Industrialized Factory Farms Threatens Humans and Animals Alike—As DC Protects Them, w/ Wayne Hsiung and John Oberg
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Welcome to a new episode of System Update, our live nightly show that airs every Monday through Friday at 7:00 PM Eastern, exclusively here on Rumble, the free speech alternative to YouTube.
Tonight, many Americans for generations have been raised on family farms, or have admired them and their values from afar.
A bucolic, natural, healthy way of life that raised and treated animals very well, until slaughtering them in humane ways to turn them into food.
But such things barely exist at all anymore in the United States.
Family farms have been almost entirely replaced with a much different species, namely industrialized factory farms owned by gigantic international corporate conglomerates such as the Chinese-owned Smithfield Foods or the Brazilian corporation JBS.
To say that factory farms are different from family farms is to radically understate the case.
They are complete bastardizations of them, a vandalization of that way of life, and have all but ended the existence of family farms in the United States.
What takes place inside factory farms in the United States is anything but bucolic or humane.
That is why this industry has spent massive sums of money to fund both political parties and then use that political influence to implement laws that literally make it illegal to reveal with videos or photos the reality of what takes place inside of those factories.
Just like the U.S.
military industrial complex knows that the population will tolerate endless wars only if the barbarism and bloodshed remains hidden, when is the last time you heard about or from a family slaughtered by American bombs?
The factory farm industry in the United States knows that the public will recoil with revulsion, disgust, and indignation.
If the truth were known or were seen about the mass torture of animals inside these factory farms, along with the filthy and diseased conditions that threaten the public health, the mass dumping of some of the most revolting and toxic waste products produced by any industry, and so much more.
Fortunately, for the sake of public transparency, many courageous animal welfare activists and journalists have risked prison and prosecution in order to bring us the truth of what happens, the utter horrors inside these factories.
I do not think it's an exaggeration, and we're going to show you the evidence to prove this, to say that history will look back on the atrocities in this industry and struggle to understand how they could have been tolerated.
Crucially, you do not need to be a vegan, a vegetarian, or anything else to confront the savage and barbaric torture and immorality that these industries impose on sentient, emotionally complex, and highly intelligent animals solely to maximize profit for an already highly profitable industry.
People often turn away from this reporting on this topic, in part because they think they're going to be sermonized or pressured to change their dietary choices.
That is just not the case.
But many activists, journalists, and politicians have worked on reform measures while they continue to consume meat, fish, and other animal products.
One need not become a pacifist in order to denounce the horrors of war, just as one need not become vegan to denounce and work against the most extreme horrors and atrocities of factory farms.
The evils of this industry go far beyond violations of animal welfare.
This industry has repeatedly induced the government to abuse its law enforcement agencies, including the FBI and DOJ, to persecute nonviolent activists and those who seek to reveal the truth.
They prosecute them not only as felons, but often as terrorists, even though they don't use violence.
The impact on the public health, on the ability to control the spread of antibiotic-resistant pandemics, the psychological damage to workers in these factories who are forced to impose these cruelties day after day, and so many other societal and economic harms have been well documented.
This is an issue on which I have long reported.
When I first began doing so, mostly as a way of highlighting the abuse of government power against animal rights activists who are just dissidents to the status quo, I was genuinely shocked and horrified when I began learning and seeing the abuses of this industry.
Why is that?
These practices are so natural and so moral and so in line with what human beings are supposed to do.
Why is this industry so desperate to keep it all a secret from the public?
And why do we instinctively recoil in horror when we see the truth?
In addition to showing you just some of what is taking place inside Smithfield and JBS factories that have almost entirely destroyed family farming and reporting on the political impact on our liberties from all of this, I will speak tonight to two very brave and effective activists.
The first is Wayne Soong, who was formerly of the group Direct Action Everywhere and now with The Simple Heart, who has been repeatedly prosecuted and threatened with prolonged jail time.
For his universally non-violent attempt to show the world what is taking place inside these factory farms.
And we'll also speak with John Oberg, who has become one of the most effective communicators on social media for speaking with meat eaters and non-vegans and others about why they should care about the abuse of animals inside these factories as much as they care about the abuse of dogs.
As we say about everything we report on, the war in Ukraine, the war in Gaza, the growing censorship industrial complex, there is value in knowing the truth regardless of whether that truth changes your views.
This is a massive industry we're talking about and their relentless efforts to conceal what they do is all the more reason why journalism and activism and transparency about them is so vital.
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As you know, I'm traveling this week, and so we won't have our Tuesday and Thursday aftershows this week, but we will be back live on our regularly scheduled program on Monday, February 19th, and we will have our nightly shows then, as well as the twice a week aftershows.
For now, welcome to a new episode of System Update, starting right now.
It's often the case that people talk about journalism.
They criticize journalism.
They talk about the importance of journalism.
They argue about who is a journalist and who's not, what is good journalism and bad journalism.
And yet it's very rare for anyone to take a step back and define what that means, what journalism means.
actions.
What it means to me, at least in terms of political journalists, there's a lot of different kinds of journalists.
You can have cultural journalists and critics and all sorts of other things.
But for political journalism, what journalism means to me is a focus on the most powerful institutional actors in society or the most powerful and influential individuals.
And to not glorify them or offer to serve as propagandists to promote them, but instead to subject them to journalistic scrutiny, to assess the truth of what they're saying, and not just to assess it, but to investigate, and then ultimately try to reveal to the public what the public ought to know that these industries and institutions are hiding So that the public can make up their own mind about what they think of those institutions now that they're fully informed.
Journalism does not mean telling somebody what to think or trying to lead them to a conclusion, but it does mean doing your best to expose the secrets, to point out the curtain so that you can see what is taking place there.
That's what we do with powerful institutions like the U.S.
Security State, and the Pentagon, and the military-industrial complex, and the media corporations that try and influence and propagandize Americans, and the institutions behind the censorship-industrial complex.
And among the most powerful institutions are the institutions, the corporations, that compose the factory farming industry in the United States.
They are responsible for almost all of our food supply.
They employ hundreds of thousands of workers.
They finance the campaigns of both political parties.
They exert massive influence, both in Washington and in the legislative houses of state governments.
And they have impact and influence in almost every aspect of our lives, including the law and politics and our free speech rights.
And so focusing on this industry, it's something I've done throughout my journalism career, though I don't think we've done a devoted show to this topic.
We thought this was a good week when I was traveling to do so, to take a step back and ask you to pay attention and kind of be interested in this because of the impact that it has, regardless of what you end up concluding, was something very important to do.
And it's particularly important because of how Devoted these corporations have become to keeping the truth from you.
To actually trying to enact laws using their influence over various lawmakers to make it illegal for activists and journalists to expose what it is that they do and to show you the truth about what takes place inside of these factory farms.
Here from Forbes in May of 2016, and there are countless articles like this, the headline, Big Agriculture Bullies and Lobbies to Keep Americans in the Dark.
Anytime powerful institutions are working to keep you in the dark, you should want to turn on the lights, or have journalists do their job and turn them on for you, so that you can see what's going on.
From quashing free speech to lobbying for laws that would allow it to hide what it doesn't want the public to see, big agriculture has perfected strategies for keeping consumers uninformed and for covering its unsavory tracks.
When undercover advocates released a number of videos showing animal abuse on industrial farms and in slaughtering facilities, Big Agriculture barely blinked.
Instead of being outraged at appalling living conditions, food safety concerns, or animal torture, Big Ag chose to lobby for state quote, Ag-Gag legislation.
Laws that would punish those who record and distribute images of horrifying conditions at animal agricultural facilities without the owner's consent.
Big Ag has convinced House Republicans to include language in the proposed 2017 House Agricultural Appropriations Bill that would exempt agricultural commodity groups from Freedom of Information Act requests.
Last year's fiasco at the American Egg Board likely precipitated Big Ag's efforts to get check-off programs exempted from FOIA law.
Emails obtained through a FOIA request showed that Egg Board leaders had tried to undermine an egg-free mayonnaise competitor, Just Mayo.
According to the emails, the Egg Board worked with a public relations agency to try to slow Just Mayo's growth and at one point directed a consultant to call Whole Foods to ask that they keep Just Mayo off of their shelves.
That should bother you no matter what your views are on any of this, that they are trying to create a legal framework where it is a crime to video or photograph what is taking place inside of those facilities to show the public if you don't have their permission to do so.
It's a direct violation of free speech and free press laws and fortunately courts have finally begun to rule that way.
Here from a release from Harvard University by Joseph William Singer in February of 2023 is a report on just one of those court rulings.
Quote, the Fourth Circuit strikes down North Carolina's Ag-Gag Law under the First Amendment.
Quote, in a very complicated ruling, the Fourth Circuit has struck down North Carolina's Ag-Gag Law that prohibited employees from engaging in, quote, undercover animal cruelty investigations and publicizing what they uncover.
