In 2008, the Humane Society of the United States released a video that went viral showing workers at Hallmark Meat Packing Company in Chino, California kicking “downed” cows and using “forklifts to force them to walk” (Shea n.pag.). We have all seen similar videos on social media, gruesome depictions that are horrifying to watch and make us seriously question our dining priorities. They are grainy, difficult to understand, and look like the videographer was in the middle of a low-scale earthquake, but these typically low quality videos turn out this way for a reason: they were filmed by an undercover whistleblower attempting to bring some transparency to the generally mystifying state of our meat industry. In the last 120 years or so since their inception in the United States, the practices of commercial slaughterhouses, meat packing plants, and other meat-centered businesses have changed very little. This is problematic for a number of reasons, but the issues can be most easily understood by comparing Upton Sinclair’s historically accurate 1906 novel The Jungle with Eric Schlosser’s 2001 sensation Fast Food Nation. The two pieces share scarily similar details and descriptions of life for workers inside and out of meat packing houses, and were published almost one hundred years apart. Regardless of how far we have come in technological advances and labor rights in the United States, the outdated methods and subpar conditions for the animals and the humans in these high-output factories still prevail. In Sinclair’s time, the widespread popularity of his novel opened the public’s eyes and caused them to successfully call for reforms to the meat industry; the Pure Food and Drug Act and the Meat Inspection Act were passed shortly after the novel was published. Granted, these reforms were born more from health concerns than for the animals and workers, but they still allowed for positive change to take place. Today while activists like Schlosser are publishing similar work they do not receive even a fraction of the attention that Sinclair’s piece did, so activists turn to more visually graphic techniques to expose the harsh realities of these facilities: enter the disturbing videos, pictures, and even blind soundbites that flood animal activist social media platforms.

        Social media is a highly accessible vehicle which allows these pieces to gain huge amounts of publicity with the American people, and the meat industry is not happy about it. In response to the popularity of these videos the industry began to fight back with what have become known as ag-gag laws, laws that would make it illegal for anyone to record and distribute footage detailing what happens in animal agriculture. The term “ag-gag” was coined by food journalist Mark Bittman in 2011 in a New York Times column, signifying an attempt to silence (gag) exposure of agricultural practices (ag) in the United States. These proposed laws have gained momentum in a number of states, and eight states (Kansas, Montana, North Dakota, Iowa, Missouri, Utah, North Carolina, and Wyoming) have succeeded in passing laws which criminalize undercover activism (ADLF n.pag.). All of these laws attempt to protect the owners of the facilities, to whom the collected footage is supposedly detrimental. While this may be true, these laws provide more questions than answers: What do these people have to hide that would make these videos problematic? And if they have nothing to hide then why should they care if the public sees what goes on in their factories? These laws do nothing but protect those who abuse the animals and keep the public in the dark about their practices, which more often than not threaten the health and wellbeing of those who eat meat products. Ag-gag laws foster distrust and hostility between the consumers and producers of meat by attempting to limit knowledge which enables consumers to make informed decisions about the food that they eat and other lifestyle choices.

        Historically speaking ag-gag laws are relatively new, showing up in the early 1990s, because of the nature of the medium they attempt to rule out. At that time they were essentially harmless due to the fact that they drew very little, if any, public awareness and were rarely put into action (Landfriend n.pag.). It would not be until 2010 and later that these bills gained support because the first incidents of animal cruelty caught on tape started to materialize in 2007. The first notable ag-gag laws were passed in Iowa and Utah in 2012 which both aimed to criminalize individuals who sought employment in these facilities under false pretenses, meaning that if someone were to apply for a job in one of these spaces and knowingly misled their potential employers about their intentions to record footage not authorized by the employer then they could face criminal consequences (Liebmann n.pag.). These laws greatly crippled efforts of undercover activists whose goal was to bring transparency to the meat industry and its treatment of animals via video recordings of actual events. This type of anti-employment fraud becomes one of five general categories of ag-gag laws which rapidly pass after the two originating in Iowa and Utah. These include bans on "agricultural interference" (filming agricultural practices), employment fraud in agricultural settings, distribution of agricultural recordings, trespass in agricultural facilities, and delayed reporting of animal abuse (Landfried n.pag.). All proposed ag-gag bills fall into one of these categories, which all focus on demonizing the capturer of any evidence against the meat industry. After 2012, bills generated to crush the capabilities of activists spread across the nation, each becoming increasingly more devious in response to the  rise of first amendment challenges to previously enacted ag-gag laws.

