For animal rights activists, a bona fide hit

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An undercover vegan wired with a camera no bigger than a sugar cube spent six weeks last fall working at a Southern California slaughterhouse. To fit in, he brought sandwiches made with soy riblets and ate them in a dusty parking lot with the other workers.

He tried not to worry about the emotional toll that long days escorting cows to the kill might have. He had more practical concerns, like whether the camera switch hidden in his pocket would fail or a cow would smash into him and crack the recording equipment taped to his body.

The Humane Society of the United States first gave a 32-minute video made from his footage to the San Bernardino County district attorney, then in January released an edited version on its Web site and to a newspaper. The video showed workers flipping sick dairy cows with forklifts, prodding them with electricity and dragging them with chains to be processed into ground meat, some of which likely ended up in chili and tacos at public school cafeterias.

It was as if someone gave Upton Sinclair a video camera and a Web link. Animal cruelty charges were filed, the slaughterhouse was shut down and Congress held hearings. The Agriculture Department announced the recall of more than 143 million pounds of meat — the largest in the nation's history. (Cows so sick they can't walk can't legally be processed into food because they may have mad cow disease, also known as bovine spongiform encephalopathy, a form of which can be passed on to humans.)

After more than 25 years of tactics that have included tossing a dead raccoon on to the lunch plate of Anna Wintour, the Vogue editor; boycotting fast-food restaurants; and staging legal challenges, the animal rights movement had a bona fide hit.

 

 

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Video: Video from California slaughter plant (The Humane Society)» View

 

 

A new generation of cameras so small they can be hidden in eyeglass frames or a hat — together with the rise of YouTube and the growing appeal of so-called citizen journalism — has done for animal rights advocates what the best-organized protest could not. Perhaps more than other social agitators, people concerned about animals raised for food have discovered that downloadable video can be the most potent weapon in their arsenal.

"Most activist organizations working on a national or international scale have already integrated all kinds of Internet content into their strategy," said Eric Klinenberg, the author of "Fighting for Air: The Battle to Control America's Media" (Metropolitan Books, 2007) and an associate professor of sociology at New York University.

Video downloads can be especially effective if they are picked up by the mainstream media and if they portray something plausible to an audience increasingly sophisticated at dissecting images on the Internet, he said.

"Sometimes a video will just catch on and be powerful regardless of your political perspectives," he said. "Americans know enough about the inside of the food industry now to believe an image like this."

That it came from the least radical of the animal rights groups using undercover video helped. It was also part of a well-coordinated legal and media strategy. The undercover vegan is on the Humane Society's 10-person investigative team. He applied for a job at the Westland/Hallmark Meat Company in Chino, California, after his efforts to investigate another plant failed.

"I went to this place almost on a hunch," the investigator said in an interview last week. "Really, that is exactly how it happened. It was too good to be true."

The undercover vegan agreed to be interviewed only if his identity was kept private because he fears retaliation. He declined to talk about certain aspects because of continuing civil and criminal investigations tied to his work at the plant.

The success of the Humane Society video was built on decades of trial and error by animal rights advocates who have spent years dragging bulky cameras around to slaughterhouses, sometimes posing as employees.

Ingrid Newkirk, a founder of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), pioneered the technique in the early 1980s when she hid in a cardboard box outside a laboratory, serving as lookout for an undercover employee photographing mistreated monkeys inside. The case led to U.S. government reforms that improved life for research animals.

By the 1990s, animal rights advocates had started turning an increasingly accessible generation of video cameras on farm animals.

Sometimes the images helped end inhumane practices. But often, local law enforcement officials would not prosecute what appeared to be abuses of animals. Some videos were exposed as creatively edited frauds, with images taken out of context. Others were simply too gruesome for most people to watch.

The Westland/Hallmark video was shot and edited in ways that made it more effective than some earlier undercover slaughterhouse videos, according to people who work in the meat processing industry and longtime animal rights advocates. The film showed clear legal violations but avoided the bloody images of many undercover videos. As a result, local and national television stations could replay the images over and over.

"The video itself had the right balance of violence," said Wayne Pacelle, the president and chief operating officer of the Humane Society.

In addition, the public was more likely to relate to large mammals being mistreated in the name of ground beef for schoolchildren than to undercover images captured in the past, like ducks manhandled in the production of foie gras or Thanksgiving turkeys used as punching bags.

The timing was right, too, coming when the level of public worry over food-borne pathogens and the oversight of the food supply is high.

The power that video sharing has brought to animal rights advocates has led some meat processors to argue that their industry should start making videos of its own.

"Everything about slaughter and agriculture that is up on YouTube is the bad stuff," said Temple Grandin, the Colorado-based animal behavior expert who is a leading adviser to the cattle industry. "We've got to get the good stuff up on YouTube."

To that end, the American Meat Institute is compiling a video showing humane, well-run slaughterhouses that could be released by this spring, said Janet Riley, a vice president of the national trade association, which represents most meat and poultry processors in the United States.

And last week, Agriculture Department officials said the agency would once again consider putting cameras in several hundred of the nation's slaughterhouses to watch out for inhumane handling and poor procedures.

But even images of the best slaughtering practices can be misunderstood, Riley said. Without some knowledge of what it takes to kill and process an animal, the average person can have difficulty evaluating slaughterhouse videos, whether they are meant as exposés or promotions.

"The fact is, you could be absolutely, 100 percent in perfect compliance, but if someone is not used to seeing the slaughter process it would be unsettling," she said.

Of course, the transparency Riley and Grandin advocate does not appeal to everyone in the meat business. Many want to work harder to keep recording devices out of slaughterhouses — something Grandin thinks will be impossible.

"How are you going to keep the cameras out when they're as big as the pearl buttons on my Western shirt?" she said.

Several states have laws restricting photography and videography of what are broadly referred to as "animal enterprises," including circuses, medical laboratories and ranches. And in 2006, Congress passed the Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act, which makes behavior that results in damage to or the economic disruption of an animal enterprise illegal. The laws were in part a reaction to the increased use of hidden video cameras, Newkirk said.

Just when the movement has mastered the nuance of the medium, such legal blocks plus the increasing cost of investigations are making things difficult for even the most dedicated undercover campaigner.

With research, legal fees, production costs and accommodations, an investigation can cost as much as $67,000, Newkirk said. And investigators who work for the Humane Society and PETA say it is getting tougher to get hired at plants because managers are increasingly suspicious of applicants who don't fit the profile of the typical slaughterhouse worker, often a Spanish-speaking immigrant.

But the success of this video has given the technique a boost. "A picture is worth a thousand words, but a good video is worth a million," Newkirk said.

Peter H

 

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