On the grounds that it violates the First Amendment free speech rights.
The North Carolina Property Protection Act prohibits, quote, intentionally gaining access to the non-public areas of another's premises and engaging in an act that exceeds this person's authority to enter.
The court suggests that North Carolina can achieve any legitimate goals it has in protecting private property by focusing on the interests of trespass laws that protect the exclusive use of land, but unauthorized access can be prohibited that cannot be conditioned on regulating speech that is protected by but unauthorized access can be prohibited that cannot be conditioned on regulating speech So much of what we learned has been through unauthorized reporting about the government.
Snowden was unauthorized to take the evidence.
That prove that the NSA was illegally and unconstitutionally spying on Americans without warrants?
WikiLeaks publishes unauthorized information?
It's what journalists do.
Of course corporations don't want anyone reporting on the truth of what they're doing.
They want to rely on propaganda and commercials and all sorts of fake branding to convince you that they're doing something that they are not in fact doing.
And the reason why they are so eager to hide this is because there is now a growing group of people, activists and journalists, who understand that what is taking place inside these facilities is a moral atrocity and a threat to the public health and devastating in so many other ways.
And it can't be hidden any longer because it affects all of you.
It affects all of us.
So one of the innovative ways that animal rights groups and animal welfare groups have developed for showing the reality is by using virtual reality technology to film inside of the factory farm so that you can see what it's actually like, the horrors and torture that is taking place there.
Here from the New York Times in July of 2017, you see the headline, animal welfare groups have a new tool, virtual reality.
Quote, for years, animal rights advocates trying to expose bad practices in the meat industry have surreptitiously shot grainy photographs and handheld video.
Now they have a more sophisticated weapon in their arsenal, the virtual reality camera.
Wayne Swoon, the founder of Direct Action Everywhere, who will be our guest in just a little bit, Which also fights for animal welfare, called the technology, quote, a game changer for animal advocates.
Quote, the meat industry always complains that we're using selective footage, narrow vantage points and editing to make things seem worse, he said.
But with virtual reality, you're seeing exactly what we saw and are hearing exactly what we heard.
In one sign of how quickly the technology is being adopted, among animal advocacy groups, Direct Action also released a virtual reality video on Thursday.
It takes viewers into the barns at Circle Four Farms in Milford, Utah, one of the largest pig production operations in the United States.
The film shows sows with bloody and mangled teats, pregnant cells with gnawing on the bars of the narrow stalls that they live in until they give birth, And piglets clamoring over and nibbling dead siblings.
In a portion of the film, Mr. Swing narrates, dead piglets are piled up behind a sow who was wedged into a crate so tightly that she cannot move away from the mess.
But a viewer can turn away from her to see and hear sows in similar straits all around her.
Circle Four is owned by Smithfield Foods, which was bought in 2013 by Shanghai International, one of China's largest meat processors.
Kira Lombardo, a Smithfield spokeswoman, said the video had, quote, blatant inaccuracies, such as the assertions that the animals shown in it are being starved.
Now we're going to get back to the issue of pigs in just a second.
Pigs are At least as intelligent as dogs are.
More so, most tests show.
They are as socially complex and emotionally developed as dogs are.
They're extremely social animals.
But in these factory farms, mother pigs are taken into a cage so tiny and narrow that they can't move.
They cannot turn around and they're kept there for a year or longer.
And they go insane because just like if you put human beings in solitary confinement because we are social animals, we will go insane.
John McCain famously said that far worse than the physical abuse he suffered while detained by the North Koreans was the isolation that he was kept in.
There's all kinds of studies about how prolonged isolation drives humans insane.
It drives pigs insane as well.
And you go into any of these factory farms and these pigs are so desperate to get out.
from these tiny little crates they're kept in that they start gnawing on the metal rods until their teeth fall out and their mouths are full of blood.
They often just almost kill themselves by throwing themselves against the metal barriers until all their organs are scrambled.
It's one of the most horrible things you will ever look at.
Especially given the capacity for thought and complexity and intelligence and social connection that pigs were born to fulfill.
But what really is the most defining attribute of these factory farms is the utter and complete dehumanization, the need to absolutely cut off any sense of empathy that people have for animals it's very common it's a kind of cliche but it's absolutely true that a lot of people who grew up to be serial killers or sociopaths or psychopaths begin by torturing small animals
things that most people can't do because our natural empathy for animals doesn't prevent prevent us from doing so it doesn't permit us from doing so sociopaths and psychopaths have no empathy and people trained to work in these factory farms are trained almost like people in the military are trained not to see the humanity of those they have to kill to cut off that empathy to suppress it so that they can do unimaginable cruelty to animals
one of the things that is very common in egg farms is is that hens that are bred to lay eggs are bred not to be eaten but just to lay eggs.
And as a result, the only chicks that have any value are female chicks because they keep those to lay the eggs.
The male chicks have zero economic value to egg farms because they can't lay eggs and because they don't grow into the kinds of roosters that can be consumed as chickens, as food, because their body doesn't support them, they don't have the muscles thinning, So they have zero economic value.
And so what happens is when hens lay eggs and these chicks are born and are hatched, By the thousands, they are culled, meaning that on a conveyor belt, huge numbers of chicks are sent down this assembly line and workers who are trained to identify their gender take out the male chicks on the first day of life.
This is right when they're born and they instantly Mass kill them, either by throwing them into a container that kills them with carbon dioxide, or more commonly, just throwing them into an incinerator, something that just cuts their body until they're dead.
And there's huge mountains of dead male chicks, not even the day old, who then get dumped into sewage, into communities, into water supplies.
It is revolting.
Here is a video from Animals Australia that shows you the process from March of 2023.
The other process sees workers sorting and separating male chicks from the females on a conveyor belt.
The vulnerable baby chicks bounce off each other and the rails in this mechanized system.
Finally, one by one, they drop off the belt, their lives are ended, and bodies shredded by a metal grinder.
Alright, so there are workers who wake up every day and they go to work, and their job is to pick out male chicks that are about an hour old, and to throw them into a metal grinder that chops up their body and kills them.
By the billions.
By the billions.
What it's doing is these are creatures that are born as part of whatever you believe in by God, by nature, by the universe, and they are bred to be instantly slaughtered by the billions.
Here is a Separate procedure that is used for chicks.
It's called de-beaking Because it's much easier to raise them if they don't have their beak so that they can't peck at or attack other hens and the de-beaking That gets done by the thousands every day where they just cut off their beak with no painkillers, no anesthesia.
They obviously suffer greatly.
What it shows is just the complete humanity that has been stripped from this process.
It is just purely industrialized, treating them like widgets at a factory, even though these are living sentient beings who feel pain, who feel everything that highly developed animals feel.
Take a look at...
this and I think it really vividly illustrates the mentality behind it.
So, let's take a look at the light let's take a look at the light of the light.
Now, some of these are activist videos so you can ignore the sad music and just analyze some of these are activist videos so you can ignore the sad I know that most people look at this and don't want to see it.
They feel bad about it.
They feel sadness and empathetic to these animals.
Why?
If it's so natural, we should be conditioned to be completely indifferent.
We should be able to look at these videos all day and not feel the slightest thing.
Here is a undercover film at Smithfields Foods that shows, and this is from 2010, the way in which the pigs are kept in these crates that are so tiny they literally cannot stand up and turn around.
They just sit there by themselves looking straight forward for years on end.
So those are the gestation crates and you see here one pick out for the next and this goes on for miles.
These are huge, gigantic factories, and each one of these is a pig kept in a cage that is about the same size as the width of their body, so they can't turn around.
I'm talking about hundreds of thousands and millions of them every day being kept this way.
All we found are extraordinarily inhumane conditions at Smithfield Foods, the largest pork producer in the entire world.
I still remember the first time I ever laid eyes on a gestation crate facility.
Seeing the helplessness of these animals, who have done nothing to deserve the fate that they're enduring, suffering inside of these crates, is just absolutely devastating.
The Green Society of the United States has investigated Warren Smithfield's breeding operations.
This facility represents what Gestation Crate confinement is.
Open wounds.
Pressure sores.
Infections.
Bleeding gums from biting the bars so much.
And these animals aren't even being cared for with individualized veterinary attention.
Regardless of how the system is managed, these pigs are barely able to move even an inch their entire lives.
They're unable to walk around, to turn around.
It causes them to quite literally go insane.
This is one of the reasons why so many animal scientists and veterinarians have condemned this extreme confinement practice.
Smithfield about, I would say, two weeks ago, two, three weeks ago, made an announcement that we had made a decision to phase out the use of sow gestation crates made an announcement that we had made a decision to phase out the use of sow So that's from 2007.
This video is 2010.
Here's a Smithfield executive claiming that they made a decision to phase out gestation crates.
They've been doing this for many, many years.
Because, again, these are not vegans objecting or vegetarians objecting.
