Meatonomics Read online

  Cheeseburger laws are typically based on a model ALEC statute titled the Commonsense Consumption Act. Although cheeseburger bills died four times in Congress, twenty-four state legislatures have rallied to the food industry's cries for help.31 The laws exempt food producers, promoters, and sellers from liability to a plaintiff who claims that long-term consumption of food led to obesity or obesity-related disease.

  Cheeseburger laws' proponents say the legislation stands for personal responsibility. “I recognize that obesity is a serious problem in America, but suing the people who produce and sell food is not going to solve this problem,” says US Senator Mitch McConnell (R-KY), who sponsored a cheeseburger bill that died in the Senate. “Americans need to take greater care in what—and how much—they eat.”32 But the laws' critics say courts already have a simple mechanism for dealing with frivolous suits—dismissing them—and that exempting industry groups from liability could preclude plaintiffs from recovering for real wrongdoing.33

  The Green Scare

  To recap to this point, animal food producers or restaurateurs have been largely responsible for eliminating farm animals' protection from inhumane treatment in most US states, barring people from suing over obesity and related illnesses in almost half of states, making it illegal to criticize food in a quarter of states, and in one in seven states, preventing undercover investigations into the conditions that might tempt one to engage in such criticism. If any doubt remains as to the clout or determination of those in the industry who regularly convince state legislatures to pass such laws, consider another of the animal food industry's campaigns to stifle criticism: animal enterprise terrorism laws.

  Brought to you by the same group responsible for cheeseburger laws, ALEC, a particularly bizarre class of new law has been hitting the statute books in the past decade: so-called ecoterrorism laws. Typically based on a model ALEC statute titled the Animal and Ecological Terrorism Act, these laws provide enhanced penalties for disrupting the operations of an animal enterprise.34 Criminal conduct that would normally constitute basic trespass, vandalism, or theft is punished more severely when the target is a farm, restaurant, grocery store, or any other animal-related business. Law professor Dara Lovitz writes of this phenomenon:

  The perplexing result is that an arsonist who burned down a building with no political motivation would be tried and sentenced as an arsonist; but if the arsonist burned down the building to protest the abuse of animals therein, s/he could be labeled a terrorist and thrown in prison for exponentially more years.35

  In a wave dubbed the “Green Scare” because of its similarity to the Communist Red Scare that swept the United States in the 1950s, the federal government and at least thirty-nine US states have adopted ecoterrorism laws in the past decade. Just as the Red Scare was promoted by a handful of fear-mongering individuals, the Green Scare seems to have originated with a handful of special interest groups who profit from animals and rely on their continued ability to do so.36 With little evidence of actual terrorist activity to point to, these groups nevertheless label animal and environmental activists as “terrorists” and promote what they claim is antiterrorism legislation across the United States to protect their business interests.

  According to journalist Will Potter, whose book Green Is the New Red explores the Green Scare phenomenon, “‘Terrorist’ has replaced ‘communist’ as the most powerful word in our language.”37 Terrorism is an emotionally and politically charged term without an accepted definition—in fact, it's officially defined in more than one hundred ways.38 The terrorist label is often applied by governments seeking to marginalize or delegitimize disfavored groups, leading a Reuters editor to instruct writers to avoid using the term: “One man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter.”39 Under most conventional definitions, terrorism is the use of violence to achieve a political or ideological goal.40 But this begs the questions: What is violence? Is it violent to burn down an empty building? Is it violent for chanting activists to protest in front of a home? Activists involved in both of these scenarios have been charged with felonies under the federal Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act, although in each case, no one was injured.41

  When it pushes ecoterrorism laws, the animal food industry routinely cites the need to protect the safety of our nation's food system. The main premise of this argument is that food terrorists might disrupt factory farms and wreak havoc on the nation's food supply. However, the idea that food terrorists seek to hurt the nation's food supply has little empirical support. There have been only two known acts of food terrorism on US soil: the Rajneeshee cult's infecting Oregon salad bars with salmonella in an attempt to influence a local election in 1984, and a disgruntled laboratory worker's infecting food with shigella in 1996. Neither incident resulted in any deaths, and neither made it into the FBI's list of Major Terrorism Cases.42 Moreover, as animal food production is spread throughout more than 18,800 separate facilities around the country, a terrorist group seeking to disrupt the nation's food supply by targeting individual facilities would have to be remarkably determined and coordinated to have any meaningful effect.

