Occupy Factory Farms

It has been difficult this week to focus on food-related issues when Occupy Wall Street is generating such incendiary news coverage, not to mention truly shocking "man on the street" video.

Indeed, if you want to see a scary video this weekend that's shot on a handheld camera, skip Paranormal Activity 3 and dive into this:

While this isn't the most vicious instance of police brutality at the protest - a quick search on YouTube will bring up plenty of those - it's particularly shocking because the man who was handcuffed and thrown to the ground was seemingly unaffiliated with the protest, and clearly did nothing to warrant such a violent arrest.

But it's videos like this one that have propelled Occupy Wall Street from a fringe movement to a substantial voice in the national conversation about our country's future.

And though Bill O'Riley and his ilk want to frame the protest in partisan terms, sympathizers of Occupy Wall Street are not limited to hippie socialist Nazis. So like it or not, Republican politicians will have to accept that many of the people involved in this protest speak for their constituents.

After all, there's plenty to be outraged about when the Securities and Exchange Commission is only making a company like Citigroup pay $285 million to settle a civil complaint, after the company stuffed its portfolios with risky mortgage-related investments, sold them to unsuspecting customers and then bet against them (to put that number into perspective: in its third quarter alone Citigroup earned profits of $3.8 billion).

Last time I checked Citigroup's actions are the definition of fraud, and I'm pretty sure if I did something similar I would be in jail right now.

So while some may want to dismiss Occupy Wall Street as unfocused or irrelevant, there's clearly a need for a national discussion on financial reform. But it's interesting that the protest didn't gain traction until videos of police brutality began to emerge. And I can't help but wonder how far along the movement would be if those videos hadn't been made.

For animal advocacy groups, the use of video to expose instances of animal welfare violations has been an important tool in the animal rights movement. After all, it's easy for supermarket shoppers to buy hamburgers, eggs or milk and never wonder about how that food was produced. And the agriculture industry would like to keep it that way.

In at least three states - Iowa, Florida and Minnesota - legislation is moving ahead that would make undercover investigations in factory farms, especially filming and photography, a crime. The purpose of this legislation is to hide factory-farming conditions from a public that is beginning to think seriously about animal rights and the way food is produced.

The bill proposed in Florida would make it a first-degree felony to film a farm without written permission from the owner (the maximum prison time for a first-degree felony in Florida is 30 years). Kansas and Montana, meanwhile, have already passed anti-whistleblower laws, though they aren't specifically aimed at secret filming in factory farms.

So under this legislation, videos such as the one below - produced by the animal advocacy group Mercy for Animals (MFA) - would become a thing of the past. Please note, the video is quite graphic:

This undercover investigation by the MFA revealed the shocking practices of one of the nation's largest pork producers - Iowa Select Farms in Kamrar, Iowa. Between April and June 2011 an MFA investigator documented the brutal abuse and confinement of mother sows and their piglets, which can be seen in the video.

ABC News followed up on the video, interviewing the executive director of the MFA to figure out how the organization gained access to Iowa's largest pig farm:

Gaining access as employees, "our investigators go in as eyes and ears for the public," said Nathan Runkle, executive director of Chicago-based Mercy for Animals. "They give their real names and real social security numbers and they shoot the video with a small undercover camera. Part of our message is there is not a single federal law that provides protection to factory animals. What we need are stricter, stronger laws."

Iowa Select Farms responded to the video by posting a statement from the company veterinarian, Dr. Howard Hill, on its website. Hill writes, "Iowa Select has a long-standing commitment to animal welfare." He goes on to say that the company has initiated an investigation, and then bizarrely condemns anyone who would "video tape what they believe is animal abuse if they had a chance to stop it."

Apparently this is all the MFA's fault for not stopping the abuse. Good thing Hill cleared that up for me.

The idea that someone could get 30 years of jail time for simply filming animal cruelty while the company committing the abuses suffers no repercussions is contemptible. Occupy Factory Farms, anyone?