These are meat eaters who believe in the justice of killing animals for food.
Many of them do.
And yet, that doesn't mean they endorse industrialized mass torture that causes these sentient animals to go completely insane.
Over a ten year period.
Smithfield committed publicly to phasing out gestation crates within a 10-year period, receiving a lot of public praise for doing so.
Now, just a couple years later, the company is saying that it no longer can meet its own very generous self-imposed deadline.
That's completely unacceptable.
Many other pork companies, such as, let's say, Maxwell Foods, which is one of the biggest pork producers in the country, is already 100% gestation-grade free.
Cargill, another major pork producer, is already 50% gestation-grade free.
The American Farm Bureau, the primary agribusiness lobby in the United States, funded a poll in which they found that an overwhelming majority of Americans find gestation crates to be inhumane.
This is one of the reasons why seven states in the country have already banned this practice, why all 27 member nations of the EU have banned the practice.
Gestation crates are a practice of the past, not of the future, and Smithfield ought to be speeding up that trend rather than slowing it down.
So not only did the state of California, which he referenced there, ban...
The use of gestation crates inside California.
And unfortunately, most of the states that have done so are not the states where most of these farms exist.
They exist in places like Iowa, where those states are completely dominated by these industries.
But the Californians also went and, in a referendum, banned the importation into California of any pork products that are from factories that have gestation crates.
And the association representing this industry sued the state of California.
It went to the Supreme Court.
The Biden administration Entered the case and cited on the side of the animal agriculture industry, saying California has no right to ban the importation of pigs from other states that don't have the same ethical standards as they do.
And the Supreme Court ruled in favor of California, one of the most important victories in the history of animal agriculture and animal activism at the Supreme Court level.
Here I want to show you one more video of what's called the culling process, where the male chicks are selected and picked out the second they're born or minutes after they're born and then just immediately extinguished.
*music*
*music*
*music* *music* *music* *music*
*music* There are a lot of philosophies, a lot of religions, a lot of cultures that believe in the justice of killing animals and using them for food, but I don't think there's any humane point of view or philosophy or worldview that can justify treating live creatures that are part of the universe in a completely industrialized and inhumane way.
I don't believe there's anyone looking at these videos who doesn't feel a sense of serious discomfort.
You should ask yourself why that is.
Obviously, this is a very visual show.
It's hard to listen to this on podcast because the videos are such an important part, but just want to make that note.
Now, as I said, there's a significant civil liberties and legal component to all of this, which is that these industries have become so desperate to conceal the truth of what's taking place there because they know that it can jeopardize the willingness of people to tolerate it.
that they have increasingly caused the enactment of laws that would enable animal rights activists who are totally nonviolent, whose only objective is to enter these facilities to film them, Occasionally they'll take one or two small pigs or small chicks that are close to death that have no economic value.
I literally mean one or two.
Just to be able to rescue them, nurse them back to health, have the public be able to identify with them, understand their life trajectory, to understand that their lives absolutely have value.
But they don't bomb these facilities.
They don't call in bomb threats.
That's old animal rights activism from decades ago.
They use nonviolent means with the intent to inform.
And yet the government has succeeded and the FBI has aggressively pursued a framework that is designed to treat them as domestic terrorists.
A framework that if you're a dissident of any kind, You should be very alarmed by it.
Here's the ACLU in 2005 when they were still the ACLU.
Quote, new documents show FBI targeting environmental and animal rights groups' activities as, quote, domestic terrorism.
Quote, the FBI is using counterterrorism resources to monitor and infiltrate domestic political organizations that criticize business interests and government policies, despite a lack of evidence that the groups are engaging in or supporting violent action.
The ACLU said that the documents released today on Greenpeace, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, and the Arab America Anti-Discrimination Committee show the FBI expanding the definition of domestic terrorism To include citizens and groups that participate in lawful protest or civil disobedience.
Among the documents released today were more than 100 pages on FBI files on PETA.
Multiple documents indicate ongoing surveillance of PETA-related meetings and activities, including a vegan community project event at the University of Indiana, during which the group distributed vegetarian starter kits to students and faculty.
An animal rights conference in Washington, D.C.
that was open to the public, and a planned protest of Cindy Crawford's decision to become a llama fur spokesperson.
The ACLU said that FBI surveillance of mainstream organizations involved in public education campaigns has allowed the Bureau to maintain files with names and other information on law-abiding Americans who support or participate in events organized by the groups.
The ACLU said that some of the documents suggest infiltration by undercover sources at animal rights meetings and conferences.
One highly redacted, quote, Domestic Terrorism Operations Unit document suggests the FBI is using PETA's interns for surveillance, while others describe attempts to locate and interview, quote, several former disgruntled PETA employees.
Similarly, one cryptic email kept in a Greenpeace file describes a source who, quote, offers a unique opportunity to gain intelligence on activists who show a clear predisposition to violate the law.
Now, this is what we've seen over the last six or seven years with regard to right-wing groups, anti-government groups.
It's all part of the same list.
In fact, there was a document that we reported on that was from Homeland Security, where Homeland Security said our primary priority, the biggest threat to our national security is not external threats like Al Qaeda or ISIS or Iran, or Russia or China, or North Korea, it is actually domestic extremism.
And here was their chart from the from DHS in March of 2021, where they define what they mean by violent extremists.
And here you can see abortion-related extremists.
Here's anti-government authority extremists.
It says, domestic violent extremists with ideological agendas derived from anti-government or anti-authority sentiment, including opposition to perceived economic, social, or racial hierarchies, or perceived government overreach, negligence, or illegitimacy.
They have anarchist violent extremists, militia violent extremists, As I said, abortion-related extremists, and then here you see animal rights and environmental violent extremists.
Those are ones seeking to end or mitigate perceived cruelty, harm, or exploitation of animals, or perceived exploitation or destruction of natural resources and the environment.
It's basically a framework that says that any anti-establishment activists can be treated as terrorists.
And you're about to see when we interview Wayne Swing of DXE how many times he has been threatened with prison for nonviolent activism as a felon or even as a domestic terrorist.
This is the framework that they are implementing to say that the greatest threat Now, we need a new war on terror for is not foreign terrorist organizations, but domestic extremists, including all the groups I just named.
Now, here from The Intercept when I was at The Intercept in 2017 was the first time I reported on the industry of factory farms.
And as you see in this headline, the purpose and function of this article was to expose the FBI's abuse of resources To target nonviolent animal rights activists.
And there you see at the top, the FBI's hunt for two missing piglets reveals the federal cover-up of barbaric factory farms.
Systematic abuse of animals lies at the heart of U.S.
industrial farms, which are protected by the government.
Despite a crackdown on activists, the public is seeing the barbarism.
Here's what I wrote, quote, FBI agents are devoting substantial resources to a multi-state hunt for two baby piglets that the Bureau believes are named Lucy and Ethel.
The two piglets were removed over the summer from the Circle 4 farm in Utah.
Remember, that was the operation that the New York Times had reported on.
They were removed, these two piglets, from Circle 4 Farm, which is owned by Smithfield, by animal rights activists who had entered the Smithfield-owned factory farms to film the brutal, torturous conditions in which the pigs are bred in order to be slaughtered.
At Smithfield, like most industrial pig farms, the abuse and torture primarily comes not from rogue employees violating company procedures.
Instead, the cruelty is inherent in the procedures themselves.
One of the most heinous industry-wide practices is one that DxE activists encountered in abundance at Circle 4, gestational crating.
Where that technique is used, pigs are placed in a crate made of iron bars that is the exact length and width of their bodies, so they can do nothing for their entire lives but stand on a concrete floor, never turn around, never see any outdoors, never ever see their tails, never move more than an inch.
That was the condition in which the activists found the rotting piglet corpses and the two ailing piglets they rescued.
So they went into this facility, filmed it, and on their way out, they saw two piglets close to death.
Which means they had no economic value to these corporations, in fact, had a negative economic value because they were going to die, they had to be disposed of.
And they took these two little pigs, nursed them back to health, named them Lucy and Ethel, put them on their website so the public could identify with these pigs to understand these pigs are playful animals, are loving animals, are highly socially sophisticated and intelligent animals.
That was what they did.
That's all they did at the Smithfield facility.
Quote, the pigs are so desperate to get out of their crates that they often spend weeks trying to bite through the iron bars until their gums gush blood, bash their heads against the wall, and suffer a disease in which their organs end up mangled in the wrong places from the sheer physical trauma of trying to escape from a tiny space or and suffer a disease in which their organs end up mangled in It's called organ torsion.
I remember the day that I learned that term, where the pigs so violently toss themselves against the wall, against the metal bars, that their organs scramble and end up in the wrong places.
On the last day of August, a six car armada of FBI agents in bulletproof vests, armed with search warrants, descended upon two small shelters for abandoned farm animals, Ching Farm Rescue in Riverton, Utah, and Luvin Arms in Erie, Colorado. Ching Farm Rescue in Riverton, Utah, and Luvin Arms in These sanctuaries have no connection to DXC or any other rescue group.
