New Report Exposes "Big Ag's Gag Agenda"

A new report puts a spotlight on so-called “ag-gag” laws, offering a clear look at how these efforts to criminalize whistleblowing “are part of a sweeping crackdown on dissent.”

Released Wednesday by the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) and Defending Rights & Dissent, “Ag-Gag Across America Corporate-Backed Attacks on Activists and Whistleblowers” details the first part of the crackdown—”the Green Scare”—that emerged in 1990, and a second wave that erupted in 2011, as well as legal challenges they have faced and successful efforts to defeat them.

“States must not be allowed to shield the disturbing reality of animal agriculture from public scrutiny,” said CCR senior staff attorney Rachel Meeropol. “Documenting what actually happens on factory farms is not a crime.”

Though they’ve taken on different forms in different states, the report find that these laws all include at least one of these elements: prohibiting documentation of agricultural practices; prohibiting misrepresentations in job applications utilized to gain access to closed facilities; and requiring immediate reporting of illegal animal cruelty.

Kansas has dubious distinction of having passed the first ag-gag law in 1990. It bars destruction of property at an “animal facility” and “enter[ing] an animal facility to take pictures by photograph, video camera, or by any other means . . . without the effective consent of the owner and with the intent to damage the enterprise conducted at the animal facility.”

That law, along with ones ones in Montana and North Dakota, served to “legitimiz[e] the idea that animal industries should receive special protection, that animal rights activists should be singled out for special punishment, and that documentation of animal agriculture should be criminalized,” the report argues.

Another important development that guided the second wave was Congress’s passage of the Animal Enterprise Protection Act (later amended as the Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act), which criminalizes animal and environment advocacy by equating it with terrorism, as well as the American Legislative Exchange Council- (ALEC-) drafted Animal and Ecological Terrorism Act model legislation. It “would not only criminalize undercover investigations and whistleblowing, it would require those convicted under the law to register with the state attorney general as terrorists,” the report states.

In 2011, states witnessed a resurgence of ag-gag laws, the report says, and while most have failed, nearly half of the states in the country considered getting them on the books.

There was a clear pattern to their emergence, the report says: