee to create an inspection and certification program for bird facilities. Back in the late 1980s I worked with other aviculturists and two avian veterinarians to establish a method for maintaining appropriate avain welfare for different species of birds. So, I am NOT against appropriate means of monitoring facilities with birds and animals. See http://www.modelaviculture.org for the details of the program.
“Where Does KFC Chicken Come From?” https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=460105005905624
Ms. Desborough: Living on the Delmarva Peninsula on the Eastern Shore has afforded me plenty of opportunity to visit industrial chicken houses. Since 1985 I have cared for many chickens from Tyson and Perdue in addition to having toured a Tyson chicken slaughterhouse in Richmond, Virginia. No special training or intelligence is needed to see how badly the chickens are treated and how much they suffer. The “realities involved,” viewed directly, are what compel people with a conscience to stop consuming animals. As the former Tyson chicken slaughterhouse worker Virgil Butler and his partner Laura Alexander wrote in 2004, “We just couldn’t look at a piece of meat anymore without seeing the sad face of the suffering animal who had lived in it when the animal was still alive.”
Merritt Clifton has eloquently addressed your feeble contentions.
Karen Davis, PhD, President, United Poultry Concerns. http://www.upc-online.org
It should also be noted that undercover investigations, including covert filming, have exposed practices such as grocery stores re-packaging and selling expired meat and patient abuse at long-term care facilities. Undercover footage obtained by an animal welfare organization, ironically enough, showed cows too sick to stand being dragged to slaughter–their meat being served to children through the National School Lunch program.
Investigations such as this could very well be outlawed by some of the “ag-gag”-type legislation. I wonder if those who fight against unauthorized filming and investigations would also be okay with the practices described above continuing to occur unexposed.
The 2008 undercover investigation Lindsay mentioned that caught the Westland Meat Company and Hallmark Meat Packing Company in Chino, California, selling beef found unfit for human consumption to the USDA school lunch program, is summarized here, along with many similar cases: https://www.animals24-7.org/2013/11/19/undercover-videos-push-tyson-into-requiring-farm-animal-welfare-audits/. The Westland/Hallmark investigation, completed and publicized by the Humane Society of the U.S., was among the many that have been brought to animal advocacy organizations by workers who felt they had no way to address the cruelty they saw within the chain of command, because their two immediate superiors were the worst offenders. Both of those superiors were eventually fired, but only after the undercover video showing their actions aired on national TV newscasts.