The meat industry largely defines what’s animal cruelty and what isn’t; a recent court ruling in Pennsylvania could offer a new legal route for activists.
In 2018, Erin Wing worked for two months at a 1,000-cow dairy farm in Chambersburg, a small Pennsylvania town about three hours west of Philadelphia, where she was one of 10 employees who milked and fed the cows. But something set her apart from the other workers: Wing wore a hidden camera, living a double life as an undercover investigator for Animal Outlook, an animal advocacy nonprofit.
During her stint, Wing captured a variety of horrors on film. Some were inhumane but legal and not uncommon in the dairy industry, like removing calves’ horns —which is done to prevent the horns from injuring workers — without pain mitigation like anesthesia or anti- inflammatory drugs.
But she also documented acts of cruelty that seemed wholly gratuitous, like employees beating, stomping on, and kicking cows, and many others I’ll omit for the sake of readers’ peace of mind.
“All told, we documented over 300 incidents that we believed violated Pennsylvania’s laws,” Will Lowrey, an attorney with Animal Outlook, told me.
The Pennsylvania State Police opened an investigation, and over a year later it announced that the district attorney of Franklin County in Pennsylvania, where Chambersburg is located, would not press charges against the farm as a corporation, the owner, and 14 current and former employees. The police also assured the public that the farm had taken steps to improve training and animal handling procedures. (The Pennsylvania State Police declined an interview, Martin Farms could not be reached for comment, and the Franklin County district attorney did not respond to requests for comment.)
The DA’s decision wasn’t surprising. Many undercover investigations that document cruelty to farmed animals don’t result in prosecution, and when they do, it’s usually over the more egregious, often one-off acts of cruelty conducted by stressed-out, low-paid workers. The routine yet inhumane practices instituted by the owner — and often pervasive throughout the industry — go unexamined, even though they account for much more animal suffering.
And with 9 billion animals churning through the meat, dairy, and egg industries each year and just a handful of undercover investigators documenting how they’re treated, consumers and policymakers are left in the dark. This system persists because farmed animals are largely invisible in the law.
But due to a quirk in Pennsylvania’s legal code — the ability of private citizens to challenge government officials’ decision not to prosecute — Animal Outlook was able to circumvent that invisibility and set a new precedent for animal law. But before I get to that, it helps to understand the legal system under which animals are farmed.
How the animal agriculture lobby erased farmed animals from the law
At the federal level, there are no laws that protect animals while they’re on the farm.
The Animal Welfare Act, which sets minimum standards for animals used in zoos or research or sold as pets, specifically exempts animals raised for food. The Humane Methods of Slaughter Act and the 28-Hour Law (the latter which covers farmed animals in transport) are weakly enforced, and both exempt poultry, which make up 98 percent of US land animals raised for food.
Every state has an anti-cruelty statute on the books, and a few exempt farmed animals altogether, while most exempt what are considered “customary farming practices” — or as Pennsylvania law puts it, “normal farming operations.” It doesn’t matter how inhumane those practices may appear as long as they are commonly used, year after year.
“In most of the United States, prosecutors, judges, and juries no longer have the power to determine whether or not farmed animals are treated in an acceptable manner,” wrote animal law professors Mariann Sullivan and David Wolfson in their seminal text on state and federal anti-cruelty exemptions. “The industry alone defines the criminality of its own conduct.”
As a result, only more extreme acts of cruelty — like some of the acts documented at Martin Farms — are potentially prosecutable under the law. But they’re typically only uncovered if a group like Animal Outlook sends an investigator onto one of America’s tens of thousands of factory farms, which leaves most abuse undocumented and unaddressed.
And even if an investigator can gain employment on a farm, political and cultural factors pose major barriers to seeking justice for the abuse they document. Factory farms tend to be located in rural areas, where they are woven deeply into the fabric of the region’s politics, economy, and culture, so sheriffs and district attorneys are often reluctant to take action. When they do, it’s usually against low-level employees who are disproportionately immigrants and are labeled as “bad apple” workers while (typically white) owners and management often get off scot- free.
“You see this syndrome where the owner says, ‘Oh, my god, I’m so shocked — this is terrible. We’re firing them right away and they should be prosecuted’,” Sullivan, who teaches animal law at Cornell Law School and hosts the Animal Law podcast, told me. “So the very low- level people get prosecuted for this gratuitous cruelty. … And they’re eligible for being thrown under the bus by the owners.”
