At stake, both sides said, is regulating how livestock are treated and how Americans’ food is produced.
Since
The organization has also been buying chunks of stock in publicly traded food companies, in part to be able to introduce shareholder resolutions and pressure company executives to alter their purchasing decisions.
The strategy has worked. Companies including
“”Companies generally don’t want graphic information about how their suppliers abuse animals for their products sent to every investor and the media,”” said
But the farmers are fighting back. In recent months, agribusiness lobbyists and farm groups have bombarded companies sympathetic to the Humane Society with letters asking them to halt donations to the group.
“”HSUS seeks to remove meat from our dinner tables, leather goods from our closets, animals from zoos and circuses and eventually — pets from our families,”” Kansas Farm Bureau President
In
And in
“”They are huge. They are influential, and they are our biggest concern on the impact of our ability to domestically produce food,”” said
The egg farm footage released Wednesday was shot surreptitiously over the past two months inside
Among other things, the video footage showed chickens crammed into cages so crowded that the animals couldn’t move and their talons couldn’t touch the floor; chickens held in battery cages above manure pits that allegedly hadn’t been regularly cleaned; and a worker stuffing birds into a euthanizing chamber with such force that the thunk of the animals’ heads hitting the metal exterior could be heard.
One worker, whose face has been blacked out on the footage, told the undercover videographer that disease had killed many birds at one location: “”It was nothing to pull 5,000 out of there a day,”” the worker is filmed as saying. “”And that’s all we did for about two weeks straight, is just pull dead birds.””
Officials for
Similar clandestine videos of farm operations have led to national changes in food-safety policy. An undercover video of a
“”We’re not asking for an end to the confinements of animals in buildings. We’re asking they not be crammed into cages and crates barely larger than their bodies,”” said Humane Society President
That’s a message Pacelle has been pushing far more aggressively since
The bill’s success created a ripple effect, putting pressuring on other states to pass similar reforms.
Pacelle said the Humane Society and Farm Sanctuary — the biggest farm-animal-rights groups in the U.S., which co-sponsored