  In fact, experience shows that food safety is actually much better served by allowing exactly the kind of third-party monitoring that the food industry seeks to deter. After undercover investigators from the Humane Society of the United States discovered diseased cows being dragged to slaughter in 2007, food safety concerns led to the largest meat recall in US history. When legislators and law enforcement target animal activism, they chill this kind of investigation and discourage the kind of healthy inquiry that benefits consumers. Mike German, a former FBI agent who has written about his career infiltrating terrorist groups, says about ecoterrorism legislation:

  To create a law that protects one particular industry smacks of undue influence and seems to selectively target individuals with one particular ideology for prosecution. Why does an “animal enterprise” deserve more legal protection than another business? Why protect a butcher but not a baker?43

  That's easy: bakers don't spend $138 million yearly lobbying lawmakers.44

  Let's Get Federal

  When state laws fail, the federal government often comes to the rescue. In fact, when times call for action to protect the nation's voiceless or disenfranchised, it's usually the federal government, not a state government, that takes action.45 We look to the federal government in hard cases because it is better suited than states to take difficult action. State lawmakers and judges are often too regionally biased, unprofessional, or uncommitted to take important action. Many states pay lawmakers little, resulting in state legislatures filled with part-timers.46 Further, federal judges are appointed for life and are thus insulated from popular pressure, while state judges are generally elected to multiyear terms and are sensitive to the need to win reelection. That's why it was federal, not state judges, who were responsible for integrating the South in the 1960s and '70s.

  With all these reasons to count on the federal government, you might expect it to be the main bulwark to shield farm animals from cruelty. If so, you'd be disappointed. For starters, the primary federal legislation protecting animals, the Animal Welfare Act, doesn't apply to farm animals—so we can ignore it.

  The Twenty-Eight-Hour Law

  Two federal laws do purport to require humane treatment of farm animals, although as we'll see, these laws have more symbolic than actual value. To begin with, the Twenty-Eight-Hour Law requires that animals being transported across state lines for more than twenty-eight hours must be provided with food, water, and rest. If this law sounds helpful, consider that in most humans' lifetimes, unless we're stranded on a desert island or trapped in an elevator, we will never go without food, water, and rest for twenty-eight hours. The European Union, in fact, imposes transport time limits shorter than ours for all animals, and much shorter for cattle, sheep, goats and very young animals.47

  Notwithstanding that twenty-eight hours is a long time to go without basic comforts, another limit
ation of the Twenty-Eight-Hour Law is that it doesn't apply to chickens or turkeys—together accounting for 98 percent of all land animals killed for food in the United States. The law also contains loopholes big enough to drive a cattle truck through. The twenty-eight-hour travel limit applies only to interstate trips, so intrastate travel is exempt—even though animals might spend days traveling eight hundred miles or more in a big state like Texas or California. Additionally, the law can simply be ignored when necessary to overcome “unavoidable causes that could not have been anticipated or avoided when being careful.”48 The twenty-eight-hour limit can also be easily extended to thirty-six hours if the animals' owner makes such a request in writing to the carrier.49 Further, only those who “knowingly and willfully” violate the law are subject to penalties; those whose “mere negligence” results in death, pain, or suffering to animals don't violate the law.50 Then there's the maximum penalty for violations: $650. The threat of being forced to pay less than the value of one beef steer is unlikely to influence the behavior of a commercial animal transporter.

