Putting Factory Farm Investigations on the Map

New AnimalVisuals infographic geographically displays video exposés by species and state for easy access & panoramic analysis

Egg-laying hens in a battery cage
from an investigation by
Compassion Over Killing

Undercover video investigations are inarguably among the most effective means of exposing the legal and illegal animal cruelty being committed in laboratories, fur and puppy mills, circuses, and rodeos. Recent technological advances in video surveillance devices have made them both smaller (and therefore easier to hide) and able to capture higher-resolution images—facilitating the proliferation of such muckraking exposés. In the last decade, clandestine activists have increasingly turned their cameras toward factory farms and slaughterhouses, revealing a hidden world where many “food” animals raised for meat, milk and eggs are sadistically beaten, confined in cages so small that they can barely move, and slaughtered while still visibly conscious.  

The impact of these shocking images on public opinion and the animal agriculture industry has been profound. They’ve led to criminal animal cruelty convictions against farm workers and agribusiness companies, plant closures, major food recalls, significant corporate policy changes, public demands for stricter animal welfare laws as well as increased enforcement, and passage of landmark legislation in numerous states. It’s therefore no wonder that animal enterprises see video exposés as a threat to their profits, and have enlisted some state legislators in a cynical bid to criminalize the very act of documenting the animal cruelty being routinely perpetrated on factory farms.

I recently wrote extensively about these proposed “Ag Gag” laws in a series of interviews with representatives of the “Big Four” animal protection groups that have conducted most of the undercover factory farm investigations: namely HSUS’s Paul Shapiro, COK’s Erica Meier, MFA’s Nathan Runkle and PETA’s Jeff Kerr. Of the four bills proposed so far, those in Minnesota and Florida have been defeated, but political pawns of the animal agribusiness industry in Iowa and New York are still trying to pass these misguided attempts at censorship. Ironically, their efforts to ban undercover video investigations have backfired in that they have drawn more attention to the abuses these exposés reveal, further educating people about where their food comes from and emphasizing the importance of this information to society at large.

The Factory Farm Investigations Map

Here’s a prime example of such unwanted publicity. In response to the recent legislative attempts at outlawing undercover investigations, graphic designer, illustrator and computer whiz Mark Middleton created a new map on his AnimalVisuals website that gathers together in one place the 48 undercover factory farm exposés conducted by the Big Four animal advocacy groups in the US since 1998. Take a look at the map for yourself, then come back here to learn how animal activists can use it to both inform the public about factory farm cruelty, and why the movement should strategically strike out into virgin territory with new investigations.  

As you can see, the map is very easy to navigate: colored pins represent the Big Four organizations, and cartoon animal icons indicate the type of investigation by species (or animal use, in the cases of broiler chickens vs. egg-laying hens and beef cattle vs. dairy cows). Switch to “satellite view” (in the upper right-hand corner of the map) and zoom in to see a photo image taken from outer space pinpointing a factory farm’s precise location—something that only government spies would have been able to do just a few short pre-Internet 2.0 years ago. You can also scroll down past the map for a chronological list of investigations that specifies the state, date and species associated with each one.

Benefits of Mapping

AnimalVisuals’ factory farm investigations map can be an incredibly useful tool for raising awareness of agribusiness’ systemic animal abuse and the informational value of undercover exposés:

- The Public: Putting all the key investigations on one website gives people easy access to videos and information about factory farming’s abuse of animals. The fact that there are so many exposés also highlights the breadth of animal cruelty taking place on factory farms. As Middleton writes on the AnimalVisuals site, “Viewed individually, the actions shown might be dismissed as isolated incidents. Taken together, however, they reveal a pattern of disregard for animal welfare and routine cruelty-to-animals throughout animal agriculture.” People who view the map and videos cannot deny that cruelty is horrific and endemic throughout the animal agribusiness industry, making them more likely to question their dietary habits and consider more compassionate alternatives (such as eating fewer animal products or becoming vegetarian or vegan).

