Civil Litigation for Farmed Animals - Notes From EAGxBerkeley Talk

By Noa Weiss @ 2024-09-13T19:44 (+2)

Overview

These are my notes of the "Civil Litigation for Farmed Animals" from EAGxBerkeley, given by Alene Anello, president of Legal Impact for Chickens (LIC).

It was an excellent talk, exploring a front of the animal welfare movement that, in my opinion, has the potential to be extremely effective, and is very much neglected. (Would love to hear if you agree/disagree on this).

LIC also is currently hiring lawyers, so if you know someone who might be interested, let them know. This is a rare opportunity for folks with legal training to get professionally involved in the movement (those paid positions are hard to come by).

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Talk Notes

Intro

• Premise: improving conditions on factory farms will go a long way towards helping chickens suffering
• The law prohibits animal cruelty (in theory)
  • (Gave an excerpt from the California Penal Code)
• Yet undercover investigations in farms expose such cruelty on a regular basis
• Footnote on criminal laws: there are some states that have exemptions for animal agriculture
  • But not in California
  • Even states that have exemptions – it’s not for *every* kind of abuse. There’s a lot of stuff that happens in the farms that isn’t technically exempted
• But police and prosecutors don’t really enforce it
  • And even when they do – it’s against individual workers and not the company/CEOs
    • Why? Not sure. Perhaps because it’s easier to go after someone with less power.
    • Attorney generals are almost always politicians (elected / politically appointed), which means they have an interest in keeping powerful companies happy
  • Some reasons for not enforcing at all:
    • A reason they often officially give: those are misdemeanors, and they’re more interested in pursuing felonies (also for funding reasons)
    • Possibly: corruption
    • Possibly:  “soft corruption” like not wanting to make powerful people angry
    • Resources and priorities

LIC’s Solution: “Creative” Civil Litigation

• Not how civil litigation is usually works
• Animal cruelty is a crime, would more “naturally” be handled by the criminal system – but since the criminal system doesn’t do anything, LIC looks for ways to bring it to civil litigations
• LIC sues companies and executives

Example Cases

Example 1: Costco

• Costco is not only a store but also breeds, raises and slaughters chickens (and sells the meat)
• Bred them so fast that they could not even stand, eat, drink. Starved to death
• That’s against the law – you’re required to feed your animals
• There are some fiduciary duties – which are on the executives, personally, towards the company
  • One of them: “don’t break the law”
  •  If the executives haven’t fulfilled the duties – the company can sue them
    • Which wouldn’t usually happen because the execs control the company
    • But! The company also has owners. In the case of a publicly traded company – share holders
    • So LIC found Costco shareholders to work with
    • (Q: do you have to find existing share holders or can you just buy shares and then sue? A: Alene doesn’t know, there isn’t really a precedent).
• Result:
  • The good news: the judge did say that the company has a responsibility re animal cruelty. Which means LIC can bring more cases like that!
  • The bad new: had a different interpretation to the law re what happened at Costco, so dismissed the case

Example 2: “Case Farms” – KFC supplier

• Treated chicks as “dispensible”. Let machine drive over them etc. Pretty harrowing.
• Happened in North California. Has a law against animal cruelty, with an exemption for food/poultry.
  • That was what CF’s defense was based on. That thereby anything they do is exempt.
  • LIC disagrees. If you kill the chicks they’re not really used for food.
• This was dismissed and LIC appealed. Currently in the NC court of appeals.

Example 3: Rhode Island Beef and Veal

• LIC looks for any way to make cruelty a liability.
• Judges have a *lot* of leeway in sentencing. Can give a stricter/lesser sentence based on judgement call.
• A slaughterhouse was sentenced. Criminal case.
• “amicus brief” = a way for someone who’s not on a part in the lawsuit can submit a brief to the court on a specific lawsuit. For example if they’re an expert on the subject.
• LIC submitted such a brief. 
• Result:
  • Good news: the judge let them submit it (so they can now do that again for other cases). 
  • Bad news: sentence was still shorter than LIC thinks it should be.

Q&A

What are LIC’s bottlenecks?

• Concerned about lack of undercover investigations to expose cruelty
• Surprised to find that people working in the meat and egg industry hate the companies they work for
  • Could potentially help, tell them about cruelty that’s been happening
  • Had such workers reach out to them
  • Had ads target such workers, to reach out to LIC if they want to expose such cases
  • Alene thinks this would have happened a lot more if the workers weren’t frightened of the companies
    • Especially since a lot of them are undocumented workers

Why the focus on chickens?

• (Disclaimer: they focus on chickens but do aim to help all farmed animals, e.g. example case 3 mentioned above)
• Three reasons for the focus:
  • Scale: there are so many chickens that are treated so badly. More so than cows/pigs
  • Birds are more neglected than mammals
  • While the scale of chickens in animal ag is smaller than sea animals and insects – it will be probably too hard to do anything for them in court right now, because:
    • State laws don’t necessarily apply to them
    • Harder to get judges to “feel bad” for fish (chickens are hard enough)