The Troubling Effort to Silence Animal Rights Activists

Last year, The Intercept published an article following the dollars, tracing a link between campaign contributions by big agriculture and laws meant to silence animal rights activists. But what’s happened since?

On October 5th, 2017, The Intercept published an article that started with the story of two piglets gone missing. The article ended by exposing a union between certain government bodies and corporate donors seeking to suppress an animal rights movement. As The Intercept story begins, the FBI went on a full-fledged hunt to find two piglets missing from Circle Four Farm, an industrial farm in Utah. It would later be determined that an animal rights group had removed the two piglets after discovering them during an undercover project to document slaughterhouse conditions.

The Intercept is no stranger to tackling tough issues and opposing the interests of influential organizations. Launched in February 2014, the publication’s claim to fame is its reporting on NSA documents leaked by Edward Snowden. Today, its journalists cover a wide range of issues and strive for what they call “adversarial journalism,” attempting to uncover instances of corruption and bring them to light.

The animal activists who rescued the two piglets became the victims of a campaign to intimidate those who seek to expose farm conditions. It’s with good reason on the part of the companies since practices on these large farms include burning ankles of horses with chemicals, kicking and flinging pigs, and burning and snapping the beaks off chickens, along with harsh living procedures like gestational crating.

Sometimes, however, activists are able to save or release animals living in exceptionally torturous conditions. This is what the activist group Direct Action Everywhere, the rescuers of Lucy and Ethel (the names the FBI gave to the two piglets), did. The organization would subsequently be raided by the FBI a month after The New York Times wrote a piece about the pigs’ rescue.