- Activists: Watching videos of animals being tortured and slaughtered may not be your idea of a good time, but it is eye-opening. Many vegetarians and vegans have told me that they already know what happens on factory farms, so they don’t need to watch any more videos documenting the horrors hidden behind their walls, and don’t want to because it upsets them. Of course, meat eaters are the ones who really need to see these videos because they probably don’t know what happens on factory farms—but how can we animal advocates expect them to watch if even we won’t? So view a video (or two or three), then click the link in the upper right-hand corner of the screen to share the map on Facebook, Twitter or email with a note encouraging your friends and followers to watch a specific video exposé that personally affected you. 

- Investigators: The map highlights the country’s informational “black holes”—especially the 29 states where none of the Big Four animal protection organizations has yet conducted an undercover investigation. Some states may be “blank” right now for various reasons. For instance, investigations tend to cluster around the areas where the Big Four are based, and there are ten states where trespassing on private property to conduct surveillance is illegal. However, in states without such laws, there would be considerable advantages to putting more factory farms “on the map” with undercover exposés. For one thing, it would make people living in those areas more aware of what is being done to animals on farms in their states. For another, it would put factory farmers throughout the nation on notice that they are not invulnerable to exposure just because they operate in a state that hasn’t yet been mapped by pioneering undercover investigators.

- Iowa Residents: Use this convenient HSUS Action Alert to encourage your state senator to oppose S.F. 431. Also contact your state senator directly, and ask him or her to oppose this bill.

- New York Residents: Use this convenient HSUS Action Alert to encourage your state senator to oppose S 5172. Also contact your state senator directly, and ask him or her to oppose this bill.

- Check out other resources on AnimalVisuals such as data visualization tools, the 3-D battery cage, and the “Farm Rescue” Facebook game. Also read my 2009 VegNews magazine article “The Road to Vegetopia: (Re)Imagining the Future of Food” featuring Middleton’s fantastic sci-fi illustrations.

Go Figure! The Mathematics of Dietary Death

Computing the cost of plant vs. flesh food production in animals’ lives

Anyone who’s been vegan for any length of time has heard the dizzying array of specious arguments for why people are supposedly meant to eat meat, dairy and eggs. These reasons range from the nutritional (“we need animal protein to live”) to the Biblical (“God gave humanity dominion over all the Earth’s creatures”) to the ethical. Yep, that’s right: some omnivores have the cajones to claim that vegans are responsible for killing more animals than flesh eaters!

Oregon State University professor of animal science Steven Davis, for one, contends that people who eat beef from cattle fed on grazing pasture spare more animals’ lives than vegans because of all the death supposedly caused by harvesting crops. While Davis’ research has appeared in such prestigious periodicals as TIME magazine and the Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics, apparently no one bothered to peer-review or fact-check his methodology before publication. That is, a new analysis of the professor’s claim reveals that (surprise, surprise!) his numbers don’t quite add up.

Artist and graphic designer Mark Middleton recently calculated the true impact of food production on two categories of animals: domestic species specifically slaughtered for human consumption, and wild species killed as a consequence of agricultural harvesting. What’s more, he translated his findings into an easy-to-read graph* that enables comparison of how different diets (i.e., plant vs. flesh foods) impact animals’ lives — both by the numbers and as an interactive (filterable) visual representation of these otherwise abstract values:



Extrapolating from this diagram, we find that:

• Eating chicken flesh takes about 100 times the number of animals’ lives as eating the equivalent caloric content of vegetables.

• Subsisting on only grains for an entire year would likely cost fewer than two animals (e.g., field mice) their lives.

• Contrary to Davis’ central assertion, the number of wild animals who die as a result of beef production is much greater than occurs in the harvesting of all plant food varieties combined.

Middleton arrived at his revised conclusion by incorporating into his formula some criticisms of Davis’ work by researchers Gaverick Matheny and Andy Larney which, upon even cursory consideration, seem so basic that it’s amazing they even had to bring them up. I mean, it doesn’t take a mathematician to know that we can feed more people per acre by using land to raise crops rather than cattle, as Matheny opined, or to understand Larner’s contention that counting animals killed by predators (in addition to, say, chemical pesticides and mechanical threshers) skews the end results. So Middleton’s new presentation begs an obvious question: why did Davis’ claims go so completely unchallenged by the mainstream media and the scientific establishment when he made them?

