{"id":170347,"date":"2020-10-12T12:00:14","date_gmt":"2020-10-12T11:00:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=170347"},"modified":"2020-10-11T08:39:29","modified_gmt":"2020-10-11T07:39:29","slug":"new-documents-reveal-how-the-animal-agriculture-industry-surveils-and-punishes-critics","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2020\/10\/new-documents-reveal-how-the-animal-agriculture-industry-surveils-and-punishes-critics\/","title":{"rendered":"New Documents Reveal How the Animal Agriculture Industry Surveils and Punishes Critics"},"content":{"rendered":"
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A respected Bay Area veterinarian endures widespread attacks following an industry \u201calert\u201d about her criticisms of factory farms.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

10 Oct 2020 – <\/em>Animal agriculture industry groups defending factory farms engage in campaigns of surveillance, reputation-destruction and other forms of retaliation against industry critics and animal rights activists, documents obtained through a FOIA request from the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) reveal. That the USDA possesses these emails and other documents demonstrates the federal government\u2019s knowledge of, if not participation in, these industry campaigns.<\/p>\n

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These documents detail ongoing monitoring of the social media of news outlets, including The Intercept, which report critically on factory farms. They reveal private surveillance activities aimed at animal rights groups and their members. They include discussions of how to create a climate of intimidation for activists who work against industry abuses, including by photographing the activists and publishing the photos online. And they describe a coordinated ostracization campaign\u00a0that specifically targets veterinarians who criticize industry practices, out of concern that\u00a0veterinarians are uniquely well-positioned to persuasively and powerfully denounce industry abuses.<\/p>\n

One of the industry groups central to these activities is the Animal Agriculture Alliance<\/a>, which represents factory farms and other animal agriculture companies \u2014 or, as they playfully put it, they work for corporations \u201cinvolved in getting food from the farm to our forks!\u201d The group boasts<\/a> that one of its prime functions is \u201cMonitoring Activism,\u201d by which they mean: \u201cWe identify emerging threats and provide insightful resources on animal rights and other activist groups by attending their events, monitoring traditional and social media and engaging our national network.\u201d<\/p>\n

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Animal Agriculture Alliance website<\/p>\n

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Indeed, the Alliance frequently monitors and infiltrates conferences of industry critics and activists, then provides reports to their corporate members<\/a> on what was discussed. As The Intercept previously noted when reporting on felony charges<\/a> brought against animal rights activists with Direct Action Everywhere (DxE) for peaceful filming and symbolic animal rescues inside one\u00a0Utah farm that supplies Whole Foods and another owned by Smithfield\u00a0\u2014 an action that showed how wildly\u00a0at odds with reality is the bucolic branding of those farms \u2014 the Animal Agriculture Alliance issued a statement<\/a>\u00a0denouncing the activists for (ironically) harming their animals and urging law enforcement and \u201cpolicymakers\u201d to intervene on behalf of the industry against the activists.<\/p>\n

In the emails obtained by the FOIA request, the Alliance and its allies frequently encourage their members to\u00a0alert\u00a0the FBI and Department of Homeland Security regarding actions by activists. In response to a project by DxE to create a map tracking factory farms, Lyle Orwig<\/a> \u2014 Chairman of the agricultural company Charleston\/Orwig, Inc. and a member of the Alliance board \u2014 proposed the retaliatory step of \u201ctaking photos of every DXE [sic] member\u201d and posting them to the internet while accusing them of being \u201copposed to feeding the hungry.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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One person singled out<\/u> for retaliation in these discussions was a popular, respected Bay Area veterinarian, Dr. Crystal Heath. As a local CBS affiliate television profile of her<\/a>\u00a0explained, Dr. Heath is the kind of veterinarian who we all as children are taught to admire.<\/p>\n

Rather than working for corporations or state agencies engaged in cruel animal experimentation<\/a>, or for factory farms making a large salary to provide\u00a0the veneer of medical justification\u00a0for their barbaric<\/a>, torturous practices<\/a>, Dr. Heath has devoted herself to shelter medicine, working for years with the Berkeley Humane Society and other non-profit animal rescue groups, where she \u201chas spayed and neutered more than 20,000 animals.\u201d The CBS broadcast report provides a full picture<\/a> of the humanitarian and self-sacrificing nature of her work.<\/p>\n

But to the Animal Agriculture Alliance and its industry allies, Dr. Heath somehow became a grave danger, an \u201cextremist\u201d whose name needed to be circulated within her profession as someone to be aggressively shunned. And that is exactly what they did.\u00a0What prompted this targeted campaign against her was nothing more than her use of her veterinarian expertise to express criticisms of industry abuses and excesses.<\/p>\n

In May, The Intercept reported on a gruesome mass-extermination technique<\/a> being used by Iowa\u2019s largest pork producer, Iowa Select Farms, to kill large numbers of pigs which were deemed unnecessary and in need of \u201cdepopulation\u201d due to the pandemic. The technique, called \u201cventilation shutdown\u201d (VSD), involves cutting off the air supply in barns and turning up the heat to intense levels so that \u201cmost pigs \u2014 though not all \u2014 die\u00a0after hours of suffering from a combination of being suffocated and roasted to death.\u201d The pigs who survive this excruciating ordeal are then shot in the head in the morning by farm employees. A video report produced by The Intercept<\/a> and the video documentarian Leighton Woodhouse \u2014 based on footage obtained inside\u00a0an Iowa Select\u00a0barn by DxE as the pigs were\u00a0slowly dying \u2014 was viewed by more than 150,000 people.<\/p>\n

Numerous veterinarians were shocked by the use of this unspeakably cruel and gratuitous mass-extermination tactic, which imposes extreme, protracted suffering on highly intelligent, socially complex, sentient animals. And it created serious problems for the industry, with McDonalds demanding an explanation it could use publicly, and even discussions \u2014 from the National Pork Producers Council \u2014 to invent a new, more pleasant and euphemistic name for the extermination technique:<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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One of the veterinarians indignant about ventilation shutdown extermination programs was Dr. Heath. She was part of a group of hundreds of her veterinarian colleagues\u00a0to launch\u00a0a campaign urging<\/a> the American Veterinarian Medical Association (AVMA) to\u00a0withdraw its approval of the use of this technique in limited, proscribed circumstances. Though the AVMA says it was not involved in the specific use of the extermination technique by Iowa Select, its guidelines approving of VSD were, as The Intercept documented<\/a>, cited as justification by the company and its allies.<\/p>\n

Dr. Heath was quoted in one news report<\/a> on the controversy as saying: \u201cI believe the majority of AVMA members do not approve of VSD except as a \u2018last resort\u2019 depopulation method and\u00a0AVMA intended VSD to be used only in extreme conditions of infectious or zoonotic disease outbreaks or natural disasters. AVMA approval has allowed pig and poultry producers to use VSD as a cost-savings procedure to cheaply destroy unprofitable or excess animals.\u201d<\/p>\n

Due to her criticisms of\u00a0these factory farm practices and her work with DxE in\u00a0advocating\u00a0industry reform, industry groups focused on her. In one email from April, a\u00a0Vice President of the Animal Agriculture Alliance, Hannah Thompson-Weeman, revealed that an \u201calert\u201d had been sent about Dr. Heath to California members, accusing her of engaging in \u201cextreme activism\u201d and encouraging groups to \u201cspread the word to your veterinarian contacts in California\u201d \u2014 where Dr. Heath practices \u2014 \u201cusing private, members only channels.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Following that \u201calert,\u201d Dr. Heath began experiencing targeted campaigns against her online and within her profession. Though it cannot be proven that this was the result of the Alliance\u2019s \u201calert,\u201d what began happening to her\u00a0for the first time in the wake of that alert tracked the language used against her by these industry groups. (The Alliance and Thompson-Weeman did not respond to The Intercept\u2019s request for comments.\u00a0Thompson-Weeman locked her Twitter account<\/a>\u00a0yesterday after we previewed this article and the SYSTEM UPDATE episode. The AVMA has denied that it was involved in Iowa Select\u2019s use of VSD).<\/p>\n

What perhaps alerted the Alliance was one veterinarian group that accused her of being \u201cpart of an active campaign to cause as much harm as possible to our clients and ourselves,\u201d announcing that they had alerted the Alliance about her. Veterinarian groups on Facebook posted their own warnings about her, and she was banned from some groups.\u00a0 Comments began appearing on her own Facebook page, purportedly from other veterinarians, accusing her of \u201cderanged activism,\u201d being \u201ca liar who makes up stories,\u201d \u201cbastardizing our profession through every available method,\u201d and\u00a0claiming that she is \u201cliterally, by name, a topic of conversation in board rooms from Ag business to organized veterinarian medicine across the nation. Your name is literally toxic.\u201d<\/p>\n

What alarmed Dr. Heath most was the emergence online of anonymous fliers which contained a \u201cBEWARE\u201d warning at the top, along with her photo and a string of accusations, some of which were false, that claimed she habors \u201can agenda that doesn\u2019t include anything positive for our profession\u201d and \u201cexpresses fondness\u201d for \u201cdomestic terrorist organizations.\u201d It warned that even allowing her access to the social media pages of veterinarians could be dangerous, and thus urged that she be blocked from all online forums, personal profiles and social media groups.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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It goes without saying that this sort of a campaign could be devastating to the career opportunities or ability to earn a livelihood of any veterinarian. Fortunately for Dr. Heath, she believes her hard-earned reputation with area clinics developed over many years will\u00a0enable her to continue to work, but she believes, for very good reason, that \u201calerts\u201d and campaigns of this sort would make it extremely difficult if not impossible for her to find work anywhere else. For a younger or less-established veterinarian seeing what was done to her, they would obviously think twice about speaking out\u00a0or working against the factory farm industry, the obvious goal of such campaigns.<\/p>\n

That the U.S. Department of Agriculture was in possession of the emails and other documents circulated by industry groups, and thus produced them as part of the FOIA request, indicates that, at the very least, government officials are being included in these discussions (the flier about Dr. Heath and other social media postings regarding her were obtained by The Intercept from Dr. Heath, not by the FOIA request). What is clear is that the animal agricultural industry essentially operates their own private surveillance and\u201d warning\u201d networks, and uses their extensive influence within the halls of government power to aid their efforts to punish and retaliate against its critics and activists.<\/p>\n

Dr. Heath is my guest on this week\u2019s SYSTEM UPDATE. The episode, which\u00a0can be viewed on The Intercept\u2019s YouTube channel<\/a>\u00a0or on the player below,\u00a0first reviews these new documents in detail obtained by the FOIA request, and I then speak to\u00a0Dr. Heath about what she has endured as a result of her speaking out against this very powerful industry.<\/p>\n

httpv:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=vfE2u9x7MKk&feature=emb_logo<\/p>\n

This week\u2019s SYSTEM UPDATE on this topic \u2014 with Dr. Crystal Heath, one of the veterinarians targeted by these industry campaigns for retaliation \u2014\u00a0can be viewed on\u00a0The Intercept\u2019s YouTube channel<\/a>, or on the player.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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\"\"<\/a>Glenn Greenwald – <\/a>glenn.greenwald@\u200btheintercept.com<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

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Go to Original – theintercept.com<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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