They simply serve as a shelter for sick, abandoned, or otherwise injured animals.
The FBI agents searched the premises of both shelters.
Remember the whole time they're looking for these two little piglets that Smithfield Foods was about to allow to die to make a case against the animal rights activists for theft and felony trespass.
They demanded DNA samples of two piglets they said were named Luthie and Ethel in order to determine whether they were the two ailing piglets who had been rescued weeks earlier from Smithfield.
Several volunteers at one of the raided animal shelters said they were followed back to their home by FBI agents who dramatically questioned them in front of family members and neighbors.
And there is even reason to believe that the Bureau had been surveilling the activists' private communications regarding the rescue of this piglet duo.
That shows you the extent to which this industry, and other industries, have commandeered the FBI as their own private police force used against activists.
There are all sorts of horrific stories from the pandemic when the supply chain broke down and these factory farms had animals that they couldn't sell, couldn't kill and couldn't sell.
And so they just had to slaughter them en masse and they had to come up with gruesome new techniques for doing so here from The Guardian.
On August 3rd, 2020, quote, the pandemic highlights the gruesome animal abuses at U.S.
factory farms.
Quote, stories have emerged of mass killings of chickens and pigs, a tiny fraction of daily abuses heaped on farm animals.
As slaughterhouses across the nation have been forced to close by the virus, gruesome stories have emerged of the mass killing of millions of chickens and pigs who can no longer be brought to market.
Chickens have been gassed or smothered with a foam in which they slowly suffocate.
Among other methods, pigs, whose cognitive abilities are similar to dogs, have been killed by a method known as ventilation shutdown, in which the airways to a barn are closed off and steam is introduced.
A whistleblower's video shows thousands of pigs dying as they are slowly suffocated and roasted to death overnight.
Now, this is actually an investigation that we did that I did with Leighton Woodhouse, the videographer, where we had a whistleblower inside a farm in Iowa.
And there was a mass extermination method that was created that was beyond words in terms of its cruelty.
And this whistleblower filmed everything that took place along with animal rights activists and then gave it to us so that we could report on it.
And here's a video that we produced while I was at the Intercept still just a few months before I left that was an investigation into what Iowa Farms was doing in order to max exterminate these pigs that they no longer needed.
Watch this.
So this is the pen where they're going to load the trucks in and load the pigs in here and have it all sealed off, insulated.
And they're pumping in steam from the machine outside.
and they're gonna roast the pigs alive in this sauna.
You can look in the barn and see the horrible conditions that they live in.
You see it and this is normal.
This is the industry that we have.
This is the industry that I've grown up around.
Iowa Falls, Hardin County, Hampton, Grundy County.
Everything around here.
That is Iowa Select.
That is Big Pork.
Now, this is The Voice.
Or the words of this whistleblower who has worked in these factories his entire life.
He's been around farming.
He grew up in Iowa.
The last thing he is is a vegan.
But the more he worked there, the more he began to internalize the extraordinary cruelty that has never existed on family farms.
Industrializing the torture and then the mass slaughter of animals.
And, as he said, the solution they turned to was to use a method to roast the pigs alive.
So they put the pigs in this barn, they seal it off, they inject it with steam to create a sauna, turn up the heat more and more until the pigs die of heat.
It takes hours and hours.
They die in agony one after the next, and you'll see what the result was. - I'm sorry. and you'll see what the result was. - I'm sorry.
Employee shutdowns caused massive backup.
No places to put these pigs.
Early talks kind of scared me about massive pig kill-offs.
Of healthy pigs.
The pigs that now are being killed for no reason.
And the methods to that was through ventilation shutdown.
Shut the pit fans off, shut the ventilation fans off, and heat up the building.
*Squeak*
So, where was the camera at in terms of what would the very range of sight?
The...
What did you see?
It was pointed...
So it ends by, I'm not sure why that cut out there, but it ends by them saying basically, oh actually this camera would have shown everything.
And by then the video was already obtained and we were able to do the reporting on exactly what happened and how the thousands of pigs were removed.
Here was the article we wrote in May of 2020.
Hidden video and whistleblower reveal gruesome mass extermination method from Iowa pigs amid the pandemic.
Pigs are being slowly suffocated and roasted to death by an agricultural industry that relies on secrecy.
We were very concerned about the safety of the Whistleblower, there you see Iowa's largest pork producer, Iowa Select Farms, has been using a cruel and excruciating method to kill the thousands of pigs that have become commercially worthless due to the coronavirus pandemic.
As is true for so much of what the agricultural industry does, the company's gruesome extermination of sentient animals that are emotionally complex and intelligent has been kept entirely out of view.
And then we explain what the video was.
As I said, I know that there are people who strongly believe that humans can kill animals and should kill animals, and that's one thing.
That's a completely different point of view from justifying or sanctioning Creating the worst possible torture methods to impose upon these animals the most extreme levels of suffering that last their entire life.
That is not what happens on family farms.
In fact, lots of family farmers have become so attached to their animals that many have given up farming for that reason.
But the idea of family farms has always been, we treat our animals well, it produces better animals, and then they slaughter them humanely.
Nothing like that.
is what drives the industrial factory farming industry.
It's a pit of filth and disease and immorality and torture and sickness and then mass toxic dumping into neighborhoods.
We have two experts who have worked as activists and as journalists who are trying to expose the truth, which is what activists and journalists should be doing.
One is Wayne Swing of the Direct Action Everywhere.
The other is John Oberg.
and we will show you those interviews right after this.
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Wayne, thank you so much for taking the time to join us today.
It's It's always great to see you and we're glad you were able to come.
Sure.
So I've been following your work and reporting on your work for quite a long time and have been a local admirer of what you're doing, even though on a personal level, as I've told you before, I wish you didn't subject yourself to quite as much jail time as you do, but we'll get to that in a second.
And when I first began reporting on you, I know you've moved on since then and we're going to talk about that too, but you are with the animal rights group, activist group called Direct Action Everywhere, D-X-E.
What was the general idea and the ideology behind that group?
Glenn, starting in 2010, there were these laws called Ag-Gag Laws passed across the country that made it a crime to merely take photographs inside factory farms, even for employees.
And so a lot of the traditional non-profit groups were just leaving states where these laws were being passed.
And we felt like the public had a right to know what was happening inside these factory farms.
So we started DXC with the idea that we needed to show the world what's actually unfolding in factory farms and slaughterhouses and try to give help to animals who are being criminally abused.
I think the concept of ag-gag laws, maybe people have heard the term before, but it's such a profound violation of basic free speech and press freedoms, and in fact many courts have ultimately ruled that to be the case, that I think it's kind of shocking to people when they hear what ag-gag laws really said It's shocking to learn that that was allowed in the United States.
So talk a little bit more about exactly what ag-gag laws are and were and what they were designed to accomplish.
The Ag-Gag Law has come in a lot of different varieties, but the general thrust of all of these varieties is they criminalize the act of publicizing animal cruelty inside a place of institutionalized animal abuse.
So, for example, my friend Amy Meyer was standing on a public street and saw there was a cow being dragged around by a forklift at a slaughterhouse in Utah, which is not just cruel to the animal, it's actually a threat to public health, because if you have diseased animals being dragged in the slaughterhouse, That's not good for the human consumer.
And all she did was pull out her camera and started videotaping what she was seeing from a public sidewalk, and she was charged under the Utah Ag-Gov law.
So as you said, that's a constitutional fraud, but it hasn't stopped the industry from passing them in states across the nation.
And unfortunately, both Democratic and Republican elected officials have been pretty supportive of that.
And our goal was to go into the states where these Ag-Gov laws are being passed, challenge them, and face criminal charges if we had to.
Yeah, you know, it's interesting.
I mean, as somebody who has covered the war on terror for a long time and just general endless war, one of the things that governments need to do to keep a population, if not supportive of, at least tolerant of very severe forms of barbarism and violence is hide the results of that policy.
So you barely ever see or hear from victims of American wars.
It's kind of invisible and it's abstract.
And that is what the agricultural industry has done as well.
They don't want people knowing the reality of what's taking place inside these industrialized factory farms, and so they've used their control over state legislatures in order to make them, make it illegal for people to show them.
And so one of the tactics that you have worked on for a long time is something called open rescue, which is really designed to combat the secrecy surrounding these laws.
I've seen you do it before.
I've reported on actions where you've done it.
Talk about what Open Rescue is and what it's intended to accomplish.
The idea behind the Open Rescue is that if people actually saw what was happening inside these factory farms and slaughterhouses, they'd want to do the common sense thing, which is that healthy animals are suffering.
So for example, in egg farms, it is commonly the case that 10, 15, 20% of animals are dying every single year because of the close confinement in these facilities.
