“The violence is not new, it’s the cameras that are new.”
–Ta-Nehisi Coates
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It has been a couple decades since I saw my first video of a factory farm. Since then, I’ve seen countless more and gone to these places to see it all personally. To do this, I learned to separate myself from what I witnessed.
I have observed clinically, using spreadsheets to keep track of the investigations, color-coding them by types of animals and types of abuse (“beating,” “sexual violence,” “standard practices”). That’s what journalists are taught to do with the trauma we witness. We put it in boxes and then write a story.
This worked for a long while until it suddenly didn’t. I don’t know how to explain this, because I still don’t fully understand. Although I have been writing about factory farms for years, this project made it all feel new again, made me reexperience the terror and the sense of being restrained and forced to watch the violence.
Working on this project has changed me. I haven’t kept tally, but I have watched dozens of hours of factory farm investigations at this point, maybe more. I have immersed myself in industry research and publications like Pork Network News and Dairy Herd Management. I have visited farms and slaughterhouses myself, both legally and illegally. I have seen it all with my own eyes, and I have been haunted by what I’ve seen, again and again, like the first time.
I want to be transparent about this because I do need to tell you about what takes place every day on factory farms. This is a small part of the book, and the descriptions are disturbing, but they are necessary, and I hope you won’t turn away.
To truly see injustice, we need more than visual imagery. Our sight has to be informed with a broader understanding of context, history, and the individual.
I also need to tell you that, soon after watching that first video, I stopped consuming animal products. As a journalist, I feel the need to disclose my plant-based diet as a bias. I’ve argued with the editor in my brain quite a bit about this. Why is it that not eating animal products is a bias, while eating them is not?
That said, I always approach my reporting meticulously, and no matter what I’m covering I fact-check my own preconceived ideas and deliberately seek to challenge them. I have done my best throughout to be careful of my tone and adjectives, my descriptions and analyses. I have tried to keep details of disturbing videos short—much more has been left on the cutting room floor than made it into the book. Still, I know this material asks a lot from a reader, even more than if I were to ask you to watch a video yourself. As John Gardner says, when we read we drift into a dream state and “we begin to see images.” It can be haunting, and it’s always easier to close the book.
I’m reminded of the Friends episode where Joey was too scared reading Stephen King’s The Shining, so sometimes he needed to shut the book and put it in the freezer. Feel free to try that, as often as you need. But come back, because those passages, no matter how shocking, are just a small part of a much bigger story that is critical for us all to confront. It’s not just the farm animals and those who try to protect them who are at risk.
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My friend Dayo Aiyetan runs an organization in Nigeria called the International Center for Investigative Reporting. He has spent decades exposing corruption and training journalists how to report secrets in dangerous environments. Years ago I asked him to speak to a class I was teaching at the University of Michigan on whistleblowing. My only request was that he not gloss over the dangerous realities for African journalists and investigators. Just tell them what it’s like.
At the end of his talk, a student asked what makes him keep going amid so much corruption and violence.
“There is a saying we have in Africa,” Dayo said. “ ‘If you hide a rooster in a basket, he will crow sometime. People will know about it.”
There will always be people in power who try to hide corruption, Dayo said, but it’s growing much more difficult to hide. He argued that because of email, social media, and video, it’s easier than ever to follow the crows of roosters.
This is what undercover investigators have done. One video at a time, they began lifting the lids off the baskets of the animal agriculture industry.
In a landmark investigation in 2008, for instance, the Humane Society of the United States recorded sick cows at Hallmark/Westland Meat Packing Company in Chino, California. The cows were too sick to even walk, which is so common in the industry that they are called “downers.”
Sick animals are not supposed to enter the food supply. But downers hurt profit margins, and workers are pressured to get every animal to slaughter. Hallmark/Westland workers were recorded beating and kicking the cows, applying electric shocks, and stabbing them with the blades of a forklift to push them into the “kill box” so that they could be killed and sold.
The slaughterhouse was the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s second-largest supplier and was named a “supplier of the year” for 2004-2005. The video prompted the recall of 143 million pounds of meat, the largest meat recall in U.S. history.
Had this investigation not occurred, sick animals would have been fed to elementary school children in 36 states as part of the national school lunch program.
A lawsuit was filed against the company and its investors arguing they defrauded the U.S. government and the National School Lunch Program. The meatpacking company was hit with a $155 million consent judgment, the largest in U.S. history for animal abuse.
This was a turning point in the undercover investigation movement. It demonstrated the power and potential of undercover investigations and confirmed for the activists that they were on the right path. A single video had sent the agriculture industry into a tailspin, and now they were eager to build on that momentum.
In the following years there was a feverish intensity to the work. Every major animal protection group was involved in undercover investigations. Established organizations like PETA alongside younger, grassroots projects like Compassion Over Killing and Mercy for Animals. The Humane Society of the United States—which had long been a “cats and dogs” welfare group—started a farmed animal campaign, hiring some of those activists I was meeting at Asylum.
