Videotaped investigations of animal farms expose the gruesome reality of intensive animal farming. And I’m not referring just to the most explicit and deviant examples like when secret cameras catch workers punching, kicking or torturing the animals in other, gratuitous ways.



Intensive animal farming is inherently gruesome, even when it painstakingly follows all the rules and laws. In most countries, it’s perfectly legal to group the animals in impossibly small spaces and to confine them to a life of suffering, stress, and disease.

Videotaped investigations show all of this, unfiltered. The aim is to inspire compassion and dietetic shifts in consumers, to urge companies to raise their animal welfare standards, and to trigger governments and institutions to make such standards mandatory.

To some, it may come across as an extreme and even counter-productive tactic. Online newspapers often publish those videos under attention-grabbing headlines that make them look like torture porn.