You have a three-pound animal who's shoved into a shed with 200,000 other animals, each of whom is given about one square foot of space.
One square foot of space.
So living your entire life on a sheet of paper.
And inevitably, You're going to have not just hundreds, not just thousands, but tens of thousands of animals trampling each other, getting sick, and sometimes even eating each other alive.
And this is often a straight-up violation of law.
So in California, that sort of intensive confinement, in theory, was banned by California voters.
Eight million voters said, we don't want animals confined in this way.
This is cruel.
It's disgusting.
It should be a crime.
And so what we've done is we've gone in these places where we know, based on whistleblower accounts, based on sometimes the government's own inspection records, that these laws are being broken.
We disclose everything about what we're doing openly, and we try to give help to the animals.
And over the last few years, we've rescued hundreds of animals from conditions like this, pointing out the violations of law being admitted by the industry.
But unfortunately, in many states, instead of holding some of these corporations accountable, and even looking at our evidence, which has been supported by law professors, former prosecutors have all said, Their findings are accurate.
What's happening here is a violation of law.
The government has come after us, and I'm actually lucky to be here because I, just a few weeks ago, was sentenced in a Sonoma County jail as a result of one of these open rescues, where we took a sick chicken to the vet.
So one of the things that's striking and everything you just said is that and again I've reported on and I've seen open rescues carried out by you and your group and it doesn't involve violence it doesn't involve placing bombs at factory farms it doesn't involve attacking physically the people who work there security guards it really is a non
a peaceful way of protesting to sort of rescue two out of thousands of small pigs who are close to death, or birds are close to death to show people the reality of these animals.
And yet you have often faced and continue to face the very real prospect of being prosecuted under felony laws There are even ways to call animal rights activists who don't use violence terrorists.
You currently have a pending case and have had them pretty much ever since I've known you.
And before we get into the specifics of the legalisms, what I'd like to ask you is, why is this cause sufficiently important to you that you are continuously willing to risk your own liberty and constantly involved in fights against the government in order to pursue this cause?
I think it's a combination of two things.
I mean, obviously, there's always a personal element.
And like a lot of Americans, my dog growing up was my best friend.
And I had an early childhood experience where I saw a dog being killed for food in China.
The dog looked exactly like my dog back at home.
And it opened my eyes to the fact that there are animals just like the dogs and cats we love at home, suffering not just violence, but brutal torture for years before they're killed.
But the second thing is, I just think there's an incredible opportunity.
When Americans actually see what's happening inside these factory farms and slaughterhouses, repeatedly, it's been proven time and time again, they want change.
When the confine of animals went to voters in California in 2008 for the first time, there were more voters.
8.1 million California voters who voted to free animals from these cages and had voted for any ballot initiative in California history.
The big problem is the industry has enormous influence.
Even in states like California, which is a democratic state, these laws are very rarely enforced.
And when you point out they're not being enforced, when you point out that animals are trapped, caged, and cannibalized, too often the government, at the best of the industry, goes after the people blowing the whistle instead of the people who are actually committing the crimes.
I remember when I first started reporting on the atrocities in Factory Farms, one of the great difficulties as a journalist, as a human being, that I face and continue to face when I do it is that some of the barbarism and torture and savagery is so extreme That it's actually difficult to get yourself to look at it.
There's like an instinct to want to turn away because as humans we kind of have an instinct to turn away.
Talk about some of the worst things that you've seen in the many times that you've gone into these industrialized factory farms and what is it that you've seen that you think people should know about?
The pork industry is maybe one of the most disturbing examples because it's been In the national political conversation recently, the Biden administration supported the pork industry in trying to basically abolish Prop 12, which is the California ballot initiative that freed animals, including mother pigs, from cages and crates.
And just to give you the factual context, the gestation crates that this law banned, that again, overwhelmingly California voters wanted to ban, These gestation crates are two foot by seven foot metal boxes, so 14 square feet of space, where a 600 to 700 pound animal will live virtually her entire adult life.
So the way I try and visualize for most people who don't have experience in farms is, imagine two of the largest human beings, say NFL linemen, living inside a bathtub for their entire lives.
That's a gestation crate.
And as a result of this confinement, Even industry publications show that 92% of animals are going psychotic within an hour.
Like these animals develop repetitive behaviors.
They develop shoulder sores and gaping holes in their side because they're slamming their heads, their bodies against the concrete floor or the cage wire walls around them in a desperate attempt to escape.
And this happens for four to five years.
There's no one who can see an animal living in what seems like essentially a metal tomb who is not aghast about this abuse.
The problem, as you put it, is that most people kind of don't even want to look at it because it's so nightmarish, it feels like it has to come from a horror movie.
And when you realize it's not a horror movie, this is actually happening in a factory farm that's just a couple hours away, it's hard to believe and it's hard to tolerate.
The thing you mentioned earlier is dogs being kind of the gateway into your broader animal activism.
I think it's so important because if you look at how people respond to abuse of dogs, if someone, there's a video on the internet of somebody kicking a dog or somebody's punching a dog.
The indignation is through the roof.
I mean, the internet will want that person, you know, hung at high noon, if not worse.
And yet, you have all these animals who are subject to abuse far worse than that.
And a lot of times I think people assume, well, those aren't quite like dogs, so there's no reason why I should care as much.
Talk a little bit about the capacity of, say, an animal like a pig To have sentience or intelligence or emotional sophistication or how social they are in order to kind of explain why it's not actually any better when, say, pigs or cows are subjected to abuse far worse than dogs.
Pigs are a great example because there have been a lot of fascinating experiments recently showing that pigs are not only more intelligent than a dog, but significantly smarter than a human child.
So, for example, Purdue University did this experiment recently where they taught pigs to play a video game, kind of like Pong, where they had to move a joystick around with their snout.
And they would get a treat, a little reward for doing this.
But one of the fascinating things about this study was that even after the pigs stopped getting treats for playing the game, the scientists found the pigs still wanted to play.
They were just getting stimulation and enjoyment from playing this video game in the same way that you or I would.
And this is something that...
But it's not just pigs, even chickens, which are probably the most abused farm animal on the face of the planet.
There was a recent publication in Science Magazine showing that chickens had passed the mirror test of self-awareness, so they can look in a mirror and recognize, hey, that's me.
And this is something that dogs and cats actually can't do.
Dogs and cats, many of us probably had hilarious experiences where dogs looking in the mirror and thinking there's another dog.
In the mirror?
Well, a chicken is smart enough to figure that out, yet we subject literally billions of chickens to confinement that is so intense they never get to step outside, they never see the sky, they can barely even spread their wings without touching the side of an enclosure to a cage or another animal.
And so when you start realizing this, and there's these living beings that are sentient, that are intelligent, and have compassion and love, they want to be around the people they like, the people they love, their families, just like us, just like a dog or a cat, you start realizing, you know, as you put it, Glenn, that what's happening in Factory Farms is an atrocity.
Wayne, the first story I ever reported on involving your group was a case where you had rescued two little baby pigs from a Smithfield facility that has billions of pigs, and these two little pigs were baby pigs very close to death.
They would have almost certainly died had you not rescued them.
And so their market value was zero, maybe their market value was $30.
And yet you ended up being charged with felonies and threatened with felonies.
And I think one of the things, politically speaking, that has happened over the last several years is that a lot of people on the populist right and on the populist left have come to understand that our government and our legislatures are corrupted because the same special interests and corporations fund both parties and can control the laws that get passed.
But they've also come to understand that law enforcement agencies are often weaponized and abused, the FBI, Homeland Security, the Justice Department, state police forces, in order to attack and demonize and destroy any kind of political dissent.
This is something that I think people are becoming more and more aware of.
And you know, one of the things that I think sometimes gets overlooked, you know, people are aware that groups that say are right-wing extremists or anti-government activists or people involved in activism around abortion are often considered to be terrorists by Homeland Security or by this U.S.
security state.
But one of the biggest examples of people who have had the law brought down on them in the harshest ways are animal rights activists, where you get charged with felonies or even possible terrorism charges, even though you're not using anything remotely approaching violence, such as in the case that I just described, where you invaded a factory farm.
That's true.
But you also then only rescued two little small baby pigs and did no other damage.
Talk about the legal frameworks that have arisen that have allowed animal rights activists to be subjected to some of the most, the heaviest and gravest types of prosecution and punishment that the law provides. - Yes.
The Utah case is a great example, Glenn, because you're right.
What we did was completely nonviolent.
We didn't even damage the property.
They didn't even know we were there until we published our video in the New York Times a few months later.
In Utah, the state attorney general, with the support of the FBI, brought felony racketeering charges, which are the second highest level felony, felony burglary charges, and felony theft charges for taking two sick baby pigs to the vet.
And the racketeering charge was the most terrifying, because this is a charge that is extremely hard to fight against.
