Just a month ago, I wrote about a new kind of undercover farmed animal investigation carried out in the UK by Animal Aid. The conventional way to do these sorts of investigations is to hire someone to work undercover who then gains employment at a factory farm or slaughterhouse. This worker goes about his job while wearing a hidden camera, thereby creating video documentation of the facilities’ cruelties.
Mercy For Animals is the group best known for this sort of investigation, and they’ve released a string of videos over the past several years documenting everything from hatcheries to veal farms to pig breeding facilities. HSUS, PETA, and Compassion Over Killing have likewise made headlines by releasing videos filmed by undercover investigators.
Animal Aid’s autumn investigation took a different approach to gaining footage. Volunteers sneaked into seven UK slaughterhouses and planted hidden remote video cameras. They allowed the cameras to run for days or weeks, and then compiled this footage and released it to the public. The video made headlines across Britain, and the public uproar paid off immediately: within a week Britain’s Food Standards Agency recommended that all slaughterhouses in the country be outfitted with video cameras.
Well, now an Israeli animal rights group has added a brilliant new twist to the approach taken by Animal Aid: they’ve installed a spy cam in a factory egg farm, and are broadcasting the images in real time directly to the web. And here’s the best part: since factory farms are so large and so interchangeable in appearance, Israel’s egg farmers can’t find the damned camera!
It’s one thing to see video of animals brutalized weeks ago; quite another to watch a live streaming feed that factory farmers are desperately trying to shut off.
There’s no reason why this sort of thing couldn’t be done on a wide scale throughout North American and European factory farms and slaughterhouses. Israel’s Anonymous for Animal Rights may have just pioneered the most important tactic yet conceived for exposing factory farm cruelties. (Via BoingBoing.) Link.
