Quick summary: Activists went inside an industrial pig farming operation in order to film the cruel treatment and deplorable conditions that these animals are subjected to as a matter of course and rescued two dying piglets in the process. What ensued was a multistate "pighunt" by the FBI.The FBI’s Hunt for Two Missing Piglets Reveals the Federal Cover-Up of Barbaric Factory Farms
Glenn Greenwald | October 5 2017, 1:05 p.m.
FBI AGENTS ARE devoting substantial resources to a multistate hunt for two baby piglets that the bureau believes are named Lucy and Ethel. The two piglets were removed over the summer from the Circle Four Farm in Utah by animal rights activists who had entered the Smithfield Foods-owned factory farm to film the brutal, torturous conditions in which the pigs are bred in order to be slaughtered.
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Female pigs give birth in this condition. They are put in so-called farrowing crates when they give birth, and their piglets run underneath them to suckle and are often trampled to death. The sows are bred repeatedly this way until their fertility declines, at which point they are slaughtered and turned into meat. The pigs are so desperate to get out of their crates that they often spend weeks trying to bite through the iron bars until their gums gush blood, bash their heads against the walls, and suffer a disease in which their organs end up mangled in the wrong places, from the sheer physical trauma of trying to escape from a tiny space or from acute anxiety (called “organ torsion”).
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Retaliation for exposing cruel treatment
What has vested these two piglets with such importance to the FBI is that their rescue is now part of what has become an increasingly visible public campaign by DxE and other activists to highlight the barbaric suffering and abuse that animals endure on farms like Circle Four. Obviously, the FBI and Smithfield — the nation’s largest industrial farm corporation — don’t really care about the missing piglets they are searching for. What they care about is the efficacy of a political campaign intent on showing the public how animals are abused at factory farms, and they are determined to intimidate those responsible.
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Government power abused to intimidate and punish activists
The Justice Department’s grave attention to a case of two missing piglets reflects how vigilantly the U.S. government uses extreme measures to protect the agricultural industry — not from unjust economic loss, violent crime, or theft, but from political embarrassment and accurate reporting that damages the industry’s reputation. A sweeping framework of draconian laws — designed to shield the industry from criticism and deter and punish its critics — has been enacted across the country by federal and state legislatures that are captive to the industry’s high-paid lobbyists. The most notorious of these measures are the “ag-gag” laws, which make publishing videos of farm conditions taken as part of undercover operations a felony, punishable by years in prison.
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You might be wondering why, in a time of actual terrorist threats, natural disasters, and generalized social unrest, the FBI would be committing any resources at all, let alone a substantial amount of them, trying to find two two piglets who would have been unceremoniously discarded by the factory farm from which they were rescued. The answer is quite simple: The US government is acting on behalf of massive agricultural corporations who are desperate to hide the systematic torture and maltreatment of farm animals from public view. That's it.
For my own part, I've always found industrialized farming operations cruel and backwards, but I've never really done anything about it except object to it in the abstract. That ends now. I refuse to continue mindlessly supporting this industry with my money. I will commit to being more consciousness about the animal products I consume. I cannot promise I will stop supporting them 100%, since I, like most middle class Americans, operate under certain economic constraints that makes it somewhat difficult to only consume humanely raised animals, but I will DEFINITELY be reducing my consumption of these products and making a sincere effort to stop consuming them entirely in the coming years. And this change of heart is precisely why the US government, which is nothing more than the armed wing of a corporate oligarchy, wants to silence animal welfare activism, because it is so effective.