This kind of outcome for undercover investigations happens frequently enough that it’s causing some in the animal protection movement to critically examine the carceral approach to investigative work.
By getting laws passed, animal advocates have been able to ban or restrict the use of some customary farming practices, mostly cages and crates for hens and pigs, in 14 states. But the legislative route is slow and difficult; to even get to a full vote, farmed animal welfare bills first have to make it through the statehouse’s agriculture committee, where they usually go to die, as they’re often chaired by industry-friendly lawmakers.
Advocates have found some success through putting the vote directly to the people via ballot measures, but those are costly, and fewer than half of US states allow such direct measures.
This challenging legal landscape, and the political and cultural factors that block the gaps that could overcome it, have long stymied animal lawyers and advocates who’ve amassed thousands of hours of footage of animal abuse through their undercover investigations. But due to the above-mentioned quirk in Pennsylvania law — the ability to petition a court to overturn the district attorney’s denial of prosecution — Animal Outlook shifted what practices can be deemed “normal” in the first place.
The organization’s initial petition was denied, so it appealed to Pennsylvania’s Superior Court. Last month, in a precedent-setting decision, the court’s three-judge panel ruled that the lower court was required to order the Franklin County district attorney to prosecute Martin Farms for animal cruelty, including over common practices like dehorning without pain mitigation.
“The most obvious evidence overlooked by the trial court was that concerning the dehorning of calves…” the decision reads. Citing Dr. Holly Cheever, a veterinarian who reviewed the investigative footage, the decision went on to state that “the technique used by Martin Farms as shown in the video caused the calves to be ‘in agonizing pain, shown by their violent thrashing and bellowing.’”
The judge characterized the district attorney’s position on exempting dehorning without pain mitigation as “absurd,” creating a crack in the meat industry’s ironclad legal armor.
Animal Outlook’s investigation could influence the future of animal law
“I can’t even describe the feeling I had,” Wing, the investigator, said about hearing of the ruling for the first time. “I have thought of Martin Farms and that investigation for years. … I definitely have had nightmares about what I witnessed there.”
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Jo-Anne McArthur/#unboundproject/We Animals Media
“I do think it’s an amazing and important case,” Sullivan told me. “Obviously it’s limited to Pennsylvania, but the fact that an appellate court looked at this situation and was clearly horrified … feels like a very big deal.”
The case would still be influential if it had merely centered on the more malicious acts of animal cruelty, but what makes it more important is that the court also questioned whether dehorning calves without pain mitigation should be considered “normal” in the first place (and if not, it could then be prosecutable). The court also deemed Martin Farms’ dehorning not normal because employees roughly handled the calves and performed dehorning at an age when the practice is more painful.
Since Pennsylvania’s anti-cruelty statute exempts “normal agricultural operations,” this decision could lead to advocates challenging other common farming practices in the courts.
Dehorning without pain mitigation exists in a “normality gray zone” because while some dairy industry organizations don’t like it, a lot of farmers still do it because they don’t think pain mitigation is necessary, they’re unfamiliar with the available drugs, or the drugs take too much time to administer. A 2021 survey of 217 dairy farmers in Wisconsin, which ranks second in dairy production, found that only half used pain relief for the procedure.
Does that make it a normal agricultural practice? When does a practice go from normal to abnormal, from legal to illegal? As battery cages for egg-laying hens get replaced by cage-free systems, what will the threshold be that tilts cages from normality to cruelty in the eyes of the law? Someday, a Pennsylvania judge may decide.
“How could this be a standard practice — to take a hot iron and press it into the skull of a young calf and burn their skin away, burn their horn tissue away, and especially to do that without some form of anesthetic?” Wing says. “To have that be recognized [by the court] is really incredible.”
The decision “sends a clear message that animals used in agriculture are protected by the law,” Lowrey said.
And even though the precedent is limited to Pennsylvania, it’s important in two other ways. First, Pennsylvania is a major agricultural state, ranking fourth in egg production, seventh in dairy, 10th in turkey, and 14th in chicken. All told, over 235 million animals are raised for food in the state each year. Those who advocate for them now have another tool in their legal toolbox.
Sullivan says it also sets a cultural precedent, which can’t be discounted — and it gives animal lawyers across the country a decision to reference when challenging other states’ exemptions.