        With ag-gag bills rapidly multiplying, animal welfare advocates and other supporters of the public’s ‘right to know’, as it were, quickly found ways to fight back against these freedom-choking laws. Initially oppositions to ag-gag laws were based in direct violation of freedom of speech and expression upheld by the first amendment to the constitution, which is how the two instances in Iowa and Utah were overturned. However ag-gag bill writers learned to maneuver around direct infractions to the first amendment by focusing more intently on the ostensibly criminal activities of capturing and distributing footage without permission of the owner. Proposed ag-gags now place incidental restrictions on speech, by criminalizing certain acts which would indirectly limit free speech (Landfried n.pag.). Unfortunately these laws are much more difficult to find unconstitutional than previous iterations because incidental infringements are defended much less strictly than direct infringements. The trend seems to be that ag-gag laws are most successful when aimed at fraudulent employment, though, so incidental restraint disputes may still have a chance at striking down these laws.

        Most currently, anti ag-gag proponents face a new wave of ag-gag bills: rapid reporting laws. This special form of ag-gag requires any evidence of agricultural animal abuse to be reported to the police within twenty four to 120 hours of capture and criminalizes anyone who withholds this type of footage outside the specified range of hours per their state’s laws. In theory these laws appear to be a step in a positive direction for animals in agriculture, by encouraging people to come forward as soon as possible to immediately deal with abuse. While these laws provide a sincere effort to protect animals, they actually do more harm than good according to many animal welfare advocates. There are two major issues with rapid reporting laws: “duty-to-report laws are exceedingly rare” and, coincidentally, they are directly contrary to public policy (Shea n.pag.). Duty-to-report laws are those which make it certain witnesses’ (doctors, nurses, social workers, teachers, and the like) responsibility to report abuse or neglect within a very short window (usually twenty four hours) of time, which can be extremely beneficial in child, mentally ill or infirm, elderly, and other such abuse cases. These are instances in which rapid reporting laws are arguably essential to providing the best care and treatment for the abused individual, but these laws are rare for a reason. Laws that make it the citizen’s duty to do anything could be considered unconstitutional because we are technically free in this country to do ostensibly whatever we wish, and any law which goes against this autonomy would rightfully be shot down. Furthermore, rapid reporting laws for animal abuse, especially within agriculture, make it infuriatingly difficult to actually discontinue the abuse, and this is primarily because public policy dictates that a pattern of abuse must be proved to result in any substantial change or consequence. The reasoning behind this policy makes sense: one instance of animal abuse may result in the dismissal of the offending employee(s) and maybe the payment of a fine, but it does not hold the facility accountable for the abuse which will almost definitely continue. By enforcing rapid reporting laws it would become nearly impossible to build enough of a case against the culpable facility to create necessary change, or to punish the party in charge of the facility. These laws are just another tool which the meat industry uses to further profit without a conscience. For these and other reasons, rapid reporting laws embody a deceitful effort to support the anti-regulatory, profit-driven (and dare I say capitalist) agenda of the meat industry in America.

        There are a myriad other important components to discuss when looking at ag-gags, like the need for transparency in the meat industry, and how it relates to the need for greater sustainability of our food market, and the health concerns which come along with mass produced meat. These issues come intrinsically with animal agriculture, and ag-gag laws are just one of the ways that help the meat industry dupe American consumers. Ag-gag laws threaten not only animal welfare, but also food safety, workers’ rights, and the right of the people to know how their food is produced. The fight against ag-gag laws is frustrating at best and can be relentlessly discouraging, but it has become increasingly important to keep pushing back against the meat industry for the sake of those who want justice for the animals and peace of mind for meat eaters.