A local lawmaker has backed a controversial bill critics say would curb efforts to expose animal abuse on Vermont farms.
State Sen. Richard Westman, R-Cambridge, is one of four sponsors of S. 162. The bill would make it a crime to trespass onto farm property or get a job on a farm under false pretenses. Offenders would pay up to a $1,000 fine if convicted.
The bill is a reaction to animal rights groups entering farms to film livestock abuse and is similar to other legislation in several states around the country, dubbed “ag-gag” bills by critics.
Supporters say the bill protects honest farmers from activists who do not understand farm practices and often raise false alarms. But opponents say it would stifle efforts that have helped put a stop to serious animal abuses in the past.
Westman, who grew up on a farm, acknowledges the bill is controversial but said he sponsored it at the request of Sen. Bobby Starr, D-North Troy, and the Green Mountain Dairy Farmers Cooperative Association. Starr, Norman McAllister, R-Franklin, and John Rodgers, D-Glover, are the other sponsors of the bill.
When asked why he supports a bill that would punish whistleblowers, Westman said, “There are clearly two sides to this.”
“Clearly, if somebody goes in and trespasses onto somebody’s farm and sets up cameras, that is breaking the law,” Westman said. “This particular legislation has been passed by a lot of states across the country. The (Green Mountain Dairy Farmers Cooperative Association) wanted it. They’re a very reputable group.”
The association is made up of Agri-Mark — the large New England dairy consortium, which includes the makers of Cabot Cheese — St. Albans Co-op and other dairy farm organizations around Vermont.
Similar laws have passed in Iowa, Utah and Missouri, reports the New York Times, and several states are considering the legislation. Lawmakers in New Hampshire and New Mexico shot down the proposals, in part due to backlash from animal rights groups.
Several groups, including the American Civil Liberties Union, American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, Sierra Club and Natural Resources Defense Council have opposed such bills nationally.
Some have linked the efforts to the American Legislative Exchange Council, a conservative lobbying group that drafts model legislation for lawmakers around the country. The council’s “Animal and Ecological Terrorism Act” includes similar provisions, as well as more drastic measures, such as labeling undercover agricultural workers “terrorists” and requiring them to register to a government database.
Breaking the Vermont law would only result in a fine.
The Humane Society strongly opposes the bill.
“Whistleblowers have played a vital role in exposing animal abuse, unsafe working conditions, and environmental problems on industrial factory farms,” said Joanne Bourbeau, northeastern regional director of state affairs for the organization, in an email. “The agriculture industry’s response to these abuses has not been to prevent them, but rather to prevent the American public from finding out about the abuses in the first place.”
A number of high-profile animal abuse cases, including in Vermont, have come to light through the efforts of agricultural whistleblowers, who often pose as people who want to work on a farm, only to use the access to film abuses there.
In 2009, a Humane Society member working undercover at Bushway Packing Inc. in Grand Isle recorded video of other workers kicking, shocking and dragging weak veal cows, among other abusive acts.
Frank Perretta, co-owner of Bushway, was later fined $2,000, required to do 120 hours of community service, and was banned from working with animals.
“Had an anti-whistleblower law existed in Vermont, these crimes would never have been revealed, and the criminals would likely still be abusing animals,” Bourbeau said.
“As a Vermonter myself, I was disappointed to see it introduced here,” Bourbeau said. “The effect of these bills’ enactment would be to criminalize the kinds of important undercover investigations now being conducted by animal welfare, food safety and other public interest organizations.”
According to Bourbeau, the legislation is not likely to pass this year, because it wasn’t voted out of the Senate Agriculture Committee before the crossover deadline — when bills from the House go to the Senate, and vice-versa. But the bill will carry over to next year as part of the Legislature’s two-year session.
Middlebury dairy farmer Robert Foster, the current president of the Green Mountain Dairy Farmers Cooperative Association and a director on the Agri-Mark board, defended the bill.
“The dairy industry has some concerns, and this was a way of dealing with that,” he said. “We try to do things openly and up front, that’s sort of a characteristic of the industry, but to have somebody come in and not play by those rules doesn’t seem quite fair.”
Foster said the bill is aimed at activists who “manufacture events” to attack the industry in general. He pointed to a recent case in Peru, N.Y., when an activist from People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals went undercover to film workers there electrocuting and poking cows, as well as burning off their horns. Foster said he’s been to that farm and never seen abuses there.
He said activists use the videos to help generate donations to their organizations. The videos, he said, are “being created by a group that advocates under the pretense of helping animals, to try and make agriculture look bad, but they do it to generate funds,” he said. “They get more money that way. It’s an economic driver.”
Foster said activists might not understand common farm practices, like tail docking, where part or all of an animal’s tail is removed.
