The popular slogan “if slaughterhouses had glass walls everyone would be vegetarian” is indicative of a view commonly held by animal advocates: that the biggest barrier to either improving animal welfare, or ending animal agriculture, is community ignorance about what really goes on in factory farms.



Intriguingly, farmers also often claim that the community is ignorant of their growing interest in animal welfare. If only ignorant city-slickers knew how concerned farmers are about their animals, they would not be vulnerable to manipulation by alarmist activists.



This month Will Potter, author of Green is the New Red, tours Australia to deal with these questions and contradictions: who controls the flow of information over agriculture? And how much should the urban elite be allowed to know about how animals are transformed into meat?



Potter brings with him the latest talking points from the US, where animal activists and beneficiaries of the agriculture-industrial complex have been fighting a protracted battle over so-called “ag gag” laws. The laws seek to outlaw undercover surveillance by animal rights activists inside factory farms, under threat of harsh punishment. Offences include accepting work on farms without disclosing links to animal groups, capturing images without permission, and distributing those images via the media - tactics used in Australia by groups like Animals Australia, whose footage featured prominently on the ABC’s Lateline programme, prompting the shutdown of the live cattle export industry.

As of February this year, eight states in the US had passed ag gag laws. In 2013, 11 US states tried to introduce 15 separate laws. They all failed. There is some support for introducing ag gags in Australia: Western Australian Senators Chris Back (Liberal) and Glenn Sterle (Labor) and NSW MP Katrina Hodgkinson are both on record supporting the laws. Hodgkinson caused a stir by describing animal activists as “akin to terrorists” last year.



Farming hasn’t always been such a contested industry. Ruth Harrison, in her 1964 book Animal Machines, is widely regarded as the first person “to open the doors of the factory farm to the public”. She “revealed the indignities and suffering inflicted on farm animals by industrialised agriculture”, by apparently just asking to be shown:



The farmer switched on the light and there was instant pandemonium within a row of narrow, enclosed crates at one end of the shed. When the noise subsided he carefully let down the shutters in front of one of the crates and revealed a calf standing in a space barely large enough to hold it, its eyes wide and staring, its face a picture of misery.

It seems that in the 1960s even veal farmers were willing to grant a curious observer access to intensely reared animals. Harrison’s Animal Machines, and ethicist Peter Singer’s 1975 book Animal Liberation, also used freely available and intriguingly candid testimony from industry rags. For example, a 1963 edition of Farmer and Stockbreeder advised farmers interested in the relative merits of over-stocking that the resulting “deaths in no way nullify the extra return obtained from the higher total output”.



The age of agricultural innocence extended well into the 1980s. Thirty years later the political landscape is very different. Far beyond the issue of free range versus cage eggs, ag gag laws stifle who has control over information and its dissemination. For Potter, anti-whistle blowing laws challenge the very essence of what it is to be an activist, and by extension, the potential to drive social change.



So can both farmers and animal rights activists claim that they “just want people to know the truth”, without somehow becoming entwined in a contradiction? On balance, I think the weight of argument falls on the side of animal activists. While they no doubt prefer to film inside factory farms, where conditions are poor, the fact that they must trespass at all suggests that farmers are generally more interested in protecting their private property rights than transparency. If farmers are committed to animal rights, then why not open the gate and let the public look inside?



Next time you make an ethical choice about food, it will most likely be the work of a trespassing animal advocate that helped you make that decision, not the work of farmers who, in my experience, would prefer as few people as possible to know how Babe came to be bacon.