Opinion makers’ unquestioning acceptance and promotion of Professor Davis’ flawed theory says more about meat eaters’ desperate psychological need to justify their violent destructiveness than anything else: apparently, people want to continue eating animal flesh so badly that they will even unconsciously create and cite conspicuously inaccurate data to make the case that omnivores are ethically superior to vegans. Once again, we vegans have the truth on our side, but there remain some lingering doubts about its persuasive value, because people basically believe what they want to believe. If history is any guide, many omnivores will continue to invent and propagate ways of salving their guilt by convincing themselves that meat is not murder but mercy — no matter how much incontrovertible evidence we vegans present to the contrary.

Related AnimalRightings:

- My 8-page VegNews magazine feature article “The Road to Vegetopia: (Re)Imagining the Future of Food” (illustrated by Mark Middleton)

- My blog post about Middleton’s “Virtual Battery Cage”

* For interested techies, Middleton built this interactive graphic in Adobe Flash using a data visualization library called Flare. Click here for a full explanation of the analysis and mathematical proofs.

Experience the Virtual Battery Cage

See a factory farm through the eyes of an egg-laying hen

It is often difficult for people to truly comprehend the suffering that animals on factory farms are subjected to on a daily basis. Facts and figures are informative but can be abstract and intangible compared to actual reality, while videos documenting the conditions animals endure usually show their suffering from the human angle — from outside the cage, so to speak.

Fortunately, there’s an innovative new interactive tool called the Virtual Battery Cage (VBC) to help fill the perspective gap. Created by artist, web developer, and animal rights advocate Mark Middleton, the VBC was modeled and textured in Blender 3D, and uses Adobe Flash and Papervision 3D to create an experience like a QuickTime Virtual Room (QTVR). Such "spherical panoramas" have been around for a number of years now, but this is the first time anyone has used this emerging technology to expose animal exploitation.

Middleton says he created the Virtual Battery Cage "to compel viewers to empathize with caged hens by seeing their world from their point of view, and to show that chickens are not just things, but actual living beings whose feelings matter. I also wanted to make something interactive and interesting that would attract viewers to the facts about the misery that chickens suffer just so humans can eat their eggs."

Many of these facts are included on Middleton's animalvisuals.org website, complementing the audiovisual sensory experience. For instance, an estimated 95% of egg-laying hens raised in the U.S. (about 300 million birds a year) are intensively confined in battery cages, with each cage holding 5 or 6 birds on average, but sometimes up to 10. The cages are so small that the hens wouldn't be able to spread their wings even if they were individually caged, but the average amount of space given each bird is only about two-thirds the size of a standard sheet of paper. This is barely enough to even sit in, yet this is where laying hens spend their entire lives.

Crammed together in battery cages for months on end, chickens are prevented from engaging in even the most basic natural behaviors, like nesting, perching, scratching, foraging, dust-bathing, exploring, and stretching. Their intensive confinement contributes to serious health problems, including respiratory diseases, and broken bones and foot disorders from constant contact with wire floors. Though chickens can live for more than 15 years, their egg output starts to wane after about two years on factory farms, so they are sent to slaughter, but not all of them even survive that long. Use your mouse to scroll around the VBC environment, and you'll find a dead chicken lying on the ground among her living cage-mates.

So, whether or not you still eat eggs, visit the VBC to get a glimpse of what it's like to be inside a battery cage on a factory farm. When you see the sights and hear the sounds that comprise a lifetime of suffering, you may be inspired to act, whether by foregoing eggs or educating others about factory farming cruelty. Here's an easy way to start: forward the VBC to your family and friends and encourage them to take a look around.

And check out my 8-page feature article The Road to Vegetopia: (Re)Imagining the Future of Food with illustrations by VBC designer Mark Middleton, from the March 09 issue of VegNews magazine!