Before sitting down to watch Adam’s tapes, I came in with my biases about the meat industry. After twenty years of work in the field, visiting farms and slaughter plants and studying the topic exhaustively, I felt that the meat industry had lost whatever humanity it once had, adding more and more miseries to the lives and deaths of animals raised for food. The modern livestock industry is never more resourceful than when it is cutting corners or evading even minimal regulations. Among many other wrongs it commits, the industry has betrayed the old standards of animal husbandry, which at their best showed a decent respect for the natures and needs of farm animals and obvious ethical boundaries. That sense of responsibility has been discarded by industrial agriculture; at every stage the animals are typically treated as unfeeling commodities and units of production. It can make for some sorry sights, and that’s what I was prepared for when I sat down to see what Adam had recorded.
Yet for all that, the images still left me rattled. The abuse was just appalling. As if it were not hard enough for these afflicted creatures going to their death, their last moments were filled with beatings, shouting, and fright. The workers showed not the least sense of restraint or concern. Whatever compassion they might have felt for the animals had clearly worn away in the violent routine of the job.
One of my first thoughts was the disconnect between what I was seeing and the California dairy industry’s “Happy Cow” advertising campaign—a high-profile, multimillion-dollar promotional effort financed by a two-cent surcharge on every gallon of milk. The ads play up the idea that happy cows produce good milk, evoking pastoral images of cows in green fields bathed in sunshine.
We now had in hand more than enough evidence that the industry’s marketing campaign was a fraud. These cows at Hallmark had never set their hooves on grass; their path, from the day they were born to this day of their death, was one of confinement, privation, and misery. They passed their days standing on concrete floors or knee-deep in a dark brew of mud and manure before they came to the knock box at places like Hallmark.
My only concern was that the scenes were so painful to watch that the news media might not put them on the air—a common problem with issues of cruelty. In the view of a lot of producers and editors, there’s enough upsetting news every day without forcing scenes of animal cruelty on their viewers and readers, and so they take a pass. The temptation to ignore the story is only stronger when it concerns farm animals and meat production and many viewers may feel a touch of guilt—since the average American consumes 220 pounds of meat a year.
This is true even though we seem to be in a period of social awakening about our food and its origins. In best-selling books, Michael Pollan has pointed out that corn is in so many foods, that processed foods are a fixture in our diets, and that industrialized agriculture abuses animals, who themselves are typically fed massive amounts of corn and soybeans. Pollan’s general dietary advice is: “Eat Food. Not too much. Mostly plants.”
In Fast Food Nation, also a best seller, Eric Schlosser showed how fast-food companies are “super-sizing” their products, leading to obesity, diabetes, and a range of other health problems. Men, on average, weigh seventeen pounds more than they did in the 1970s, and women weigh nineteen pounds more. Americans are simply eating more, and much of what they eat is doing them harm. Pollan and Schlosser, among others, have given us a window into what is happening in slaughterhouses and on farms, revealing the harsh, merciless world of modern food production.
At the time of the Prop. 2 effort, people were beginning to recognize that it doesn’t have to be this way. All of us have choices. And to make those choices, we need to see our options clearly and take an unflinching look at the moral costs of industrial livestock farming. What Adam and his camera had captured would offer that clear view, and at just the right time. It always takes the right set of circumstances for a campaign to break into popular consciousness, and here those circumstances were aligned. A series of food safety scares in the months before the Hallmark case had made the issue a live one in Congress and among the public. This shocking story out of California happened to involve kids and school lunches—Hallmark’s primary market—so parents would demand action. It also involved a mainstream group like HSUS, and a courageous undercover investigation that added some drama to the story. And, finally, the footage that Adam recorded had a digestible amount of violence: Mistreated animals. Not too much blood. On its way to kids.
Once we watched all the Hallmark footage, it was obvious we had evidence of criminal cruelty to animals against the workers and the company. But it was a state matter, not a federal one, since federal laws to protect farm animals are virtually nonexistent and there is no federal anticruelty law. There were clearly violations of the Humane Methods of Slaughter Act, but that’s not a criminal statute—the enforcement tool for the federal government is to temporarily shut down the operations of the slaughter plant, and it was now too late for that. Moreover, no federal statutes existed to address the criminal behavior of the people involved.
That was just part of the reason we didn’t make the USDA our first stop once we had assembled the case. We also had no confidence in senior USDA officials to act in a decisive way and demand reforms. Almost as a rule, high-ranking political appointees at the USDA come straight out of corporate positions in the meat industry. And they don’t see much difference between their jobs in government and their jobs in the industry. Dale Moore, chief of staff at the agriculture department during the Bush administration, had previously been a lobbyist for the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association. The meat industry had always seemed like a management training track for senior USDA work, and it’s been that way for a very long time.
All these problems were compounded by the USDA’s own failure to prevent the abuses at Hallmark. Everything had happened under the USDA’s regulatory authority. And I thought it highly unlikely that the department would condemn its own employees’ performance and highlight the poor oversight procedures at the plant.