It's very similar to the conspiracy charges that have been brought against activists, and actually have been brought against Donald Trump, too, across the country.
And the idea behind it is, even if you personally didn't do anything to damage anyone's property, even if you personally didn't commit a crime, merely by your association in speech, by your advocacy, you've shown you're part of an unlawful, illegal enterprise, an illegal conspiracy.
One of the most fascinating things about the Utah case is one of the parties that was advocating for the case to be brought against us was the CEO of Costco.
Now, Costco is headquartered in Seattle.
It had absolutely nothing to do with what happened in Utah at that factory farm.
The factory farm is owned by Costco.
But Costco's CEO was concerned because of our, quote, defamatory protests.
I still haven't figured out what we said that was false about Costco.
All we said was Costco says they're giving freedom to animals.
This is the condition the animals are actually living in.
But because of this racketeering conspiracy charge, the FBI and the state government in Utah were able to tie together all of our activities across the country, our protests, all of which were nonviolent and peaceful, our statements to the media, our videos published on YouTube to say we're involved in this illegal conspiracy to damage a large corporate interest.
I can tell you none of us are going to get the sort of protection from the FBI or from the lawyers.
And the fact that there were dozens of FBI agents at our trial, it came out that dozens of FBI agents were involved in a case involving at most $80 of commercial value, really much less than that, because each of these piglets was sick to the point they were probably a liability to the company, should be shocking to most American consumers and citizens, regardless of whether you're a Democrat or a Republican.
Yeah I mean I'll never forget you know just being stunned and obviously I've been working for a long time on abuses of state power for political ends that you took two tiny little piglets who as you say probably had negative commercial value to these factory farms because they were likely to become sick and die Even if you want to give it the most credit, it was, as you say, $80, $40 each pig.
And yet, they dispatched the FBI to do searches and seizures at farms where they had suspected these pigs were, and the FBI agents had to come and snip off parts of the ears of these pigs to get DNA samples to try and prove that these were the pigs that you had actually taken.
A grand total of two.
And to watch The FBI deployed on behalf of an industry that obviously has no concern about the commercial damage you're doing except to the extent that you're reporting in your activism is exposing their abuses was really stunning in terms of how much law enforcement has been commandeered by these corporations.
One of the things, obviously, as you all know, is that when you talk about this cause, people start to think, oh, you're trying to force them to change their diet, to give up meat, to become vegans.
And yet, beyond the issue of animal welfare and the way in which billions of animals are being tortured every day in a way that factory farms, or rather family farms, never had done, There's all kinds of other harms to society from the abuses of these factory farms.
You mentioned earlier health problems.
Talk about some of these other, the other ways in which these factory farms are filthy, kind of, you know, laboratories for disease, what they do to workers and the environment and the rest of those kinds of harms.
There's an outbreak happening right now, just minutes from where I'm sitting in California, of a disease called H5N1.
It's already killed millions of birds across the country, primarily in commercial agricultural facilities because the animals are confined so tightly.
But when this particular virus jumps to human beings, there's been reporting and there are times that scientists have found that 56% of human beings who get infected with H5N1 die.
56%.
The only reason this hasn't turned into a massive outbreak in human populations is today H5N1 cannot jump from human to human.
It only jumps from bird to human.
But even just jumping from bird to human, that's terrifying!
We have 9 billion birds being raised and slaughtered and sold to American consumers around the world, and they're being infected by this disease, H5N1, that when it jumps to a human being, kills 56% of Americans.
So the bigger problem here to me is you have a massive and powerful corporate interest that is trampling on the rights of human beings and animals who work in the industry.
And the government, instead of trying to hold it accountable for animal cruelty, for public health risks, for environmental risks, for worker abuses, the way this influence operation works is the industry Donates huge amounts of money to Republican and Democratic elected officials alike, and the government officials basically put their blinders on.
They don't even look at anything that's happening.
And I've seen this firsthand, where we have had just mountains of evidence delivered to the government that this incredibly popular and constitutional ballot initiative that banned the confinement of animals, we presented evidence repeatedly to the government that this law is being violated, and they haven't even bothered to look at our evidence.
They haven't even bothered to start investigating the abuse.
But you're absolutely right, Glenn, that the concern here is not just about animal cruelty.
It's about public health risks, like H5N1.
It's about environmental risks, because if you live near a pig farm or chicken farm, you can smell the poop from 30 miles away in some cases.
And it's about worker abuses, too, because the same companies, which are often owned by multinational conglomerates like Smithfield, that abuse animals, They often abuse workers, too.
And Smithfield, unsurprisingly to those who watch the company, was implicated in a human trafficking scandal where they're shipping in workers from Asia and not paying them a fair wage.
In fact, not paying them a wage at all.
So what happens to animals happens to us, too, because of the abuse of power at these factory farms.
Yeah, and obviously just the need to train human beings to cut off their empathy, to be able to impose these cruelties day after day for a job that's very low paying, obviously has massive damage on the psyches of these people.
We've talked about that, there's been studies about this before, and a lot of these employees have spoken out as well.
Let me just ask you though specifically about the overuse of antibiotics inside these factory farms that have created genuine fear and alarm among scientists about the possibility of unleashing an antibiotic-resistant bacteria or some sort of epidemic that could really kill a huge number of people.
What is the issue with that?
One of the most surprising things about factory farms for people who don't understand how the system has become so industrial is that When you go into a factory farm like a pig farm, you'll see a room where you have just cases and cases of drugs.
The pharmaceutical industry sells about 80% of its antibiotics to factory farms that feed animals.
And a lot of these antibiotics are antibiotics like gentamicin.
Gentamicin is an antibiotic that has been listed by the World Health Organization as one of the essential antibiotics we need to treat human diseases.
When you get a stomach bug, when you get a respiratory infection that's bacterial in nature, you need drugs that are actually going to work.
The problem is when you're feeding...
Billions upon billions of animals, antibiotics that are crucial for human health, over time, those antibiotics stop working, because the bacteria evolves, right?
And oftentimes, these drugs aren't even being fed to animals who are sick, they're being fed prophylactically, this is the term we use in the industry, before an animal gets sick, because we know there are so many animals in here, who are raised in such filthy environments, we have to protect them from disease by giving them antibiotics prophylactically.
And the net result of that is a lot of the antibiotics that have saved people's lives for hundreds of years are no longer working.
And that could become almost a cataclysmic scenario where kids on a normal neighborhood street will scratch their knee, an infection will develop, none of the drugs are working to try and stop that infection, and the child just dies.
Yeah, you know, I think one positive kind of silver lining in all of this darkness and bleakness, and as you said, this kind of horror film that is taking place in many communities in the United States, is that because of animal suffering, people's connection to animals has become almost trans-ideological.
I remember very well that when I would do this reporting and talk about the horrific conditions imposed on animals, it was really not a left-right issue at all, in part because I think the importance of dogs has made people more spiritually and intellectually open to the fact that animals suffer, they in part because I think the importance of dogs has made people more spiritually and intellectually open to the fact that animals suffer, they love, they need, they feel sadness,
And yet at the end of the day, I think there's this sense, and I've heard this said many times before, even from people who are empathetic to the concerns about animal torture, They believe that, look, unfortunately, we have such massive population growth on the planet.
We're now exponentially increasing the number of people who we have to feed.
That there is no other way to feed the population except with industrialized factory farms.
Without them, a huge number of people would face famine.
That it's kind of a bourgeois concern because people who want to be vegan can afford that, but most people don't want to be or can't be.
What about that view that this is just necessary, as horrific as it might be, to feed 8 billion, soon to be 9 billion human beings on the planet?
I think that's just an impoverished view of human possibility.
We can achieve so many things with the technology we've developed, with the innovation and ambition of people who want to change the world in a positive way.
And I'll just give you two concrete examples.
One is new technology called cultured meat, which is basically meat grown from a kind of a bat, you know.
And it's based on a cell culture.
It's very safe.
It's much more efficient.
And we have companies in the Bay Area, again, very close to where I am today, that is indistinguishable, biologically indistinguishable from the meat that you buy right now at Costco and McDonald's, except it doesn't come from animals.
That's it.
And we could do this.
We could do this.
So the government invested in these startups and these new enterprises rather than big factory farms, often owned by multinational conglomerates in China.
We could actually change the food system so we don't have to handle production meat.
But the second thing I'd say is even if you're not down for that, and I know a lot of people think, oh, that's frankenfood, it's too weird.
I come from a Buddhist background, and there are people in India who come from a Hindu background, who have lived in their cultures for thousands of years eating delicious, healthy, sustainable meat substitutes.
They're not even really meat substitutes.
They're just protein sources that are healthier, more sustainable, and great for both the planet and for animals, right?
These are things like seitan and tofu and tempeh.
And, well, is it going to cause a little bit of a shift?
Absolutely, it'll cause a little bit of a shift.
