Don’t Let Whistleblowers Be Silenced

PETA

Please click on and sign Don’t Let Whistleblowers Be Silenced

House File (H.F.) 1369 and Senate File (S.F.) 1118, which are now before the Minnesota state legislature, would subject whistleblowers to criminal prosecution for their efforts to expose cruelty to animals on factory farms, in laboratories, and in other facilities in which animals are abused. If passed, the bills would make it a crime to photograph or record video in these facilities without the owner’s consent—even if that evidence shows violations of the law. These bills would punish whistleblowers and could hurt vital undercover work that exposes routine—and often criminal—abuse of animals in the factory-farming and animal experimentation industries.

At Crestview Farm in Minnesota, the number one turkey-producing state in the nation, a PETA undercover investigation documented that a farm manager strangled young birds and haphazardly bludgeoned dozens of others with what he called his “killing stick.” Birds who did not die immediately were still thrown onto the “dead pile,” where they were left to die slowly and in agony as they lay helpless and struggling to survive among the bloody corpses of other birds. And a recent PETA investigation at a laboratory uncovered dozens of violations of federal law that government inspectors had not found. The evidence led to the indictment of three former workers and a former manager on 14 felony cruelty-to-animals charges. Undercover video footage revealed that lab workers were kicking, throwing, and dragging dogs; lifting rabbits by their ears and puppies by their throats; violently slamming cats into cages; and screaming obscenities at animals, calling them “a**hole” and “motherf***er.” One of the defendants was shown trying to rip out a cat’s claws by violently yanking the animal from the fence onto which he or she clung in fear.

These bills are designed to shroud in secrecy industries that exploit animals for profit and to shield criminals from accountability under the law.

Fill out the form HERE to urge the Minnesota governor to oppose H.F. 1369 and S.F. 1118 today!

Abusers,
Of intellect
Lighter than
A thistle,
If you did not abuse,
We would not have to
“blow the whistle”

Karen Lyons Kalmenson