  It should come as no surprise that a law as toothless as the Twenty-Eight-Hour Law is rarely enforced—after all, what's the point of wasting thousands of dollars of government resources to fine someone $650? In the last fifty years, a grand total of zero federal decisions show a government agency trying to enforce the law. And in 2009, a Freedom of Information Act Request to the USDA and the US Department of Justice revealed that neither organization had investigated or prosecuted anyone under the law in the previous five decades.51 Given the law's applicability to only 2 percent of farm animals, its massive loopholes, its nominal penalty, and the fact that it is never enforced, we can dismiss the Twenty-Eight-Hour Law as purely symbolic.

  The Humane Methods of Slaughter Act

  The other federal law that purports to require humane treatment of farm animals is the Humane Methods of Slaughter Act (HMSA). HMSA requires that all livestock be rendered “insensible to pain” before being butchered. However, as with the Twenty-Eight-Hour Law, HMSA's scope and relevance are extremely limited because the law is subject to massive exceptions and inconsistent enforcement. There are no fines or penalties for its violation. Chickens, turkeys, and fish are excluded from HMSA, although these animals constitute 99 percent of the animals slaughtered for food in this country. And HMSA applies only in the final instant of a farm animal's life—the moment of its slaughter. Except for the largely irrelevant Twenty-Eight-Hour Law, neither HMSA nor any other federal law protects farm animals from cruelty during their lives other than at the moment of their death.

  As another exception, animals are not protected by HMSA if killed according to a religious method, such as kashrut, which produces kosher meat, or a similar method for halal meat. These methods require that the slaughtered animal be conscious at death, which calls for a knife cut to the neck, severing the carotid arteries and causing rapid loss of oxygen to the brain. Not surprisingly, this method of slaughter is controversial. Slaughterhouse designer Temple Grandin said of her first visit to a kosher slaughterhouse:

  Each terrified animal was forced with an electric prod to run into a small stall which had a slick floor on a forty-five degree angle. This caused the animal to slip and fall so that workers could attach the chain to its rear leg in order to raise it into the air. As I watched this nightmare, I thought, “This should not be happening in a civilized society.” In my diary I wrote, “If hell exists, I am in it.”52

  But by far the biggest problem in enforcing humane slaughter is that industrial killing methods, driven by considerations of profit rather than animal welfare, make it impractical or impossible for most slaughterhouses to comply with HMSA. Workers on fast-moving butchering lines must stun, kill, and dismember three hundred or more animals per hour or face discipline from their employers, and at that speed, it's impossible to stun or kill every animal properly. As a result, animals are routinely scalded, bled, skinned, dismembered, and/or eviscerated while awake and fully conscious. In 2000, workers at a slaughterhouse run by the nation's largest meat processor, IBP, Inc. (now Tyson Foods) provided numerous statements under oath about IBP's practices. One worker said in representative testimony:

  Thirty percent of the cows are not properly knocked [stunned] and get to the first legger [worker who cuts off animals' feet] alive. . . . Cows have gone alive from the knocker to the sticker to the belly ripper (he cuts the hide down the center of the cow's abdomen) to the tail ripper (he opens the [rectum]) to the first legger (he skins a back leg and then cuts off the foot) to the first butter (he skins from the breast to the belly and a little bit on the back) to the worker who cuts off both front feet. . . . I can tell that these cows are alive because they're holding their heads up and a lot of times they make noise.53

  The USDA is responsible for enforcing HMSA. The National Joint Council of Food Inspection, the union that represents the USDA's 7,500 meat inspectors, has repeatedly voiced its frustration with USDA policies that make it difficult for inspectors to perform their job duties. Meat inspectors want to do their jobs and monitor slaughterhouses' compliance with HMSA, but they often lack the access, or the support from the USDA, to do so. In 2001, the meat inspectors' union joined a number of other groups to present a petition to the USDA, citing systemic, nationwide problems in enforcing HMSA and demanding that the USDA do a better job of enforcing the law.