It could be months or even years until the case is resolved, and anything could happen. The Franklin County district attorney could appeal and the case could be dismissed, washing away this new precedent in animal law. The case could move forward and the district attorney could fail in their case, or it could successfully prosecute Martin Farms, emphasizing that the practice of dehorning without pain mitigation was no longer “normal” in Pennsylvania farming, setting a cultural precedent in a major agricultural state.
But whatever the outcome, the Pennsylvania Superior Court decision illustrates what can happen when standard yet horrific farming practices are put under a microscope: The institutions that govern how America farms and eats might be forced to evolve.
Mining lithium for batteries threatens some flamingos in Chile, a new study suggests.
The Andean highlands of South America where Chile, Bolivia, and Argentina collide look a bit like the surface of Mars, with jagged rocks jutting out of a rust-colored terrain. Though it’s one of the driest places on Earth, the region is known for its saline lakes, which provide refuge to three of the world’s six species of flamingo.
It’s also known for something else: lithium. Abundant in the Earth’s crust and oceans, lithium is a miraculous element, used to treat bipolar disorder and generate energy in lithium-ion batteries, which power nearly all cellphones, laptops, and electric cars. Remarkably, this one region in South America — known as the Lithium Triangle — contains more than half of the world’s supply of it.
Demand for electric vehicles is growing exponentially, with companies selling more EVs in a week last year than they did in all of 2012. And that could put flamingos and other birds at risk, a new study suggests. Research published in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society links lithium mining to the decline of two threatened flamingo species in a large lake basin in Chile. By using up groundwater, traditional lithium mining can turn lakes into hostile environments for aquatic organisms that flamingos eat, causing the birds to starve or flee, the authors wrote.
The study is among a small but growing number of reports that complicate the idea that electric vehicles and other battery technologies are unequivocally good for the planet. Electrifying cars and other vehicles is, no doubt, essential to curbing climate change — which, in itself, harms flamingos. But that doesn’t mean the lithium industry can’t find less disruptive ways to mine.
Flamingos need water. Lithium mines are sucking it up.
Lithium is commonly mined from rocks, but most of the world’s supply is in salty groundwater, called brine, much of which is found in South America’s Lithium Triangle. There, mining operations center around one lake basin in northeastern Chile, called Salar de Atacama, which is home to almost 30 percent of the world’s known lithium.
To extract lithium from brine, companies typically pump groundwater into shallow, colorful ponds, like those in the image below. Over several weeks, sun and wind evaporate much of the water and impurities, leaving behind a high concentration of lithium and other chemicals. Companies then process it into a commercial product that battery manufacturers can use to make lithium-ion cells.
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Cristobal Olivares/Bloomberg via Getty Images
The problem for flamingos and other shorebirds is that pumping and evaporating groundwater shrinks nearby desert lakes, where the birds eat and breed. Producing a single ton of lithium uses roughly 400,000 liters of water, according to the study, which helps explain why some saline lakes in the Triangle are at 600-year lows. In Salar de Atacama, more than 1,700 liters of lithium-rich brine are sucked out of the ground every second, by some estimates. Keep in mind that this is already one of the driest deserts on Earth.
As the lakes recede, they become saltier. And too much salt can kill off the aquatic organisms that flamingos eat, like brine shrimp and diatoms, a kind of algae. “Dramatic fluctuations in water lead to dramatic fluctuations of food,” said Nathan Senner, an assistant professor of biology at the University of South Carolina who co-authored the study. Without food, he said, the flamingos have fewer babies, fly elsewhere, or starve.
Flamingos are declining in a lithium mining hotspot
Flamingo populations in the Lithium Triangle vary drastically from year to year, along with the amount of water and food, the study found. And at least in some places, mining seems to be contributing to those swings.
In Salar de Atacama, the populations of two threatened flamingo species — Andean flamingos and James’ flamingos — declined by 12 percent and 10 percent, respectively, between 2002 and 2013 (the most recent years for which the researchers had strong data). The analysis shows that those declines are most tightly linked to the spread of lithium mining, which the researchers measured using satellite imagery.
As expected, the authors also linked a drop in lake water — which is likely also linked to mining — to the decline of flamingos. Over the same 11 years, the surface area of water in the salt flat fell by more than 40 percent in winter, according to the study (the researchers didn’t detect a trend during the summer months). Noise and vehicle traffic from the mining operations are also likely impacting the birds, the authors wrote.
Flamingos aren’t just pretty to look at; they’re also linchpins in brine lake ecosystems, Senner said. As grazers, they spend much of their time munching through tiny organisms near the bottom of the food chain, which helps keep the lake’s ecosystem in balance. They’re also a barometer of lake health. If flamingos can’t survive, it’s likely that other avian species — such as ducks and coots — can’t either.