Our only serious option was to hand over the footage in mid-December to the office of Michael Ramos, the very capable San Bernardino County district attorney. Ramos’s deputy, Debbie Ploghaus, had a reliable record of prosecuting cruelty cases in the county and clearly cared about enforcing the law. Along with the footage, we also gave Ramos’s office a legal analysis arguing that the conduct of the plant personnel violated California laws forbidding animal cruelty and the California Downed Animal Protection Act. Unlike many other states, California does not exempt routine or customary agricultural practices from its anticruelty statutes.
Even so, no state had ever successfully prosecuted slaughterhouse workers, so bringing Hallmark to justice was no sure thing. The case was set in a community with a strong agricultural heritage—another burden we’d have to overcome in a jury trial. We needed to produce an overwhelming case on the facts—one reason why Adam stayed undercover many weeks gathering more and more information.
Our lead farm animal attorney, Peter Brandt, had worked with deputy D.A. Debbie Ploghaus before and arranged for a meeting to hand over the evidence. Soon thereafter the district attorney’s office informed us that it had opened an investigation. Days went by, and then weeks, and the district attorney’s office gave us no definite word on the progress of the case. We could not know whether they were actively investigating, or if they had put the issue aside in order to handle other matters. By mid-January, Ramos’s office had had the footage in its hands for nearly a month. Our team was getting impatient, and I began to worry that Ramos’s office was going to bury it. Maybe the case was just too controversial for an elected D.A. in an agricultural county. Maybe pressures were being brought to bear from other sources.
WE KNEW THAT RELEASING the footage to the media would put pressure on all parties—the management at Hallmark, the USDA, and the district attorney. So on January 29, 2008, I called a reporter at the Washington Post and offered an exclusive to the newspaper. We’d release the footage t
he next day at the press conference when the story appeared in the Post. This was a case about animal abuse, and also a disgraceful example of the failure by our government to regulate the meat industry. I wanted the staff at the USDA and in Congress to see the story, and what better messenger than the Washington Post?
The Post story was powerful and validated the story, and now other reporters wanted to hear more and to see the footage for themselves. At the press conference that same day, I announced that we had found gross abuses of downer cows at a Southern California slaughter plant, that these downer cows were entering the food supply, and that this plant was the second-largest supplier to the National School Lunch Program—providing fifty million pounds of ground beef for schoolchildren all across the nation. Those facts—combined with the images, including one of a forklift rolling a cow—made a visceral impression, and reporters left that room determined to learn more.
We distributed the footage that morning and posted it on our website. It didn’t take long for CNN, Fox, and other networks to start running it, and the story became the lead item in the news cycle that day. We also sent the footage and our documentation over to Ed Schafer, the new agriculture secretary, who’d been sworn in just the day before.
There were immediate aftershocks. No one could deny that something was seriously wrong at Hallmark, and even the USDA and industry trade groups recognized that right away. The USDA pulled its inspectors from the plant almost immediately. Given that federal law requires that meat fit for human consumption be USDA approved, that action alone was enough to shut down the Hallmark slaughter lines.
Major news outlets stayed on the story for days. Upon learning that Hallmark supplied ground beef to school cafeterias, parents across America were making themselves heard. They worried about E. coli and mad cow disease. Then they started to panic, and to press for action. And school districts began taking meat out of their cafeterias.
The release of the footage also lit a fire under the San Bernardino County D.A.’s office. On February 14, we heard from District Attorney Ramos, and the very next day I joined him for a press conference at his office, where he announced he was filing charges against two of the workers seen in the video committing the worst acts of cruelty against the cows.
Ramos also announced that he had charged Daniel Ugarte Navarro, a plant worker, with five felony counts under California’s anticruelty statute, and three misdemeanor counts including allegations of using a mechanical device to move downer cows. Convictions on the felony charges could bring a sentence of up to fifteen years in prison and $100,000 in fines, plus additional penalties on the misdemeanor charges. A second Hallmark worker, Jose Luis Sanchez, was charged with three misdemeanors involving the mistreatment of downers.
To his great credit, Ramos also declared his reasons for bringing charges, in words that the entire industry needed to hear: “I need the public to understand that my office takes all cases involving animal cruelty very seriously. It doesn’t matter whether the mistreated animal is a beloved family pet or a cow at a slaughterhouse. Unnecessary cruelty will not be tolerated, and will be prosecuted to the fullest extent allowed by law.”
Agriculture secretary Ed Schafer, who was still getting to know his staff, treated the case seriously and said he was appalled by the mistreatment of the animals at Hallmark. But he also joined the meat industry in its counterattack against HSUS. “For four months they [HSUS] sat on that information,” he told CNN. Schafer and the industry all but blamed us for the cows suffering for the last few weeks, and for the food safety threats, because we didn’t deliver the footage immediately to the USDA.
Meat industry executives were very much on the defensive, without much of an explanation, so they attacked the messenger. We anticipated their counterattack. I’d already sent the USDA a timeline of our investigation, and by the reaction we were getting from the press and public, we had handled it just right. I reminded the public that the abuses happened on the USDA’s watch, not ours, and that we were tired of seeing the cozy relationship between the meat industry and an agency charged with upholding federal law and serving the public interest.
