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Getting caught is a drag.
Just ask Kirt Espenson, whose employees at E6 Cattle Company in
Yet if some state legislators have their way, horrific but valuable videos like that one will never be made.
But, first, the story: Espenson, who comes off on the phone as sincere and contrite, explained to me that he’d made a “catastrophic error in a very difficult situation,” when ultracold weather caused
The offending employees have been terminated. Nothing like this has ever happened before. Nothing like this will ever happen again.
Much as I’d like to believe Espenson, this sounds like too many other horror stories of animal cruelty, and frankly — without belittling either situation — the excuses echo
The root problem is not Espenson or his company, any more than the root problem at Abu Ghraib was Lynndie
And these may be moving in the wrong direction. In their infinite wisdom the legislatures of Iowa,
Minnesota’s “ag-gag” law — isn’t that a great name? — would seek to punish not only photographers and videographers but those who distribute their work, which means organizations like the
Videotaping at factory farms wouldn’t be necessary if the industry were properly regulated. But it isn’t. And the public knows this; the one poll about the Iowa ag-gag law shows a mere 21 percent of people supporting it. And poll after poll finds that almost everyone believes that even if it costs more, farm animals should be treated humanely.
That is not the norm on factory farms. Espenson insists that it was a coincidence that the investigator for Mercy for Animals showed up just when his workers were hammering cows’ heads; the videographer believes it was routine. And, while the farmer claims that extreme weather had hurt the cows, Weather Underground recorded that the weather was far from extreme during the period in question. The investigator theorizes that weaker, less desirable animals were sickened by living in their own feces.
We can’t know. What we can know is that organizations like the Humane Society and Mercy for Animals need to be allowed to do the work that the federal and state governments are not: documenting the kind of behavior most of us abhor. Indeed, the independent investigators should be supported. As Runkle says, “The industry should be teaming up with organizations like ours to put cameras in these facilities, to advocate for mandatory training and have real
The biggest problem of all is that we’ve created a system in which standard factory-farming practices are inhumane, and the kinds of abuses documented at E6 are really just reminders of that. If you’re raising and killing 10 billion animals every year, some abuse is pretty much guaranteed.
There is, of course, the argument that domesticating animals in order to kill them is essentially immoral; those of us who eat meat choose not to believe this. But in “
An earlier version of this column misidentified the location of E6 Cattle Company. It is in western Texas, not in southwest Texas.
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This column appeared in print on April 27, 2011.