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Utah's "Ag-Gag" Law Overturned

posted by Fnord666 on Sunday July 09 2017, @09:04PM   
from the resume-filming dept.

takyon writes:

A federal judge has ruled that Utah's ban on secretly filming farm and slaughterhouse operations is unconstitutional:

[U.S. District Judge Robert Shelby] rejected the state's defense of the law, saying Utah had failed to show the ban was intended to ensure the safety of animals and farm workers from disease or injury.

In his ruling, Shelby noted that one of the bill's sponsors in the state legislature, Rep. John Mathis, said the ban was a response to "a trend nationally of some propaganda groups ... with a stated objective of undoing animal agriculture in the United States." The judge noted that another sponsor, Sen. David Hinkins said it targeted "vegetarian people that [are] trying to kill the animal industry."

Ag-gag is a term used to describe a class of anti-whistleblower laws that apply within the agriculture industry.

Previously: Dairy Lobbyist Crafted Idaho's "Ag-Gag" Legislation
Federal Judge Strikes Down Idaho's "Ag-Gag" Law

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Original Submission

• Oh do fuck off Mathis Oh do fuck off Mathis (Score: 5, Informative) by Lagg on Sunday July 09 2017, @09:42PM (5 children)

  by Lagg (105) on Sunday July 09 2017, @09:42PM (#536938) Homepage Journal

  This asshole trying to make people think it's a Vegan thing. Like everyone who takes issue with the weird and honestly kind of gross and unhygenic commercial slaughtering operations is some kind of tree hugger. Another example of these people not having a clue who they represent. I don't even come from any sort of butchering family or anything storied like that but I've seen enough videos of commercial ops compared to guys I know that slaughtered their own chicken. I would probably not eat commercial meat if I didn't like it so much and was okay with the markup on small business stuff.

  Also that may sound picky but I've read enough to think that their germ control is basically fighting floods of chemicals with other chemicals at this point. We trust non-chemists too much with chemistry just because they hire some.

  Also worth noting: What value would a private farm that didn't think it was doing gross stuff when slaughtering have in such a law? There's not much reason (besides offending fake moral sensibilities) to not just let them get right up and film when they slaughter poultry. Doesn't surprise me that it was a dairy lobbyist, dairy operations are apparently pretty gross too. I never want to enjoy strawberry milk again. If they're undercover PETA people let the world laugh at them for thinking human survival is a life choice.

  I'm still a massive hypocrite though in that I'd prefer commercial eggs that have strict processes for making sure they're not fertile. Chicken fetus isn't my thang.

  You know what the screwiest thing is? Rep. John Mathis is apparently a veterinarian.

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  http://lagg.me [lagg.me] 🗿

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• Re:Oh do fuck off Mathis (Score: 5, Insightful) by Ethanol-fueled on Sunday July 09 2017, @10:49PM

  by Ethanol-fueled (2792) on Sunday July 09 2017, @10:49PM (#536956) Homepage

  As much as I hate hipsters, they are helping spearhead what I see as a good trend: slaughtering your own food. This is something taught to SERE [wikipedia.org] operators while they are still in school, they each raise a rabbit, name that rabbit, get to love that rabbit, then slaughter and gut that rabbit and eat it.

  The idea is simple: factory-farming has enabled humanity's disconnect from nature. Native Americans, after having taken a kill, prayed to the four cardinal directions in honor of the slain animal because they wisely viewed it as a sacrifice and not something to be taken for granted. I am no fan of Islam, but I have to admire the ceremony revolving around the Halal slaughter of animals. In the serious business of eating meat, among other things, Americans are still rather uncivilized compared to other parts of the world.

  Parent

• Re:Oh do fuck off Mathis (Score: 2) by Arik on Sunday July 09 2017, @11:07PM

  by Arik (4543) on Sunday July 09 2017, @11:07PM (#536963) Journal

  Not everyone involved is, certainly, but there's clearly a core of 'animal rights' people that clearly think eating beef is basically in the same category as eating human flesh. Some of them, I fear I'm not joking, express a clear preference for the death of humans over any other animal.
  
  Anyway, that aside, I'm afraid I mostly agree with you here. Laws against whistleblowers are a dangerous idea - even if we know there are fake whistleblowers working a degenerate agenda, let's leave that burden of proof in there about actually having evidence they did something wrong. The alternative is a cure worse than the disease.
  
  BTW, I grew up on a small farm and I'd just as soon have my eggs farmed. Admittedly I am mildly averse to all things chicken in general - not my favorite food. But they're midget tyrannosaurs with brains the size of my thumbnail and I'm not shedding any crocodile tears for their supposedly poor living conditions. If you're going to raise them at all you might as well do massive, automated farming of them so far as I'm concerned, with as few humans as possible exposed to the pests. When they are 'free range' they mostly follow each other around in a circle clucking and eating each others feces. I suspect they're the inspiration for all the 'human centipede' horror stories. There's no way commercial automation could mess them up any worse.

  --
  If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?

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• Re:Oh do fuck off Mathis (Score: 5, Informative) by c0lo on Monday July 10 2017, @01:19AM

  by c0lo (156) on Monday July 10 2017, @01:19AM (#536991) Journal

  What value would a private farm that didn't think it was doing gross stuff when slaughtering have in such a law?

