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from the how-your-food-really-gets-made dept.
A federal judge in Idaho has ruled that an "ag-gag" law is unconstitutional. For those unfamilar, an ag-gag law, as defined by the article is "[a law that] outlawed undercover investigations of farming operations, is no more. A judge in the federal District Court for Idaho decided Monday that it was unconstitutional, citing First Amendment protections for free speech". As reported:
Laws in Montana, Utah, North Dakota, Missouri, Kansas and Iowa have also made it illegal for activists to smuggle cameras into industrial animal operations. But now those laws' days could be numbered, according to the lead attorney for the coalition of animal welfare groups that sued the state of Idaho.
"This is a total victory on our two central constitutional claims," says University of Denver law professor Justin Marceau, who represented the plaintiff, the Animal Legal Defense Fund, in the case. "Ag-gag laws violate the First Amendment and Equal Protection Clause. This means that these laws all over the country are in real danger."
"Ag-gag" refers to a variety of laws meant to curb undercover investigations of agricultural operations, often large dairy, poultry and pork farms. The Idaho law criminalized video or audio recording of a farm without the owner's consent, and lying to a farm owner to gain employment there to do an undercover investigation.
Previously: Dairy Lobbyist Crafted Idaho's "Ag-Gag" Legislation.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Thexalon on Wednesday August 05 2015, @02:04PM
That's obviously impractical, because there is absolutely nothing you can do to prevent sickos like that from picking up a large rock, unless we're thinking of introducing hand amputation as a form of punishment.
Part of the problem is that from the point of view of the more extreme animal rights activists, all methods used by the animal husbandry industry are unnecessarily cruel.
But like you, I take a middle ground. That might have to do with my admittedly limited experience doing hippie organic farming: When the animals ate what they were evolved to eat (e.g. cattle should eat grass), and were kept clean and attentively cared for, they were healthy and (as far as us humans could tell) happy, and both human and animal benefited from this arrangement. Even those animals destined to be eaten. The problem is that modern farming takes a lot of shortcuts and feeds animals what is plentiful rather than what they evolved to eat, pump them full of drugs to keep them from dying because of that, and minimize the amount of attention each animal gets.
Sure, the hippie methods are more expensive, but the results also taste better.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.