What are “ag-gag” bills?
“Ag-gag” laws threaten crucial eyewitness investigations that expose cruelty to animals on factory farms.
How?
- By banning the documentation or exposure of abuse on factory farms
- By making it a crime for an investigator to secure a job at a factory farm
- By preventing an investigator from documenting abuse as systematic or ongoing
Why is it important to show that abuse is systematic and ongoing?
By forcing those who photograph or record abuse to come forward and reveal themselves within 24 or 48 hours of the first incident, “ag-gag” bills would prevent eyewitness investigators and whistleblowers from documenting and exposing these abuses as systematic, routine, and inherent in the factory-farming industry—not just isolated incidents that occurred on a single day.
For example, in 2008, PETA spent three months investigating an Iowa Hormel supplier and found that workers beat pigs with metal rods, jabbed clothespins into their eyes, and even sexually abused a pig with a cane. Evidence from this case helped prosecutors achieve the state’s first convictions for the abuse and neglect of factory-farmed pigs.
But can’t the government handle this?
There are no government inspections of factory farms for cruelty-code violations. When workers witness and report abuse, those claims are often ignored. Eyewitness investigators provide authorities with crucial evidence and empower them to hold abusers accountable to the law, and they’ve helped officials achieve landmark criminal indictments and convictions of abusers across the country.
What can I do to help?
Keep an eye on this page for updates on bills as they’re introduced. In the meantime, the best way for you to save nearly 200 animals every year from a life of misery on a cramped, filthy farm and a painful death at a slaughterhouse is to go vegan!