Many people who live in the region also depend on the birds for tourism, said Datu Buyung Agusdinata, an assistant professor at Arizona State University who was not affiliated with the study. “When the flamingo is gone, you will have fewer tourists, and this could impact livelihoods in a deep way,” he told Vox.
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But the researchers also discovered some good news: Across a much broader region, which includes the entire Chilean portion of the Lithium Triangle, none of the three flamingo species have declined. So, while mining might imperil birds in Salar de Atacama, other lakes can still support flamingos and perhaps even buffer losses elsewhere, according to the study. (In Salar de Atacama, flamingos didn’t necessarily die; they may have just flown to another lake or had fewer babies from one year to the next due to a lack of food.)
That means scientists and engineers have a rare opportunity to limit the impact of mining on these iconic birds before it’s too late.
Saving wildlife as lithium demand surges
In the last two decades, lithium production has grown eightfold in the Lithium Triangle — and there’s no question that it will continue to boom. Nearly all 20 of the world’s largest car manufacturers have committed to selling more electric vehicles, and the markets for home backup batteries and other electronics are also growing. “Chile, Bolivia, and Argentina are all pushing to expand lithium mining operations,” Senner said.
That’s one reason why studies like this are “urgently needed,” said Gonzalo Gajardo, a researcher at the Universidad de Los Lagos, Osorno, in Chile, who was also not affiliated with the study. While these results only show correlations — they don’t prove that lithium mining causes flamingos to decline — they’re still helpful, he said. “We need to devote more science to understanding how the shrinking of salty lakes affects their biodiversity,” he said.
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Researchers are also calling on companies to develop more sustainable mining practices. Lilac Solutions, a startup backed by BMW and a fund led by Bill Gates, says it has developed a technology that extracts lithium from brines without using evaporation ponds. The firm sells beads that mining companies can toss into tanks of brine, where they absorb lithium. “Lithium can be produced cleanly,” David Snydacker, the firm’s CEO, said in an interview with S&P Global Market Intelligence last fall.
Recycling can help reduce the demand for lithium, too, though it still has a long way to go. Only about 5 percent of lithium-ion cells are recycled today. “There are a lot of hurdles,” Agusdinata said. Recycling batteries can be dangerous, for example, and cells tend to degrade over time. By 2030, recycling is likely to supply less than 6 percent of the global demand for lithium, he said.
Chile, which controls roughly half of the world’s lithium reserves, is now rewriting its constitution, and study co-author Cristina Dorador Ortiz, a microbiologist, is on the writing committee. One way to strengthen the constitution, she told Vox, is to consider ecological impacts before granting companies the right to mine. “It’s impossible to stop mining,” Dorador Ortiz said. “But we need to do it better.”
Russia’s war is going to make gas and a lot of things more expensive.
The backdrop of global and domestic inflation in the United States was already worrying. Now, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the global reaction to it stand to make the situation worse — including sending gas prices soaring.
The conflict has roiled global markets, causing stock market turmoil, sending oil prices higher, and injecting even more uncertainty into an already off-balance worldwide economy. It’s also sparked concerns that inflation, already running hot, could run even hotter.
In the United States, the Consumer Price Index, which measures the average change in prices consumers pay for goods and services, was up by 7.5 percent over the past year in January. That’s a 40-year high. The hope was that inflation would soon start to come down, and that factors driving it, such as high gas prices and supply chain woes, would finally pass. Now, it appears that the situation could be quite the opposite.
“What we’re observing is essentially an energy price shock and a financial markets shock that comes on the back of this already concerning inflation environment, an environment in which global supply chains are already stressed and in which there is already some degree of uncertainty as to the outlook,” said Gregory Daco, chief economist at EY-Parthenon. “It’s not just a shock in isolation, it’s a shock in that context.”
Russia is one of the biggest oil and gas producers in the world, and any disruptions stand to have a major impact on prices — disruptions we’re already seeing. On Tuesday, President Joe Biden announced that the US would ban imports of Russian oil, natural gas, and coal. The United Kingdom has said it will scrap Russian oil imports as well. These maneuvers prompted a spike in oil prices, which have already been on the rise, and the situation is sure to have ripple effects across the global economy.
