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.
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“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...
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