WOULD YOU LIKE SOME CHICKEN WITH YOUR POO? LAW DESIGNED TO CURB UNDERCOVER FILMING OF FARMING COULD SIGNIFICANTLY RAISE RISK OF OUTBREAKS

photo : mercyforanimals

Advocates for humane farming conditions were just dealt a blow this week with legislators seeking to pass a law that would not allow undercover documentarians to film conditions at farms.

This is an obvious attempt at protecting farm practices, even if such practices often run contrary to regulations put in place both for the protection of the consumer and the animal.

In a new documentary made by Mercy For Animals, conditions at a farm were so awful that they not only pointed to the extremely unhygienic conditions of the farm, and the contamination of the foodstuff that ultimately ends up in our plate, but the woeful conditions in which the animals were kept.

The agricultural sector is pushing measures, state by state that would all but silence these courageous filming of agricultural conditions.   Most of the measures are in fact put together by ALEC, a corporate funded group that produces legislation friendly to the state legislature.

In a previous case a chicken farm that was infested with flies, maggots, rats, wild birds, tainted feed, unsanitary condition followed by workers, and chicken excrement from wall to wall. The farm operated with impunity even though it probably broke every code and regulation or sanitary code.  Manure in some parts was eight feet high, and ran so deep it overflowed from the foundations.

Unfortunately, action was taken by the FDA, but only after the farm was shuttered for causing a nationwide outbreak of Salmonella that sent more than 2,000 people to the hospital.  

Furthemore, the authorities had repeatedly visited that farm and done nothing about it.  Salmonella in fact, had been detected by the farm's own testing 73 times before the outbreak occurred.  The inspectors' reports did indicate that the farm was replete with dead bugs on the packing floor and that old egg residues caked the conveyor belts, but no action was taken on their part to stop the farm's operations.

If a group like Mercy for Animals had been able to film the premises before the outbreak, there is chance that the operation would have been shuttered before the outbreak. One wonders then, why the states would pass laws that prevented such filming in the first place. 

In fact Mercy for Animals has made another documentary in 2011, at a farm in Iowa called Sparboe Frams, which showed dead chickens being left to rot inside cages next to live chicken. Thanks to the film, the FDA was forced to act.  

Now that the sequester is in place, both the FDA and USDA are going to be short of manpower and funds, so that oversight of farming facilities might become even looser.  With these new laws on the table prohibiting watchdog groups from documenting conditions or going undercover, there will no one to protect the consumer from the abuses of unscrupulous farmers. 

Source: Mercy for Animals/Mother Jones 3.20.13