Exposing animal abuse is perhaps a strange thing to be competitive about, but there was an intense competition among the groups. They supported each other’s work, but they also used it to push themselves to go further. After each undercover investigation, they held press conferences and partnered with national media outlets for exclusive stories. The attention—and the ambition of activists—kept growing.
Undercover investigations have exposed animal abuse so egregious that they have resulted in historic criminal prosecutions for cruelty against farm animals. Prosecutors have relied on the detailed footage of undercover investigators to build their legal cases and punish those caught on camera. There have been at least twelve state animal cruelty investigations since 2010, and this had never happened before undercover video.
In New Mexico, a worker was convicted of two counts of criminal animal cruelty after an investigation showed him stabbing cows with a screwdriver and whipping them with a metal chain.
In Wyoming, workers pled guilty to animal cruelty after they were exposed punching piglets and kicking them like soccer balls.
In North Carolina, workers were exposed stomping and kicking turkeys, throwing them by their necks into metal cages, and beating them with metal bars. The investigation resulted in historic felony cruelty prosecution related to animals used for food.
In nearly all of these cases, farm owners have attempted to distance themselves from their workers. They blame the cruelty on poor training or bad actors and say they were unaware of what was happening every day on their farms.
The most damning scenes revealed by undercover investigators, though, haven’t involved rogue workers. They are behaviors that the industry considers completely normal and proper.
On factory farms these “standard industry practices” include
Cutting off the tails and testicles of piglets, the testicles and horns of bulls, and the beaks of chickens without anesthesia.
Confining sows in “gestation crates” and “sow stalls”—metal pens that are used to keep female pigs tightly confined and separated from their piglets.
Stacking egg-laying hens in battery cages so tightly that birds are given less space than a standard sheet of paper. They live unable to flap their wings, surrounded by mummified corpses and covered in the feces of birds stacked above them.
Removing baby male cows from their mothers after birth, chaining them inside veal crates so they can’t move and their flesh remains soft. When babies are not removed from their mothers, metal spikes—called an “anti-suckling device”—are inserted into their nostrils so that it is too painful for mothers to nurse them.
In Canada, Mercy for Animals exposed workers at Puratone pig farm holding piglets by their feet and slamming them onto the concrete floor to kill them. The industry has a more benign description; it’s called “thumping,” and it is standard industry practice both in the United States and Canada. After the Mercy for Animals investigation, the Animal Care and Review Panel responded by saying that what investigators exposed is widely accepted within the industry and considered the normal, proper way of treating animals.
The headline of the Vancouver Sun summed up the industry’s review of the video: “Body slamming piglets to death humane, pork experts say.”
In Iowa, an investigation of Hy-Line hatchery showed workers standing by a conveyor belt of chirping chicks, tossing them one by one into the blades of a metal grinder. The United Egg Producers describes the disposal of male chicks this way as standard procedure. The chicks are tossed into trash cans to be gassed or electrocuted, or in chutes like this to be ground alive, because males have no value for the egg industry.
A spokesman for an egg industry group responded to the Hy-Line investigation by calling animal welfare concerns a “joke.”
“If someone has a need for 200 million male chicks,” he said, “we’re happy to provide them to anyone who wants them. But we can find no market, no need.”
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Should I keep going?
I just summarized the daily suffering of billions of animals with a few pages, which is appallingly inadequate and incomplete. If I add in all the details and investigations that I have edited out, would it make the scale of the problem more visible? Or in that volume of violence does the issue become more opaque?
As I struggled with these questions, I was teaching a classes on whistleblowing at the University of Michigan, speaking at surveillance conferences, and hosting lectures with international journalists who exposed massive data leaks. I saw a broader trend emerging that was unmistakable: the size of the leaks keeps growing.
When Daniel Ellsberg blew the whistle on the Pentagon Papers in 1971, he photocopied the documents by hand. When Edward Snowden exposed illegal government surveillance, he downloaded more than a million files. In subsequent years, whistleblower releases have continued to expand. For the Luxembourg Leaks, for example, nearly 28,000 pages of financial documents were anonymously released to journalists. For the Panama Papers, reporters with the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists reviewed a leak of 2.6 terabytes—that’s about 11.5 million files.
Scholar Zeynep Tufekci has praised whistleblowing but describes the massive, indiscriminate dumping of groups like WikiLeaks as reckless. She has questioned whether it’s actually a new form of unintentional censorship; she calls it “whistle-drowning.”
“In a sea of so many whistles blowing so loud,” Tufekci said, “we cannot hear a single one.”
Could that be what’s happening with animal agriculture? I started to wonder if the problem wasn’t censorship—but that there was too much information. Are we deluged by graphic footage? Are we experiencing censorship by overload?