“It keeps employees from being hurt by a tail in the face,” he said. “People crop tails on dogs and that’s fine, but when it comes to dairy cows it’s an issue. There’s a real disconnect currently between production, organic or non-organic or whatever, between those that are currently (farming), and those that think a lot of their food just comes from the grocery store.”
When asked why farm whistleblowers should be punished, Foster said some activists have manufactured phony abuses.
“It depends on whether it’s malicious or not,” he said. “If it’s a fabricated event —which it has been a good portion of the time it has been publicized. There are bad (farmers), but the industry has ways of working to deal with that.”
Foster said many farms in Vermont are certified by the Farmers Assuring Responsible Management program, a self-regulated animal welfare certification from the National Milk Producers Federation, an industry group.
Bourbeau thinks the state should be working harder to protect animals from abuse.
“Instead of playing into this knee-jerk reaction to what is perceived as a threat to agriculture, we should be working together to prevent and address animal cruelty at its root cause,” she said.
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Agri-Mark director Robert Foster and others who favor ag gag legislation are defending the kind of dairy production that an increasing number of citizens do not support. Undercover investigations take time because they establish patterns of abuse or neglect that cannot be shrugged off as isolated incidents at the hands of the rare bad actor. And to persist in docking cows’ tails demonstrates a disregard for public attitudes as well as scientific and industry expert opinion.
Decent, law-abiding farmers have nothing to hide, but those who are lax when it comes to animal welfare might want to keep their bad habits behind closed doors. Violations of Vermont’s cruelty statutes are grotesquely under-prosecuted and penalties are seldom imposed. The vast majority of citizens don’t want systemic cruelty perpetuated. In this information age, and with agri-tourism on the rise and the local foods movement growing, concerned citizens and conscientious consumers are insisting that farmed animals are treated humanely.
Animal advocates aren't the only ones who denounce routine tail docking because it causes pain and deprives cows of their natural ability to swat flies. Eleven years ago a Dairy Herd Management editorial headline declared that "Tail Docking Makes Little Sense." Last year the dairy industry Bible, Hoard's Dairyman, declared, "It's one practice whose only place should be in the annals of history." This spring, a Wisconsin Agri-View piece quoted an animal scientist admitting that tail docking is "one of the Achilles' heels" of the dairy industry. Dr. Susan Eicher's research, for one example, determined that tail amputation causes acute and chronic pain. The conservative AVMA and the Association of Bovine Practitioners have made policy statements opposing the practice.
If dairy producers in Vermont expect to survive, maybe they should start listening to the informed consumer and their own industry experts instead of digging in their heels. Cruelty is cruelty, whether it’s abuse exposed by an undercover investigator or a routine practice that contradicts the common sense of even a city slicker tourist, to whom it’s pretty obvious that cows need their tails. (www.CowsNeedTheirTails.com)
If I raise chickens, in volume, again I will likely get a couple of pigs to go with them. Why? Because the mortality rate among chicks is notoriously high. Chicks are fragile, even kept under the best conditions. And since chicks cost money, upwards of $3 each, as a farmer I have no incentive to have chicks die. But they do. Pigs will eat dead chickens, no questions asked. And snort at you looking for more nugget snacks. Apparently, from a pig point of view, chicks are darn tasty.
Makes me a bit queasy, but I’m not a pig.
The new religion is farm transparency, the idea that you should know where your food comes from, how it is raised, and how it reaches your table. The fact is, most of you? Don't really want to know how your meat comes to hit the table. Most people aren't at all comfortable with the idea that the adorable lamb in the field, pronking straight up and down in glee as the gate opens on a fresh field of dandelion blooms, is going to be shot squarely in the ear, have its throat slit, and be left, twitching, to bleed out. There's nothing attractive about that.
In fact, photographed from the sidelines it looks downright cruel. Do you really think lambs stand there cheerfully to be shot? They don't. They are dragged bodily from their pens and forced to the ground because shooting them while they are upright would be grossly dangerous. The time between munching hay with their fellows and twitching on the ground is a matter of minutes, but still, there are those minutes when they are being handled in ways they're not accustomed to, and a frightening moment before a bullet ends their confusion.
Legislation on the table would make it illegal to trespass onto a farm's property to photograph or take away evidence, and it would make it illegal to gain access to the property by false representation. For me there isn't even a question of whether or not this legislation should pass. This kind of activism is the equivalent of a vigilante sneaking into your home to gather evidence without a warrant, or the police arriving at your house in disguise to gain entry to your home to check it out. They have no reason to suspect you, no reason to be there, other than the fact that they feel you might not meet their arbitrary standards of conduct.
If you've got an issue with farming practices you have the option of buying from other farms, or better yet, getting your hands dirty and raising it yourself. You don't like how animals are handled before slaughter? Fine. Slaughter your own. You don't like how milk cows are handled? You're free to maintain your own cow. Or find a dairy that meets your requirements and buy from them.
But stay off my property and out of my barns. Unless you've got a warrant, you've got no business being in there.
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