Yeah, I mean, I know when, and again, we're not trying to evangelize about people's diet, it's everyone's individual choice.
antibiotic resistance, the environmental damage, the worker abuses, the cost of not changing is far greater than the cost of changing.
I just believe we can do it.
So let's do it.
Yeah.
I mean, I know when, and again, we're not trying to evangelize about people's diet.
It's everyone's individual choice.
I'm just saying that when I decided to become vegan in large part because of this reporting I was doing and seeing just the level of suffering that I did not want to support, I had assumed I was making an ethical choice that would require sacrifice in terms of not liking my food as much.
And exactly the opposite was true.
It really is the case that to this very day, I enjoy my meals more.
I feel like they're healthier.
They just combine with my body.
There's no preservatives and all these additives.
They, you know, are natural sources of protein.
I mentioned earlier that you do have a new group, a new project that's called The Simple Heart.
and furnishes.
And that was something that I was actually surprised about.
All right, let me ask you this last question.
I mentioned earlier that you do have a new group, a new project that's called The Simple Heart.
What is the idea behind it and how can those who want to support you do so?
The Simple Heart is just about the idea that we have to have a better relationship with nature and with animals.
That most of us don't want to hurt animals.
Most of us don't want to torture animals.
And when we really think about it, we probably don't want to see them killed for food either.
And our goal is to use litigation, storytelling, social media, To tell a different sort of story about the human relationship with animals.
I mean, the big part of this is Open Rescue and we don't actually do Open Rescues ourselves at this point.
We do the storytelling and litigation behind it.
So I'm still supportive of and involved in direct action everywhere in various ways.
But as I've become a defendant, I've evolved my activism towards more telling kind of the stories behind the industry, telling the stories of animals being rescued too.
And so we've got a substack at blog.simpleheart.org.
I'd love for people to check it out.
And if you've got a story about animals that's been meaningful to you, share it with us because we could potentially share with our audience and help educate the public about what's really going on behind these closed doors.
Yeah, we'll put the links on the show as well and on the video as well.
You know, the thing that does strike me is that since the internet began, the content that has generated the most emotional reaction, the strongest response that has viralized the most is content about animals.
Not just dogs, but all animals.
People naturally love animals.
They connect to them.
And it's a reason why even people who say, oh, I don't really care about this, don't want to see.
Animal suffering, because there's something in us that just instinctively wants us to turn away.
We don't want animal suffering.
And a lot of legal frameworks and justifications and kind of rationalizations are necessary to get us to support that.
And look, at the end of the day, Wayne, I think one of the most important things to note is that there's a lot of people with a lot of causes who like to go around pontificating about them.
You are somebody, one of the rare people who are actually willing and have repeatedly done so to put your own self-interest, your own liberty, your own safety on the line for this cause.
And I hope that even if people are still kind of in the process of thinking what they think about this cause, they have to respect the fact That you're not just words, but you are putting your actions behind it.
That's something that I think is inherently admirable.
I'm so happy that you are doing the work you're doing.
I hope people will keep an open mind about checking out your new project, and we're always thrilled to talk to you and happy that you took the time to do so.
It's a pleasure and an honor, Glenn.
You've been such a huge part of our work, and one of the reasons I'm not in jail is because of this incredible work you're doing.
So, thank you.
Happy to do that, Wayne.
Thank you very much.
Have a great afternoon.
We'll talk soon.
John, it's great to see you.
I've been an admirer of your work for some time, so I am thrilled to have the opportunity to talk about it.
Thank you for taking the time to do it.
Glenn, thanks for having me on.
I feel like we've been friends for years on X, so it's great to be, you know, friends in real life, or at least as close as we can come.
Yeah, absolutely, to start expanding our modes of communication.
So, one of the things that I have really appreciated about the work that you do in the cause of animal welfare and animal rights and the evils of factory farms is that it seems to me
Like, you try very hard to effectively communicate with people who are not already converted to the cause, who do not already see things the way you see things or that I see things about this issue, and you, I think, tend to avoid the kind of evangelizing or hectoring or sermonizing that unfortunately characterizes a lot of well-meaning animal rights activists but makes them difficult to be effective.
What is the theory or the kind of approach or worldview Well, I'm glad you appreciate that aspect of my animal advocacy, Glenn, and it's something I've really tried hard to focus on over the years.
Of course, when I first went vegan 14 years ago, I was not like this.
I was a little bit more angry and looked at what was happening in the world and basically evangelized in every opportunity I could.
And then I realized that that was not effective.
And what's effective is reaching people where they are, rather than where I want them to be, and understanding that everybody is on their own journey.
And remembering that for the first 20 or so years of my life, I ate animals basically every single day.
And I ate a lot of animals.
I remember back when I was 19 years old, I ate 39 chicken wings in a single sitting.
And so, if I could change, I know that anybody out there can change.
And luckily, I know that the vast majority of people care about animals, and therefore, the vast majority of people are reachable.
And so for that reason, I try to really come to people in a way that they will respond well to.
And I try to really be as relatable and reasonable as possible in the ways in which I discuss animal advocacy and the ways that animals are being mistreated behind the closed doors of factory farms and slaughterhouses.
Yeah, you know, whenever I'm tempted to get a little bit preachy or a little bit judgmental, I actually remember that I spent most of my life not only consuming animals, but not really caring much about this cause.
Even though I loved animals, I always have.
I loved dogs since I was a child.
Just the connection between my choices about what I was buying for my food and the abuses and atrocities that I was enabling and supporting, it just never Connected in part because this industry does such an effective job of concealing and hiding from people the realities of the torture and the horrific conditions that take place inside of these factories.
It's deliberately done to prevent you from making that connection.
So, I know personally for me when I talk to people about this issue, when I try and do reporting on it, my goal isn't to say, I want you to go vegan.
I knew it took me, even once I started realizing this, quite a long time.
It was a long process, an incremental process to arrive at that point.
What I just want people to do instead is to kind of start thinking about, What exactly it is that's happening inside there, what their personal connection to it is, how they feel about it once they see it, and kind of leave it up to them to make their own choices.
When you start thinking about how you create social media content, a lot of which viralizes, a lot of which a lot of people see, what is the kind of goal, the immediate or proximate goal that you have in mind when you think about how to communicate about this issue?
So of course my long-term goal in my animal advocacy on social media is to create a more vegan world, right?
I want to get more people to move along that spectrum between standard Western diet and veganism.
I want people to move along that spectrum, whether it's making, you know, doing Meatless Mondays or going fully vegan.
I view people moving along that spectrum as a good thing.
Now, I understand that not everybody is going to do that with a single tweet or a single post that they see of mine.
And so at the very least, I want people to look at animals differently, and specifically to look at farm animals differently, and to learn about the ways in which they're being abused.
Because right now, the vast majority of people in society view the ways in which they believe Right now, basically, everybody in society thinks that farm animals live decent lives.
And unfortunately, you and I know that that's not true.
They are living lives of misery, basically from birth to death.
And for that reason, it's really important to try and raise awareness about the ways that animals are being mistreated.
And then, of course, to inspire people to change their behavior.
And so, you know, I think that the vast majority of times people see one of my posts, they aren't going to go vegan.
But I am at least doing something to chip away at the walls between them not caring about this issue and them caring about this issue and taking action.
I think one of the things you mentioned there is a really important point, which is the issue of family farms and the kind of mythology surrounding them.
Because I think it is true that family farms, although obviously the end of the animal's life is to be slaughtered and turned into food, traditionally have treated their animals well.
They have free range.
Oftentimes, people who are farmers are devoted to those animals.
They care for them well.
They're allowed to kind of exist in their natural surroundings with social connections and their families and like.
One of the things that I try and talk about are the differences, the grave differences between family farms on the one hand, which a lot of people grew up and value as part of their culture, and industrialized factory farms and how they're almost like two entirely separate things.
In fact, industrialized factory farms are in a lot of ways destroying the idea of family farms.
What are those differences?
Yeah, well, I will provide a caveat here and mention that in my 14 years of animal advocacy, I've had so many conversations with individuals who basically want to make a difference.
But unfortunately, it's human nature to basically try to take as short of a step as possible.
And that step is often in their mind to go from eating the meat that they're currently eating to what they think is humane meat.
And it's really important for your listeners and viewers to understand that animals that are raised on smaller farms are mistreated less, but they are not treated well.
and they are often still suffering in various ways.
And so, it's very important that we don't give people an easy way to just say, hey, well, you know what, I'm going to switch from eating whatever's on the restaurant menu to going to buy, you know, local meat from a local butcher, because those animals are still suffering.
That being said, of course, industrial factory farming is providing some of the worst cruelty and suffering across the globe to animals or to any beings that feel pain and feel fear and emotions.
And the fact is, 99% of meat comes from animals raised in factory farms.
And it's so bad with chickens in particular, that for every 5,000 chickens sold in the United States, 4,999 of them are raised in a factory farm.