I think there’s some truth here, connected to our limited ability as humans to process more information than we have ever been exposed to in human history. But increasingly I started to wonder if the issue wasn’t just a product of the digital era—mass information, new technology, smart phones, social media. For me it raised questions about fundamental human nature. This increasingly felt like it wasn’t a technological problem but instead an existential one.
As I write this, across the many years I have now been working on this project, I have been looking for answers to these questions in another set of videos.
News outlets around the world have reported an endless stream of police violence against black people documented by citizen observers. Shooting after shooting, a dark tally of beatings and murder. Eric Garner, Michael Brown, Tamir Rice, Alton Sterling, Philando Castile, Breonna Taylor, George Floyd, Daunte Wright. These are just a few.
There are striking parallels here to the rise of undercover farm videos—a perfect storm of new tech, social media, and public outrage. The scenes documented by both sets of videos occur every day, out of sight, until one person decides to pull out a camera or smartphone, and post the video online.
The individual videos are each exposing specific scenes of extreme, nearly unwatchable violence. But they work together to reveal something else entirely.
I’ve watched these videos and the movement they created in a personal search for answers about what it means to bear witness in a digital age. For me they raise the same questions as the factory farm videos I’ve studied: How do we, as individual humans, begin to process the scale of suffering that has been recorded? How much injustice do we need to see in order to understand? And at what point have we seen too much?
The videos have inspired thousands of people to take to the streets, demanding accountability and justice. But I wonder if there is also a danger here.
One of the leading researchers on the issue is Allissa Richardson, an assistant professor of journalism at the University of Southern California. In her book Bearing Witness While Black, she questions whether the public needs to keep seeing videos of black people being killed by police. She says we don’t need them anymore.
Richardson argues that the endless loop of violent footage has lost sight of the victims. Jacob Blake, for example, was shot in the back multiple times by Kenosha, Wisconsin police. His children watched from the backseat of his car. The story of Blake as a police shooting victim drowned out the story of him as a father, Richardson says, someone with “a growing collection of dad jokes” and a “bedtime tuck-in routine” for his kids.
In the onslaught of graphic videos the victims are lost, yet simultaneously the viewer is lost as well. After police killed Tyre Nichols, for example, Baratunde Thurston announced he had had enough. He said he didn’t even try to watch the video.
“I knew the moment I learned about Tyre Nichols’s death there was nothing new to see,” Thurston wrote. “I’ve learned that if you watch yourself die too many times, you start to die inside. (America is addicted to watching me die, to watching itself die.)…But even if I don’t see police murder another Black person, that doesn’t stop the killing.”
To truly see injustice, we need more than visual imagery. Our sight has to be informed with a broader understanding of context, history, and the individual. But I’m struggling with what that means for the videos I’m discussing.
Despite all the similarities in how they are used, farm videos and police videos are, of course, radically different. Farm investigations have focused on cruelty to animals, not humans. And what they depict doesn’t just bring into question the actions of cops or the powers that be. We are personally implicated. It feels like both of those factors make these videos easier to overlook.
Should I include chapters documenting how farm animals feel pain, communicate, and form relationships? I could feature a few experts describing how we know they have personalities and complex emotions. Cows play, and mother hens communicate with their chicks before they hatch. Pigs are as intelligent and emotionally responsive as a dog—as a two-year-old child. I could tell you how I have personally witnessed animals comfort each other on factory farms and mothers fight to not have their babies taken away.
What amount of explanation do those videos of cruelty require? Does a constant stream of evidence help us understand the problem or make us turn away?
One of the organizations that has the most firsthand experience with these questions is called Witness, a civil rights organization formed after the 1992 beating of Rodney King by four Los Angeles cops. The attack was filmed by George Holliday, who witnessed it from his balcony and sent the video footage to a local news station. The King video marked the zero hour for new forms of activism using cameras.
For nearly 30 years, Witness has been on the front lines of these campaigns. The group has become an international training center, preparing observers to document human rights abuses with technology and use their videos to fight for change.
Sam Gregory, the program director of Witness, argues that if the videos were confined to one incident, or even several, we might believe police departments’ claims that these are the actions of rogue officers, a “few bad apples.” We need the volume of videos, he says, because only then does the problem become impossible to ignore.
I think this is how all these videos—whether they are documenting animal cruelty, police violence, or something else—should be understood. The individual videos are each exposing specific scenes of extreme, nearly unwatchable violence. But they work together to reveal something else entirely.
“Yes, video is a tool to show violence,” Gregory said. “But more importantly, it’s a tool to show patterns.”
Patterns are what expose systemic, institutionalized corruption and abuse.
Patterns allow us to connect an individual’s behavior to the corporate, government, and social structures that have allowed that behavior.
Patterns shift the conversation away from the bad apples and instead bring the entire diseased orchard into question.
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“Bearing Witness,” from Little Red Barns: Hiding the Truth from Farm to Fable by Will Potter. Copyright © 2025 by Will Potter. Reprinted with the permission of City Lights Books.
