At a Butterball turkey farm in Shannon, North Carolina, a farm worker in 2011 was filmed kicking, stomping, dragging, and slamming turkeys into the ground. The footage was obtained as part of a Mercy for Animals undercover investigation that led to a historic court case. The worker was fired, sentenced to 30 days in jail, and fined $550, resulting in the first felony conviction for animal cruelty at a U.S. farm. The farm worker clearly faced consequences — but do such punishments help farmed animals?
Many animal cruelty lawsuits seek to criminally punish individual farm and slaughterhouse workers using evidence from undercover investigations. In Florida, a judge who previously worked at a dairy farm sentenced two farm workers to jail for beating and stabbing cows — an instance of the “good” former farm worker becoming an enforcer of the law. The trend of criminalizing workers’ inhumane treatment of animals is growing — last year, England and Wales increased the maximum jail sentences for animal cruelty, including the gross neglect of farmed animals, from six months to five years. In the past decade, convictions for farmed animal cruelty have increased significantly in these countries.
The release of undercover footage puts farm owners under pressure to act. Since farms rely on a positive image to maintain “business as usual,” their owners try to present themselves as opponents of animal cruelty. To this end, farm owners often make efforts to conceal and oppose instances of cruelty. The owners of a U.K. pig farm in 2018 denied the cruelty on their farm while simultaneously initiating a full RSPCA-backed investigation. Nevertheless, as farmed animals are considered property under the law, their routine confinement and killing is both legal and considered necessary. Farm owners who appear to be opponents of criminal animal cruelty can simultaneously profit from farmed animals’ ongoing exploitation.
However, punishing individual workers does not meaningfully change the animal agriculture industry’s standard practices. Even activists who support jailing farm workers lament how punishing workers does nothing to protect farmed animals. A large campaign in 2019 against Fair Oaks Farms in Indiana, for example, resulted in additional monitoring and education of the workers but has not changed the farm’s operations beyond that. Criminal prosecutions sometimes target the activists who reveal animal cruelty, but neither prosecuting workers nor activists ultimately changes the farms’ operations. Factory farms’ routine exploitation and killing continues unabated.
While undercover investigations may harm farms’ public images, firing workers can seem to act as a remedy; farm owners who fire workers and initiate prosecutions appear to be taking steps against animal cruelty. This reinforces the false idea that the animal agriculture industry is not inherently violent, but rather an opponent of animal cruelty. Through derailing public concern, this violent industry keeps the illusion of opposing animal cruelty alive.
Surprisingly, animal welfare proponents often applaud this charade of punishing farm workers. Many activists support harsh punishments such as deportations, incarcerating minors, and long felony sentences. Campaigns for tougher sentencing have wide support among activists and the public. Activist groups target politically weak farm workers for easier and “winnable” campaigns which, in turn, attract more funding to their organizations. These approaches support individual punishments while failing to address the exploitation at farms.
By supporting criminally punitive responses, activists in the animal rights movement stand in sharp contrast with those of other progressive social movements — such as the Black Lives Matter movement — who more widely acknowledge the structural racism inherent in the criminal legal system. Most recently, Black Lives Matter protesters in the U.S. and internationally called for abolishing the police, marking their anti-carceral stance. As legal scholar Justin Marceau writes, the pro-carceral animal welfare approach relies on a “proven system of human oppression and suffering as an assumed vehicle for undermining the structural oppression of non-humans.”
Paradoxically, this carceral approach aims to bring about justice for nonhumans through a system of human oppression.
Anti-carceral animal activists break from the pro-carceral “tradition” of seeking criminal punishments for farm workers. Instead, they seek to simultaneously fight the oppression of the animal agriculture industry and the prison system. Anti-carceral veganism is a new concept, developed by the scholars and writers Lori Gruen, Leah Kirts, and Justin Marceau, who hosted an online roundtable on the concept in July 2020. Anti-carceral veganism combines animal liberation with the anti-racist struggle for prison abolition. In a chapter entitled “Toward an Anti-Carceral Queer Veganism” (from the book Queer and Trans Voices: Achieving Liberation Through Consistent Anti-Oppression), author Leah Kirts describes the use of restorative justice — an alternative to the current punitive system — to “repair the harm that has been caused to victims, offenders, and their communities through rehabilitation, reconciliation, and restoration.” According to Kirts, capitalist white supremacy is “at the core of oppressive carceral institutions.”
Both restorative justice and anti-carceral veganism perspectives take into account the socioeconomic contexts in which individual crimes occur, such as the struggles of undocumented workers in the animal agriculture industry.
Breaking from the carceral tradition urgently pushes the animal movement towards its revolutionary potential of achieving consistent anti-oppression for all individuals of all species. Anti-carceral veganism constitutes a more political, far-reaching approach to animal liberation than the criminal punishment-oriented approach.
Despite animal agriculture executives’ culpability for how farmed animals are treated, the anti-carceral goal of emptying human and non-human cages does not align with jailing animal agriculture industry leaders. Incarcerating more or different people does not stop the inhumane practices of the animal agriculture industry, because even jailed executives can be replaced. An anti-carceral alternative based on the concept of restorative justice instead aims to end the animal agriculture industry and redirect corporations’ wealth to start repairing the immense damage caused by the industry. This wealth could fund sanctuaries for as many farmed animals as possible and employment transition plans for workers. Additionally, redistributing these economic resources could help to transform animal farms into plant-producing farms and develop new alternative plant-based foods. Jailing executives may seem just or enticing, but other approaches align better with the anti-carceral perspective and produce more just results.
For activist organizations and journalists, adopting an anti-carceral perspective would drastically alter how they approach their work. With an anti-carceral perspective, activists would need to start opposing the entire animal agriculture industry and its interconnected oppressions — a more difficult and long-term goal than merely exposing individual acts of cruelty by workers. Journalists would need to alter their work by taking more critical, nuanced views of animal cruelty investigations. Activist and journalistic work, from the anti-carceral perspective, needs to oppose all violence — not just isolated acts of criminal cruelty — in the animal agriculture industry. Adopting the anti-carceral perspective, for both activists and journalists, would constitute a broader, justice-based approach.
Animal cruelty laws and campaigns too often target low-level workers, like the Butterball employee and the pair at the Florida dairy farm, rather than the people in power and the animal agriculture industry itself. Prosecuting workers is not a stepping stone toward ending the widespread harm caused by the industry. Anti-carceral vegans, rather than advocating for individual sentencing, aim to shut down farms in their entirety to stop the violence altogether. The anti-carceral perspective is revolutionary because it rejects all oppression, by both the animal agriculture industry and the prison system, by seeking to empty all types of cages.
Image credit: Will Kimeria