  Keep away the public on environment impact of their operation?
  For example Smithfield Foods [rollingstone.com]

  Hogs produce three times more excrement than human beings do. The 500,000 pigs at a single Smithfield subsidiary in Utah generate more fecal matter each year than the 1.5 million inhabitants of Manhattan. The best estimates put Smithfield's total waste discharge at 26 million tons a year. That would fill four Yankee Stadiums. Even when divided among the many small pig production units that surround the company's slaughterhouses, that is not a containable amount.

  Smithfield estimates that its total sales will reach $11.4 billion this year. So prodigious is its fecal waste, however, that if the company treated its effluvia as big-city governments do – even if it came marginally close to that standard – it would lose money.

  ...

  Smithfield's holding ponds – the company calls them lagoons – cover as much as 120,000 square feet. The area around a single slaughterhouse can contain hundreds of lagoons, some of which run thirty feet deep. The liquid in them is not brown. The interactions between the bacteria and blood and afterbirths and stillborn piglets and urine and excrement and chemicals and drugs turn the lagoons pink.
  ...
  Looking down from the plane, we watch as several of Smithfield's farmers spray their hog shit straight up into the air as a fine mist: It looks like a public fountain. Lofted and atomized, the shit is blown clear of the company's property. People who breathe the shit-infused air suffer from bronchitis, asthma, heart palpitations, headaches, diarrhea, nosebleeds and brain damage. In 1995, a woman downwind from a corporate hog farm in Olivia, Minnesota, called a poison-control center and described her symptoms. "Ma'am," the poison-control officer told her, "the only symptoms of hydrogensulfide poisoning you're not experiencing are seizures, convulsions and death. Leave the area immediately." When you fly over eastern North Carolina, you realize that virtually everyone in this part of the state lives close to a lagoon.
  ...
  Although Smithfield may not have enough crops to absorb its pig shit, its contract farmers do plant plenty of hay. In 1992, when the number of hogs in North Carolina began to skyrocket, so much hay was planted to deal with the fresh volumes of pig shit that the market for hay collapsed. But the hay from hog farms can be so nitrate-heavy that it sickens livestock. For a while, former governor Jim Hunt – a recipient of hogindustry campaign money – was feeding hog-farm hay to his cows. Locals say it made the cows sick and irritable, and the animals kicked Hunt several times, seemingly in revenge. It's a popular tale in eastern North Carolina.
  ...
  I run into a few local guys who had made the mistake of accepting jobs in hog houses, and they tell me that you just have to wait the smell out: You'll eventually grow new hair and skin. If you work in a Smithfield hog house for a year and then quit, you might stink for the next three months.
  ...
  The biggest spill in the history of corporate hog farming happened in 1995. The dike of a 120,000-square-foot lagoon owned by a Smithfield competitor ruptured, releasing 25.8 million gallons of effluvium into the headwaters of the New River in North Carolina. It was the biggest environmental spill in United States history, more than twice as big as the Exxon Valdez oil spill six years earlier. The sludge was so toxic it burned your skin if you touched it, and so dense it took almost two months to make its way sixteen miles downstream to the ocean. From the headwaters to the sea, every creature living in the river was killed. Fish died by the millions.
  ...
  Spills aren't the worst thing that can happen to toxic pig waste lying exposed in fields and lagoons. Hurricanes are worse. In 1999. Hurricane Floyd washed 120,000.000 gallons of unsheltered hog waste into the Tar, Neuse, Roanoke, Pamlico, New and Cape Fear rivers. Many of the pig-shit lagoons of eastern North Carolina were several feet underwater....From a waste-disposal perspective, Hurricane Floyd was the best thing that had ever happened to corporate hog farming in North Carolina. Smithfield currently has tens of thousands of gallons of open-air waste awaiting more Floyds.

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  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford

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• Re:Oh do fuck off Mathis Re:Oh do fuck off Mathis (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 10 2017, @04:44AM (1 child)

  by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 10 2017, @04:44AM (#537031)

  it's not necessarily about the slaughterhouse videos.

  farm work doesnt always get to be very selective or picky who works on a farm or ranch. There are more than a few cruel and sadistic people who work with livestock. when those people believe the right people watching, an animal or two is going to bear the full anger wrath at best, or full on depravity...

  branding livestock is tough to watch. dehorning cows, goats & sheep imho is worse. Castrating males etc.

  Oh hell even some of the PETA nuts would love to burn me for shearing sheep today...

  but the fuckheads who do that stuff deserve to be secretly videotaped. often just as a matter of principal the supervisors or managers do not want to know or care about whats going on, so the stinewalling goes up ans SKAPP lawsuits go out.. Its all about moving them dogies down the chutes onto the truck or to the next pen. maybe at one point they cared, but...

  no need to go over the excuses and rationalizations for it all yet again.

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  • Re:Oh do fuck off Mathis (Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 10 2017, @06:25AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 10 2017, @06:25AM (#537046)

    Farmer here: I'm all for exposing misdeeds, and in commercial operations no real expectation of privacy should apply.

    Hell, it would be simpler to simply have a regular video feed from every operation. Tamper-evident, direct to whomever, government can look in any time.

    What I do have a problem with is the sort of case where those videos get fabricated. In my experience, because a union wanted to play hardball with management. Shocking stuff! Hideous displays of depravity and filth! Then the USDA comes in, turns the place over, shakes it hard, and discovers not a damn thing except that the union was being shitheads. And ... nothing happens to the union.

    Seriously, no fraud charges, no wasting time, no damages, no libel, no nothing. "Sorry fellas, we caught you out. Try harder next time!"

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