SoylentNews

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

---

Original Submission

• 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.

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

  Parent

  Starting Score:	1		point
  Moderation		+4
  Interesting=1, Informative=3, Total=4
  Extra 'Informative' Modifier		0
  Karma-Bonus Modifier		+1
  Total Score:		5