Should We Let the Humane Society Videotape CAFOs?

Twin bills in Iowa and Florida propose making it illegal to video tape animal rights abuses in agricultural facilities.

The bill is aimed at protecting “factory farms,” where animals are often treated in ways that their handlers would rather we not see.  These factory farms have earned the official designation “concentrated animal feeding operations,” or “CAFOs.”  Which doesn’t sound much better than “factory farms.”

Whether these bills will ever pass is in question.  Iowa’s Democrat-controlled Senate is unlikely to do so (though the bill may pass the Republican-controlled House).  Their constitutionality is also in question: videotaping seems to be a form of speech, and I’m not sure how much leeway legislatures have to curtail that speech.

But the bills are worth discussing anyway.  These aren’t “joke” bills like ones we’ve heard of recently in other states where, for instance, people would be required to carry guns at all times.  They’re proposed with the intent of actually passing them, and they’re proposed in dead earnestness.

Why anyone would propose such a bill, however, is difficult to understand.  In ideological terms, anyway.  In practical terms, meat producers have great incentive to end a run of under-cover videos that have embarrassed them over practices ranging from grinding up male chicks to hammering pigs with metal bars.  But it’s tough to justify the bill on any ideological ground.

Its proponents claim simply that those making the videos are vegetarians who wish for meat consumption to cease, that producers are being schemed by people applying for jobs who wish only to secure employment long enough to videotape abuses, and that the new law will somehow encourage employees to report abuses, rather than merely make videotapes of them public.

But each of these arguments is difficult to swallow.  If you don’t want illegal practices videotaped, stop conducting illegal practices.  Nobody’s taking jobs at these plants in order to open the barn doors and let all the animals escape; they’re simply making public information about production practices that the public may be very interested to hear: for the sake of animal rights, and for their own protection.

The videos that have been made indeed go well beyond protecting animals; several Humane Society undercover investigations have led to plant closures and meat recalls due to unsanitary practices that endangered those who ate the meat.  So these videos are protecting humans as well.

The Humane Society Must Be Stopped? Some Legislators in Iowa and Florida Think So.

I can understand producers’ desire to curtail the making of these videos, and their desire not to have the public see what goes on in their shops.  And we all have rights to privacy.  But what these shops are doing go well beyond practices we would ever want to see kept private, and they affect not only the safety of the animals involved but that of the human population eating the animals involved.  I was taught in law school that “sunshine is the best disinfectant.”  Why we’d want to make that disinfectant illegal in an area of our economy intricately tied not only to our ethical fiber but to our physical health, is beyond me.

Do you think the meat producers have a justifiable case for their proposed legislation?