With cruelty charges filed by Ramos and with much of the nation watching, USDA had little choice but to act. The USDA announced a voluntary recall by Hallmark of all meat from the plant distributed in the last two years. That came to 143 million pounds of ground beef, making this the largest meat recall in American history.
Much of the Hallmark meat had already been consumed, but millions of pounds were in freezers in schools and homes across the country, and school administrators were dumping it. Andrew Weinstein, a board member of HSUS, told me he’d recently toured an aircraft carrier and learned that the ship weighed seventy-five thousand tons. That was about the same weight as the recalled meat from Hallmark.
Spokespersons from the agriculture department called it a Class II recall, which was not the highest recall level, and said it was acting out of an “abundance of caution.” They insisted there was no danger, but that rules on the handling of downer cows had been violated. Yet if there was really no danger, why impose a recall of this magnitude?
Confidence in the USDA was hardly at a high point. Concern was growing in Congress that our food safety mechanisms were obsolete, that the functions were balkanized among too many federal agencies, and that the agriculture department itself was too close to industry and compromised by conflicts of interest.
Also on everyone’s mind were the public health risks of sending downer cows into the food supply. Because they were wallowing on the ground, the cows were covered in manure when they were slaughtered and were thus more likely to cross-contaminate equipment and spread E. coli. And plenty of evidence from Europe showed that downer cows are much more likely than ambulatory cows to have bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE). The human variant of BSE is Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, a fatal brain-wasting condition.
As all of this unfolded, Steve Mendell, the president of Hallmark, seemed to be in hiding. There were eight congressional hearings centering on the Hallmark case, and it took a subpoena from the House Energy and Commerce Committee to get him to one. Mendell testified, under oath, that he had known nothing about the cruelty that had come to light, and that he was disturbed by the evidence on tape. He assured the committee that no downer cows were slaughtered, and that the ground beef the company sold was safe for human consumption.
Representative Bart Stupak, a Democrat of Michigan, a tall, imposing, yet youthful-looking former sheriff who chaired the Oversight and Investigation Subcommittee, had studied the tape and had a different view. He directed Mendell and a jam-packed committee room to turn their attention to the monitors on the wall, and then asked that our footage be shown. The scenes looked familiar to all by then, but Stupak focused the room on one particular moment when a downer cow was dragged into the knock box. “Do you now deny, sir—and remember that you are under oath—that downer cows were slaughtered for human consumption?” Stupak demanded. Mendell relented, conceding what everybody had just seen with their own eyes.
Soon, the crisis went global. America’s trading partners became agitated about the safety of American beef. Our footage had now been broadcast on network television stations around the world, including in South Korea, the second-largest importer of American beef. There, the South Korean people saw how at least some American beef was getting to the table, and it did not inspire confidence. There were actually riots, and at one point some seventy thousand people took to the streets of Seoul. The rioting lasted for days, and both the USDA and the office of the U.S. Trade Representative launched a hurried diplomatic effort to avert a complete shutdown of the South Korean market for American beef.
Some months later, in response to the investigation, California lawmakers upgraded the state’s Downed Animal Protection Act, prohibiting slaughterhouses from selling meat from downer cows and imposing penalties of up to $20,000 in fines and imprisonment of up to a year. I also urged Secretary Schafer and his d
epartment to ban all meat from downed animal products in the food supply. He hedged, claiming it wasn’t necessary, but eventually announced nearly four months after the investigation broke that he favored a ban on slaughtering downer cattle in the food supply.
The problem was, the Bush administration’s USDA took no final action. There was a promise, but no emergency measure to stop downers from entering the food supply. And when the president’s term came to an end, nothing at all had been done to ban the slaughter of downer cows. It wasn’t until the Obama administration took over, along with a new agriculture secretary in Tom Vilsack, that a federal ban on processing adult downer cows was imposed. Such a simple, minimal standard—that sick and lame animals shouldn’t be abused any further—and yet in Washington it took two decades of debate and a series of national crises to finally make it law.
Endless Denials: The Challenge of Reform
THAT IS THE SORDID tale of the Hallmark meat plant, and it explains why this site was the first stop on my tour of the Inland Empire with Maggie Jones of the New York Times. We showed up at the shuttered plant in July of 2008, just seven months after HSUS had released the final results of our investigation. The $110 million company had been out of business since the USDA first pulled its inspectors. Its president, Steve Mendell, had left Chino behind and retreated to his $4 million home in Orange County. When Maggie and I parked outside the main entrance to the plant, the only person we saw was a security guard, who would not leave his guard shack even after I politely motioned to him to come and speak with us.
With the watchman seemingly confined to his post, we walked around the side of the plant and peered over a five-foot wall surrounding the facility. We climbed atop the wall, and from there surveyed the place where hundreds of thousands of cows had been killed through the years. Now it lay abandoned, almost peaceful. The building was completely intact, and everything there still seemed to be ready for operations. I suggested to Maggie that we call Adam so he could tell us what to look for. After a couple of rings, he picked up the phone and I put him on speaker.
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