The picture below comes from a 2010 video provided by the US Humane Society showing a slaughterhouse worker in California forcing a “downed” cow onto its feet by ramming it with the blades of a forklift. According to this news piece in the Associated Press, the video led to the largest meat recall in US history.
The massive meat recall occasioned by this video clearly shows that many people are disgusted by the cruelty its depicts. And consumers obviously want to know, or at least have the right to know, the conditions in which their meat is being raised. In a real democracy, one would expect that videos such as this one would lead to stronger government regulation of the meat industry and sever penalties (perhaps the revoking of licenses) for those businesses that engage in these inhumane acts. But in the US this video has led instead to legislative proposals to ban the filming of these videos. In Indiana, Arkansas, and Pennsylvania, for instance, legislators are now seeking to make it a crime to make videos at agricultural operations.
This fiasco is an another vivid illustration of the perverted form of democracy that exists in the US, where government is of, by, and for the corporations, not the people. Rather than working to inform or educate citizens about their food choices, government officials are in fact working, at the request of the meat industry, to keep the public in the dark.
