For related articles and more information, please visit OCA’s CAFO’s vs. Free Range page.

Amy Meyer wanted to see for herself where her food was coming from. But in the state of Utah, she discovered,  that was against the law.

On February 8,  Meyer drove to Dale Smith Meatpacking Company in Draper City, Utah, and took a look from the side of the road. She gasped as she peered through the barbed wire fence and saw what appeared to be a sick cow being treated like rubble as it was carried in a tractor. So she did what many people would do in this day and age. She got out her smartphone to begin recording.

For this, Meyer was arrested and prosecuted under Utah’s new “ag-gag” law.

It turns out that similar laws are now in place not just in Utah, but also in Kansas, Arkansas, Iowa, and Missouri. And many other states are considering similar legislation.

The goal of these laws, it would appear, is to keep consumers from seeing where modern meat really comes from. Considering that 94 percent of the American public believes that animals raised for food should be free from abuse and cruelty, the modern meat industry has some good reasons to fear the public finding out that Old MacDonald’s farm isn’t so happy these days.

Charges against Meyer were subsequently dropped, but Utah’s law is still on the books. And now Amy Meyer is joining with award-winning author Will Potter and a team of organizations in filing a lawsuit challenging her state’s controversial law in the courts.

Soon thereafter, in Kansas on June 28th, a photographer working for a publication not generally seen as promoting a radical agenda, 
National Geographic, was arrested and briefly jailed after taking aerial pictures of a feedlot for a series on food issues to be published some time next year.