Ted Genoways writes: Shawn Lyons was dead to rights — and he knew it. More than a month had passed since People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals had released a video of savage mistreatment at the MowMar Farms hog confinement facility where he worked as an entry-level herdsman in the breeding room. The three enormous sow barns in rural Greene County, Iowa, were less than five years old and, until recently, had raised few concerns. They seemed well ventilated and well supplied with water from giant holding tanks. Their tightly tacked steel siding always gleamed white in the sun. But the PETA hidden-camera footage shot by two undercover activists over a period of months in the summer of 2008, following up on a tip from a former employee, showed a harsh reality concealed inside.
The recordings caught one senior worker beating a sow repeatedly on the back with a metal gate rod, a supervisor turning an electric prod on a sow too crippled to stand, another worker shoving a herding cane into a sow’s vagina. In one close-up, a distressed sow who’d been attacking her piglets was shown with her face royal blue from the Prima Tech marking dye sprayed into her nostrils “to get the animal high.” In perhaps the most disturbing sequence, a worker demonstrated the method for euthanizing underweight piglets: taking them by the hind legs and smashing their skulls against the concrete floor—a technique known as “thumping.” Their bloodied bodies were then tossed into a giant bin, where video showed them twitching and paddling until they died, sometimes long after. Though his actions were not nearly as vicious as those of some coworkers who’d been fired immediately, Lyons knew, as the video quickly became national news, that the consequences for him could be severe.
As we sat recently in the tiny, tumbledown house he grew up in and now shares with his wife and two kids, Lyons acknowledged — as he did to the sheriff’s deputy back then — that he had prodded sows with clothespins, hit them with broad, wooden herding boards, and pulled them by their ears, but only in an effort, he said, to get pregnant sows that had spent the last 114 days immobilized in gestation crates up and moving to the farrowing crates where they would give birth. Lyons said he never intended to hurt the hogs, that he was just “scared to death” of the angry sows “who had spent their lives in a little pen” — and this was how he had been trained to deal with them. Lyons had watery blue eyes that seemed always on the verge of tears and spoke in a skittish mutter that would sometimes disappear all the way into silence as he rubbed his thin beard. “You do feel sorry for them, because they don’t have much room to move around,” he said, but if they get spooked coming out of their crates, “you’re in for a fight.”
Lyons had been trained in these methods of hog-handling (many of them, including thumping, legal and widely practiced), but a spokeswoman for Hormel — one of the largest food processors in the country and the dominant buyer of MowMar’s hogs — had already called the video “appalling” and “completely unacceptable,” and MowMar’s owners had responded by vowing that any additional workers found guilty of abuse as authorities pored over the tape would be terminated. Still, it came as a surprise when his boss informed him that he had been formally charged and immediately fired. “We don’t want to do it,” the supervisor told him, “but we got to — because Hormel will quit taking the sows.” He told Lyons to turn himself in at the courthouse.
While Lyons filled out paperwork and had his mug shot taken, his wife’s cellphone buzzed again and again: Her husband’s name was already on the evening news. Lyons hired a lawyer — but he was on video and he’d confessed to the deputy sheriff. “They got you, dude,” Lyons said his attorney told him. He accepted a plea agreement — six months’ probation and a $625 fine plus court fees—and signed an admission of guilt. It may seem like a slap on the wrist, but Lyons was the first person ever convicted of criminal livestock neglect on a Midwestern farm — and only the seventh person convicted of animal abuse in the history of the American meat industry. He wasn’t alone for long: Five of Lyons’ coworkers soon signed similar agreements.
It was a major PR win for PETA — which often appeals to local authorities to make arrests but rarely gets the kind of cooperation they got from the Greene County Sheriff’s Office — but it was also a hollow victory. “Who in their right mind would want to work in a dusty, ammonia-ridden pig shed for nine bucks an hour but somebody who, literally, had no other options?” asked Dan Paden, the senior researcher at PETA who helped run the investigation. “And at the end of a long, frustrating day, when you are trying to move a pig who hasn’t been out of its crate in [months], that’s when these beatings occur — and people do stupid, cruel, illegal things.” PETA was urging prosecutors to go beyond plea agreements for farmworkers; they wanted charges against farm owners and their corporate backers, to hold them responsible for crimes committed by undertrained, overburdened employees. [Continue reading…]
