by Larry Geller

On Friday, Iowa governor Terry Branstad signed a bill that will make it much more difficult for animal-welfare advocates to sneak cameras into Iowa's factory livestock farms. The bill's fate is being watched nationwide, because Iowa's factory farms grow more hogs and keep more egg-laying hens than those of any other state.

[Mother Jones, Iowa Moves to Keep its Factory Farms Shielded from View, 3/5/2012]

Check out the full article, but warning: not before dinner.

I’ll skip the hog part and jump to the chickens:

And their work has done considerable good. Last year, a Mercy for Animals employee got inside an Iowa egg company called Sparboe Farms and released video in November. The video depicted such scenes as dead birds left to rot in the same tight cages as active layers, amid swarms of flies. In response, McDonald's, then Sparboe's largest customer, and Target ended their relationship with the company; and the FDA, which is supposed to monitor the food-safety conditions around egg farming, was moved to conduct an investigation of the facility that found several violations.

Permalink posted by Larry @ 3/06/2012 06:20:00 PM