Thanks to investigators, Animal Equality works to bring to light the terrible conditions endured by animals and the illegal practices within the meat industry.
At the beginning of every crisis, there is a warning. Someone connects all the dots and rushes to tell others. A pattern then emerges and everything becomes clearer. And finally, an event occurs that reveals the hidden cost of relying on a corrupt system.
Most of the time we are not caught off guard; we are told that something is about to happen, or is happening, and we choose to ignore it. This occurs either because we need to be personally affected before we react, or because we believe that systems exist to protect us — too often we fail to act before it is too late. And when alarm calls have an impact on economic interests or on public confidence in the safeguards of governing systems, efforts to silence whistleblowers become ever more intense.
We now find ourselves still in a pandemic that seems to have emerged from nowhere and, in its early stages, the authorities appeared to think that the disease posed little risk to any of us. But at the beginning of the outbreak, there was someone who had foreseen what the outcome would be if we did not respond adequately. The reason the world did not listen to him is that there was an active campaign on the part of government forces to silence his protest.
In December 2019, Li Wenliang, a Chinese doctor working at a hospital in Wuhan, sent an alert to his colleagues that some patients had been quarantined with an illness resembling Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (Sars). Despite the alarm, the initial reaction of the local authorities was to accuse Li of making false statements that had disturbed the social order and to ensure that he did not commit any further unlawful acts. On 10 January 2020, Li contracted what is now known as Covid-19 and then died within a month.
When rumours about the disease began to spread online, the authorities in Wuhan declared that these patients were in fact suffering from an unknown form of pneumonia. Without heeding the warnings or taking containment measures, the disease spread rapidly through China and then around the world. With millions of documented cases and hundreds of thousands of deaths that followed, it is now widely accepted that the new virus originated in Wuhan, with some research pointing to a local market for seafood — also known for the trade in wild animals — as the epicentre.
After his death, Li was exonerated by the Chinese Communist Party's anti-corruption agency, and the police officers who silenced him were reprimanded. Unfortunately, amid criticism from Chinese citizens calling for harsher penalties for those responsible, the system that allowed his detention and silenced him remains entirely intact.
The response of the Wuhan authorities to the outbreak was not the only one of its kind.
As an investigator who works undercover in many countries, I have seen this pattern repeat itself in the numerous cases in which I have been directly involved. In the United States, I worked in a slaughterhouse that killed "spent dairy cows" to supply the national school lunch programme. I also witnessed scenes in which sick cows that were unable to walk were dragged in chains, prodded by forklifts, and violently beaten to force them into the food chain for American children as meat (and in the process, putting the entire country at risk), all in the presence of the United States Department of Agriculture (Usda), the body responsible for inspections and oversight.
When the footage from this investigation was released, the initial reaction was that the company denied the slaughter of cows that were unable to walk, and the Usda claimed that individual workers had concealed the abuses from inspectors. In my first meetings with the federal agency, I was given a statement to sign that absolved them of responsibility and placed the blame on hourly workers. It was my refusal to sign the document, followed by a nationwide objection, that changed the course of the investigation and led to the closure of the slaughterhouse and the enactment of federal legislation.
In the summer of 2019, an Animal Equality investigator worked at the Farmers Fresh slaughterhouse in the United Kingdom and documented the horrific treatment of animals in that setting too. The footage clearly shows lambs falling into the conveyor system carrying them to the slaughter hall, becoming trapped with their heads caught in the machinery, with the result that the animals were literally killed and decapitated in front of other sheep. Sheep that were unable to walk from the pen to our conveyor were killed on the spot. Their bodies were then stacked on the backs of live sheep to be transported to the slaughterhouse and processed in complete violation of British law.
But the most shocking aspect of the investigation is that these incidents were taking place under the eyes of — and, to be fair, in some cases sanctioned by — the animal welfare inspector from the Food Standards Agency (Fsa), the body responsible for oversight in the United Kingdom.
Animal Equality is currently collaborating on an investigation into the practices we documented at Farmers Fresh and is calling for the company and its officials to be held accountable for what is happening and has happened at that facility. Indeed, the FSA inspectors who witnessed the same acts that our investigator documented and made public never intervened. Their duty, under English law, is to protect the welfare of animals slaughtered at the facility.
In reality, however, it seems as though their role has simply become one of ensuring that slaughterhouses can operate at ever-greater capacity and speed. This is the same mandate as their counterparts at the USDA in the United States, where the agency is approving programmes that will allow slaughter lines to operate at increasingly high speeds, with a greater number of inspections but carried out by the meat-producing companies themselves, and therefore without any independent third-party oversight.
We must listen to the witnesses on the ground who see abuse, lack of transparency and the failures of those who should instead be overseeing these practices first-hand. Our relationship with animals has shown that we are at extremely high risk of zoonotic transmission, and our failure to enforce even the most basic welfare standards causes immeasurable suffering and constitutes a threat to public safety.
If we fail to ensure that oversight is effective and robust, we will do nothing but increase unreported violations and create further disasters. Since the role of those who carry out official inspections and checks is all too often clearly on the side of those who hold power or on the side of producers, and truth is being silenced ever more frequently, whistleblowers and undercover investigators are the clearest and strongest voices we have for making us aware of the vast scale of abuse, dangers and corruption that exists across the world in the realm of industrial animal production and intensive farming.
Our lives depend on the voices of these courageous whistleblowers — let's defend their freedom.
