undercoveranimalover

I saw a lot of messed up stuff in those years,so it's hard to pick one thing, though there's a particularly tragic fate that befalls many egg-laying hens that stands out in my mind.

On the vast majority of egg farms, hens are kept in stacks upon stacks of crowded wire cages, called "battery cages," where they never leave. Conveyor belts bring them feed and take their eggs, pipes give them water, and they basically sit their all day, 7 to 10 per cage, trampling each other and vying for space.

They're bred to lay so many eggs that commonly, they "prolapse," which means that their oviduct basically inverts and spills outside of their body. It's a very painful condition, one that's common to animals that are intensively bred; I've seen it on dairy and pig farms before. However, with egg-laying hens, this organ can get tangled in the cage wires, causing extreme pain while depriving them of the ability to get food or water. So they basically starve or get trampled to death as their organs are slowly pulled out of their body.

The craziest part is that in these facilities, there can be as little as one human worker per 300,000 birds. This means that most birds suffering this fate will never be noticed, and even worse, when they are, workers are not expected to help them. I was actually reprimanded by my supervisor for trying to help these birds and voicing concern for them. She said it was a distraction from my duties.

Thanks for the kind words. Working undercover involves doing things you'd never do in normal life - even if that's just standing still while other people do horrible things. My tactic was just to always remember why I was there and what I was there to accomplish, and to keep in mind that if I acted out, I'd be fired immediately and lose the opportunity to help. When my job required me to hurt the animals (for example, by amputating tails and testicles at a pig farm), I always tried to make sure that I did so with more care than the worker that would likely replace me. It's not a good answer to your question, but it's the best I have. It certainly wasn't easy for me.

I also used the fact that I was new to my advantage - if something particularly disturbed me, I would say so - I even reported a number of things to management. Once, that resulted in me getting accused of being undercover, but more often, people just told me that it bothered them too at first, but that I'd get "used to it."

Thanks for the question. Some places I investigated changed their practices as a result of my expose. For example, Willet Dairy stopped "tail-docking" (chopping off the tails of cows without anesthesia) after Mercy for Animals released my footage. The local DA also charged and convicted a worker there for animal cruelty, and Willet's biggest customer - a cheese purchaser for Domino's - cancelled their contract with them, so hopefully now they understand that animal welfare should be taken seriously. The best thing to come of that investigation, though, was that New York State Assemblymember Linda Rosenthal introduced a bill to ban tail-docking throughout the state. Unfortunately, that bill stalled in the Ag Committee. :P

Other places I investigated are still doing things exactly as they have been - especially the pig and egg farms that keep their animals locked up in cages so small they can't even turn around or extend their limbs. Fortunately, Mercy for Animals and the Humane Society are now doing a really good job of getting the word out to consumers and corporations that buy from these farms not to support these practices.

Great question, and I'll try to do it justice. In the short term, intensive confinement systems need to be phased out immediately. I'm referring to gestation crates for breeding pigs, battery cages for laying hens, and veal crates for veal. These cage systems keep intelligent and social animals immobilized in a way that destroys their bodies and their minds - animal welfare expert Temple Grandin compared it to living your entire life in an airline seat. So that needs to go, like right now.

In broader terms, I'm a big fan of what's called the "Five Freedoms," which were originally proposed by the British Government's Animal Welfare Council in the 1960s. These include freedom from hunger and thirst, freedom from discomfort, freedom from pain, injury or disease, freedom to express normal behavior, and freedom from fear or distress. I think these freedoms are easier to provide than we may think, and primarily, they involve giving animals room to roam, explore, and socialize.

How do we get there? Well, for one, consumers need to demand it. Vegans, vegetarians, and conscious omnivores have been making great strides in advancing these issues in recent years, but we're still a minority.

Legislation is also vitally needed to set minimum animal welfare standards and prevent companies from "racing to the bottom" in order to cut costs. Several states have recently banned intensive confinement of at least some farm animals, and national legislation was recently proposed by a bipartisan group of Congresspersons that would create minimum standards for egg laying hens, and also require labeling so that consumers could choose to go even farther. That stalled this year due to immense opposition from some agribusiness groups, which is criminal IMO. Hopefully it will pass next year.

Economic policy plays a role too. We should be subsidizing farmers who switch to more humane, environmentally sustainable, and worker-friendly systems, instead of systems that favor consolidation, animal cruelty, and environmental devastation, as we do now. The EU is actually making some decent progress with this in their Common Agricultural Policy, tho of course I think they could be doing more.

Sorry for the long answer. There's probably a lot more we can be doing, but I think those three aspects are the most important.

Yea, it's true that those labels don't mean much. "Cage-free" birds are typically still extremely crowded and trample each other. They also don't have access to outdoors. "Free-range" is, at minimum, the same thing as cage-free, but with a little concrete patio where a small percentage of birds can be in an area that gets fresh air. Until we revise those standards, your best bet is to get local eggs from reputable farmers, or to avoid eggs altogether.