In early February, JPMorgan analysts projected that disruptions to oil flows from Russia could push oil prices to $120 per barrel, which, indeed, it already has. (For context, oil was priced in the $60 per barrel range a year ago, and started 2020 in the $70s and $80s.) Some analysts have warned that worst-case scenario oil prices could hit $200, and Russia has warned that $300 oil prices could be on the horizon, depending on what Europe, which is much more reliant on Russian oil and gas than the US, does.
In the US, Russian oil made up about 3 percent of shipments in 2021, according to Bloomberg, and when you include other petroleum products, that rises to 8 percent. That’s not a ton, but it’s not nothing, either. Major oil companies, such as Shell and BP, have said they’ll stop buying oil and gas from Russia and curb business with the country, which is causing volatility and prices changes as well. Europe is starting to move away from its dependence on Russia, too.
Americans — already dealing with high gas prices and annoyed at the rising costs of heating their homes — are in for a bumpy ride. Gas prices matter not just for people filling up the tanks of their cars but also because of shipping and transportation. The conflict could also translate to high diesel prices and jet fuel for airplanes. “The inflation machine is just not going to slow down,” said Patrick De Haan, head of petroleum analysis at GasBuddy.
According to AAA, the average price of gas nationally is $4.17 a gallon, up significantly from $2.66 a year ago. That number now stands to climb even higher, especially as the summer months approach, which will put more people on the road. As the New York Times points out, the last time gas prices were so high was during the 2008 financial crisis, when — adjusted for inflation — a gallon was priced at about $5.37.
Joe Brusuelas, chief economist at accounting and consulting firm RSM, told CNN in February that the Russia-Ukraine conflict could push inflation to 10 percent year over year, driven in part by gas. By his calculation, an increase in oil prices to $110 could increase consumer prices by 2.8 percent over the course of a year. Alan Detmeister, an economist at UBS, told the New York Times that oil at $120 per barrel could mean inflation at 9 percent in the coming months.
“It becomes a question of: How long do oil prices, natural gas wholesale prices stay elevated?” he told the Times. “That’s anybody’s guess.”
In remarks at the White House on Tuesday, President Biden acknowledged that the Russia-Ukraine conflict and measures the US and Europe have taken to push back against Russia will be felt domestically. “This decision today is not without cost here at home,” he said, referring to the Russian oil ban.
The Biden administration has promised to try to protect Americans from a spike in gas prices. Over the weekend, Secretary of State Anthony Blinken told CNN that the US is “talking to our European partners and allies to look in a coordinated way that prospect of banning the import of Russian oil while making sure that there’s still an appropriate supply of oil on world markets.”
Still, the options on oil supply are limited, at least in the immediate term. “The president has insinuated that he’s got it, he’s going to do everything he can,” said De Haan in February, but it’s not clear what other strings Biden can pull on. Striking a new nuclear deal with oil producer Iran could help, but it’s no silver bullet, nor is it clear it’s very likely to happen. “It’s no Russia, in terms of oil supply,” De Haan said. The US has also begun weighing whether it could look to Venezuela.
Higher oil prices could dampen on economic growth. People and companies having to spend more on oil and gas could reduce spending in other areas, and that could cut into GDP. By one estimate, a long-term increase in gas prices could cost the typical household in the US $2,000 per year.
There are other areas where the Russia-Ukraine conflict could show up in consumer prices. Russia is the largest wheat exporter in the world. As the Times notes, Russia and Ukraine make up 30 percent of global wheat exports, and Ukraine is also a major exporter of corn, barley, and vegetable oil. Disruptions to any of that could lead to disruptions in the commodities markets, therefore pushing up prices eventually at the grocery store. The conflict has caused wheat prices to surge. Bloomberg reported in February that the Biden administration isn’t yet going to impose sanctions on Russia that would impact aluminum, which would throw a wrench in the global supply, though aluminum and metal prices have already gone up.
“It’s a combination of a set of commodities that are being produced either in Ukraine or Russia that have been affected,” Daco said. He warned that if further sanctions are imposed on Russia, it could affect aluminum and commodities prices even more. “It’s a wide spectrum of agricultural, energy, and other commodities.” On Tuesday, Russian President Vladimir Putin signed a decree banning the exports of some commodities, which could have major global ramifications.
I took a brief moment from the news in the last hour … Big mistake.
— Elina Ribakova (@elinaribakova) March 8, 2022
This will have a dramatic impact on inflation, global value chains, growth and could cause a global recession. https://t.co/SP8YnMc9Q7