99 of them are raised in a factory farm.
And so you are, if you are eating meat, you are astronomically, if you are eating meat, it is basically impossible for you to be not eating factory farmed meat.
And that is an ethical question that every person should ask themselves.
Is supporting the cruelty that animals are facing on factory farms worth it?
And since you asked me about the differences, I will mention that some of the things that happen on factory farms are extreme confinement.
So mother pigs are kept in gestation crates so small that they can't even turn around for months on end.
So imagine the most uncomfortable you've ever been in an airplane.
On a seat wedged between two people, you got a middle seat, and imagine spending close to a year there.
That is what your life is like as a mother pig.
Or egg-laying hens who are trapped in battery cages so small they can't even spread their wings.
So the confinement these animals face is just wretched.
And then, of course, they are mutilated without painkillers.
Why?
Because painkillers cost money and the factory farms don't want to spend any money on these animals.
These animals each are worth hardly anything, you know, on an animal-by-animal basis.
And why are they going to spend more money on these animals?
So, welfare is always at the bottom of the list for these factory farms.
And so, If these are things that you don't want to support, you don't want to pay someone else to do, it's really important to consider how your decisions on a daily basis are impacting these animals.
Yeah, I mean the proof is in the pudding in the sense that the industrialized factory farm industry has devoted enormous sums of money to the political process to enact laws such as Ag-Gag laws that make it illegal to show what's taking place inside of these factories without the permission of the farms because of course they don't want the public seeing what the reality is because people will naturally recoil.
There are a lot of causes that people can devote themselves to.
Obviously, there's environmental causes, and there's causes of poverty, and there's causes of injustice of various kinds.
What is it about the cause of animal suffering and animal welfare that provoked you to devote so much of your time and energy to it?
Well, on one hand, I've always really appreciated and respected animals and looked at them as being deserving of compassion, kindness, and respect.
And the flip side to that is that the problem is so incredibly severe.
The numbers are so mind-boggling, mind-boggling, The numbers are so incredibly huge that we can't even wrap our minds around it.
And so the problem is so big that me as an animal advocate can make a pretty big impact.
You know, over the course of my life as an animal activist, I could save thousands or tens of thousands or even more of animals by influencing people to make more positive changes.
And so if you look at the various causes in the world and why I focus on my energy, it's really because of my respect for animals and the fact that there's suffering in some of the worst ways.
And because you've hinted at this earlier, big ag is so incredibly powerful and just carries so much weight in politics and in society that they're able to get away with basically whatever they want.
And so it's really up to a small handful of people who are doing this work to enlighten the general public and to raise awareness about the ways that these animals are suffering.
One of the things that has always struck me is with the growing popularity of dogs in the Western world.
Dogs and cats, but especially dogs.
If you have any content about dogs, people react overwhelmingly with great intensity and great emotion.
If there are videos of people abusing a dog, kicking a dog, hitting a dog, punching a dog, It produces an indignation and rage unlike any you can ever see.
And people really want that person strung up and punished and put into prison.
They're so outraged at the idea that somebody would cause suffering to a dog.
And that here you have all these other animals including ones that are as intelligent as if not more intelligent than dogs or as socially Complex and sophisticated who feel pain and suffering and desire and happiness and fulfillment as much as dogs do and yet people have been conditioned to be completely indifferent when they are subjected to far worse abuse than dogs are.
Why do you think that is and how do you try and overcome that?
So I don't think it's true indifference that people face when it comes to the ways that farm animals are being abused.
What I think it truly is, Glenn, is that people understand that they are part of the problem.
And therefore, if they feel like they are part of the problem, it is much harder to come to terms and understand and be okay with what you are seeing.
off and people will turn away.
But on January 30th of this year there was a barn fire at a chicken factory farm in Texas that burned and killed tens of thousands of chickens.
Burned them alive.
Now if this is happening to a building full of dogs or Or a building full of cats?
I guarantee you there would be riots in the streets and outrage and it would be covered on every media outlet across the United States and probably the world.
But because it's happening to farm animals, people turn a blind eye.
But that being said, I do truly believe that people don't want these farm animals to suffer.
People are just more likely to turn a blind eye to it because they are part of the problem.
But what I've found over the years is that when somebody becomes vegetarian or vegan, for whatever reason, whether it's environmental reasons, for fighting injustices against workers, for health reasons, then they are much more likely to be open to the idea that these animals are then they are much more likely to be open to the idea that these animals are suffering and that
But when you're actively making choices at just about every single meal that are paying other people to cause this harm and suffering, it is much easier to turn a blind eye.
But that's why my work on social media and the retweets that you've done of my work and of others and of the great work that the animal advocacy community is doing in general is so important.
Because we need to get people to understand what's really happening behind the closed doors of factory farms and not let them just turn away in disgust.
Yeah, I mean, the thing that, you know, I began realizing early on is that people don't want to see these videos.
They don't want to look at the kinds of industrialized torture that are imposed on animals.
And so, to me, the question then becomes, if it's so natural that we are meant to abuse animals, not simply by ending their life in some humane way, like, quick way that doesn't involve suffering, but to subject them to just you know the videos are just like pigs trying to bite their way out of those cages you were talking about to the point where their teeth fall out and their mouths are bloody and they go
insane are something that no decent person would want to watch because we have within us a kind of empathy for animals and we feel bad when we see their suffering and that to me is sort of proof that whatever attempts you want to make to say that this is natural I seem very different it's a very difficult case to mount
but one of the arguments that I do hear a lot is from people who are even willing to concede that there are a lot of awful things taking place inside these factory farms but nonetheless believe that they are necessary to feed the earth because we have this exponentially increasing population on the planet We are now at 8 billion people, soon to be 9.
And people believe that without mass industrialized processing of animals to kill them and turn them into food, that essentially there'd be no way to feed that many people.
What is your answer to that?
Fortunately, choosing to grow plant-based food is considerably less resource intensive.
And so it is significantly easier to actually grow foods to feed the public than to grow plant-based foods and then feed it through farm animals.
That is so incredibly inefficient.
And part of the reason that meat is so cheap is because the government subsidizes this, which is just It's just crazy that your tax dollars are going to subsidize animal cruelty.
That doesn't make any sense to me, and that's something that is an issue that we need to focus on as a movement, because what animals are facing is horrible.
So not only is it less resource intensive, But also, this cruelty is not necessary.
There are lots of ways in which you can improve animal welfare that takes very little resources.
Unfortunately, the industry doesn't want to pay even an extra cent.
For the welfare of these animals.
So often it comes down to animal advocates providing pressure via campaigns, legal measures, and other ways in which we can work to try and implement animal welfare measures.
And sometimes that includes putting pressure on companies to adopt some animal welfare measures.
Like, for example, McDonald's has now committed to or has now switched, I believe they have switched entirely to cage-free eggs.
Now, I don't think that cage-free eggs are humane and I wouldn't consume them myself, but do they cause less suffering to hens?
Yes.
Did McDonald's do this just voluntarily because they felt like it?
No, they did it because of the pressure from animal advocates.
And so, we as a movement need to keep the pressure up to get change made because, you know, these companies, these These massive companies with billions of dollars in revenue, they don't really care about the welfare of animals.
And so we need to make them care or we need consumers to demand change.
And the best way that I feel like consumers can demand change is through eating plant-based food over animal-based food.
And in today's world, it is so much easier to do that than ever before.
Yeah, I mean, so there have been so many videos that you posted that have stayed with me, that kind of shocked me at the time, even though I know in principle what's taking place inside these factory farms, but just certain ones, the way you choose them, the way you describe them, I think really conveys in a uniquely powerful way the truth about these industries that they work very hard to conceal.
How can people Follow your work.
Obviously, you're on Twitter, but where else is your work located that people can follow and how can people support it if they want to do so?
Thanks for asking, Glenn.
So, the vast majority of my animal advocacy over the last decade has been through social media.
In the last five years, I've been an independent animal activist using primarily Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram, but I'm soon expanding my work to other social media platforms like YouTube, LinkedIn, and so on, TikTok.
And so, if people want to follow my work, they can follow me on any of these channels.
Of course, they can go to my website, JohnOberg.org.
If anybody wants to support my work financially, which is the lifeblood that makes my animal advocacy on social media happen every day, they can do so at DonorBox.org.
We will definitely put those links up on the screen when we broadcast this interview, as well as put them in the links to the show.
John, I hope you will keep up your great work.
I know that you will, and I really appreciate you taking the time to talk to us about it today.
Thanks for having me on, Glenn.
Thanks for all the work you do for animals and for all the great causes in the world.
Thank you.
Absolutely.
Great to see you.
- Good to see you, thanks John.
So that concludes our show for this evening As a reminder, System Update is also available in podcast form, where you can listen to every episode 12 hours after their first broadcast live here on Rumble on Spotify, Apple, and all other major podcasting platforms.
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