  Specifically, the petition stated that slaughterhouses across the country were failing to stun animals properly and were dragging and beating conscious animals, and that USDA inspectors were largely powerless to take any action. In other words, these inspectors were being sent into battle without weapons or support. Arthur Hughes, speaking for the meat inspectors' union, cited a lack of both training and access to slaughter areas as the chief problems facing union members. “We are the people who are charged by Congress with enforcing the HMSA, but most of our inspectors have little to no access to those areas of the plants where animals are being handled and slaughtered,” Hughes said. “The HMSA is not . . . a priority at all. And the USDA doesn't train us—many of the new inspectors don't even know the HMSA exists.”54

  The following year, Congress also expressed its frustration with the USDA's failure to enforce HMSA. Congress stated in the 2002 farm bill: “It is the sense of the Congress that the Secretary of Agriculture should fully enforce [HMSA],” and “it is the policy of the United States that the slaughtering of livestock . . . shall be carried out only by humane methods, as provided in [HMSA].”55 The only reason for Congress to take this unusual step—restating the provisions of existing law—was to remind the USDA to enforce the law.

  Despite petitions, Congress's admonition, and a regular stream of undercover investigations and newspaper articles documenting problems in the nation's slaughterhouses, the USDA's enforcement of HMSA continues to be grossly inadequate. In the fall of 2007, the Humane Society of the United States concluded a six-week undercover investigation at the Hallmark/Westland Meat Packing Company in Chino, California. The investigation found that although five USDA inspectors were regularly stationed at the plant, diseased and infected immobile “downer” cows were routinely slaughtered and illegally sold as meat for human consumption. Because the cows were unable or unwilling to walk to slaughter, various inhumane techniques were employed to move them. These techniques, all of which violated HMSA, included gouging their eyes with a baton, kicking and beating them, and shooting pressurized water into their nostrils and face. This investigation led to the USDA recalling 143 million pounds of tainted beef—the largest beef recall in history. Several employees at the plant were charged with crimes, and the plant ultimately closed down. Where were the inspectors? Why didn't they report this illegal activity?

  Stanley Painter, then head of the meat inspectors' union, was summoned to Congress in 2008 to answer these questions. He testified that a number of problems routinely hamper meat inspection efforts, including funding cuts, inspector shortages, increased workloads, and su
pervisors' practices of intimidating line inspectors and rewriting their reports to exonerate violators.56 USDA records indicated the department was short eight hundred inspectors, and a watchdog group found that from 1981 to 2007, the number of inspection personnel per pound of meat inspected dropped by 54 percent.57

  Factory Problems—Rare or Routine?

  When undercover footage emerges to show unsafe or inhumane conditions in meat plants, as it often does, the meat industry is quick to respond. After the massive 2008 beef recall, the American Meat Institute issued a statement which read in part:

  The U.S. meat industry has operated under continuous federal inspection since 1906 when the Federal meat inspection system was created. . . . Such intense oversight is unique to our industry. No other industry in agriculture or in other industries, from health care to auto manufacturing, has inspectors on site at all times. . . . Claims that we are not regulated heavily enough or that inspection oversight is lacking are simply outrageous. . . . We will not let a video from what appears to have been a tragic anomaly stand as the poster child for our industry.58

  It's accurate that the industry is heavily regulated with respect to the safety, packaging, and labeling of food. But in the area of humane treatment of animals, we've seen that the meat industry is essentially unregulated. There's little relevant state law, and the only relevant federal law, HMSA, is poorly enforced, covers only 1 percent of animals killed for meat, and doesn't apply to animals during any part of their lives except the moment of their death. Thus, when meat producers claim “intense oversight” requires them to treat farm animals humanely, we should be as suspicious as when Richard Nixon told the world he had nothing to do with that little break-in at the Watergate Hotel.