Couple of follow-ups to the puppy mill/USDA silencing post (here's a NYT piece with an overview as reminder).
-- I've seen a few people wondering what the motivation might be for cutting off public access to the USDA's animal-welfare records. The answer is pretty simple: it's about money.
At the most straightforward level: it costs more money to treat animals humanely. Bigger cages mean less density per square foot, so you're not extracting as much money from your space as you could. Breeding animals less frequently (versus breeding mill dogs to death within a few years) means you're not extracting as many puppies per bitch. Mandating that dogs get exercise in open spaces means that you have to dedicate an exercise yard, keep it clean, and pay more employees to take the dogs out and watch over them.
All of this cuts into the puppy mill's profits. So if all you care about is maximizing profits, regardless of the toll in suffering, then you're probably not a big fan of the AWA. But lobbying against that (or, worse, being caught violating it) looks bad, and puppy buyers tend to be a pretty sentimental market, and you need your product to look cute and innocent and lovable (and not like what it actually is). So the *best* course, for you, is not to fight about it, but to pretend to go along and meanwhile make sure the public can't see what you're doing.
That's what this is. There are a couple of other profit motives that also tie in here (check out the egg lobby trying to kill egg-free mayonnaise in the excerpt later) but they all come down to $$$.
-- "But according to the APHIS website this has been in the works for over a year, so it's not DJT at all! LOOK, OBAMA!!"
yeah, no
First off, we already know this administration lies. It lies about everything from the size of inauguration crowds to Iran supposedly attacking U.S. ships to the "Bowling Green massacre." DJT and his people just straight-up lie about everything constantly, and furthermore they silence agency employees from communicating honestly with the public. As far as I'm concerned they have zero credibility anymore. So my immediate response when a DJT-controlled entity says anything is "uh huh, where's your proof?"
There is no proof. The statement itself is written for maximum weasel-ability (the actual wording is "DURING the past year," i.e., it could have been 10 minutes ago, that's still "DURING the past year"). No specific officers or employees are identified by name. No reports are provided; there's no paper trail (and we know DJT's administration deliberately avoids creating a paper trail so they can avoid accountability; we *also* know the Obama people did not do this, therefore if this were in the works during the preceding administration then there should be a paper trail and DJT's team should be eager to show it to us so they could punt the blame over to the other guys). None of the court opinions they're ostensibly basing this on are named or cited. There's just no substantiation at all.
Furthermore, if Obama's administration *did* have this in the works and DJT's people genuinely thought "whoa hey no, this ain't right, the public has a right to know what's going on," they could easily just... not delete the records!
But they didn't do that, because that isn't what happened here. What did happen here is that Klippenstein (who, again, has a long long history of trying to protect factory farmers and puppy millers from accountability) saw an opportunity to use the DJT administration's love of deleting information to benefit his longtime benefactors.
And this *does* have a long history to back it up. Factory farmers and puppy millers have been trying to avoid the public eye for years.
In fact, the APHIS statement's note that "you can get the records through FOIA!" is particularly eyebrow-raising when you remember that ag groups have been trying to dodge out of FOIA scrutiny for a while now, see, e.g.: http://bigstory.ap.org/…/inside-washington-ag-groups-seek-e… and http://www.sej.org/…/commodity-groups-slip-foia-exemption-h…
-- I've seen a few people wondering what the motivation might be for cutting off public access to the USDA's animal-welfare records. The answer is pretty simple: it's about money.
At the most straightforward level: it costs more money to treat animals humanely. Bigger cages mean less density per square foot, so you're not extracting as much money from your space as you could. Breeding animals less frequently (versus breeding mill dogs to death within a few years) means you're not extracting as many puppies per bitch. Mandating that dogs get exercise in open spaces means that you have to dedicate an exercise yard, keep it clean, and pay more employees to take the dogs out and watch over them.
All of this cuts into the puppy mill's profits. So if all you care about is maximizing profits, regardless of the toll in suffering, then you're probably not a big fan of the AWA. But lobbying against that (or, worse, being caught violating it) looks bad, and puppy buyers tend to be a pretty sentimental market, and you need your product to look cute and innocent and lovable (and not like what it actually is). So the *best* course, for you, is not to fight about it, but to pretend to go along and meanwhile make sure the public can't see what you're doing.
That's what this is. There are a couple of other profit motives that also tie in here (check out the egg lobby trying to kill egg-free mayonnaise in the excerpt later) but they all come down to $$$.
-- "But according to the APHIS website this has been in the works for over a year, so it's not DJT at all! LOOK, OBAMA!!"
yeah, no
First off, we already know this administration lies. It lies about everything from the size of inauguration crowds to Iran supposedly attacking U.S. ships to the "Bowling Green massacre." DJT and his people just straight-up lie about everything constantly, and furthermore they silence agency employees from communicating honestly with the public. As far as I'm concerned they have zero credibility anymore. So my immediate response when a DJT-controlled entity says anything is "uh huh, where's your proof?"
There is no proof. The statement itself is written for maximum weasel-ability (the actual wording is "DURING the past year," i.e., it could have been 10 minutes ago, that's still "DURING the past year"). No specific officers or employees are identified by name. No reports are provided; there's no paper trail (and we know DJT's administration deliberately avoids creating a paper trail so they can avoid accountability; we *also* know the Obama people did not do this, therefore if this were in the works during the preceding administration then there should be a paper trail and DJT's team should be eager to show it to us so they could punt the blame over to the other guys). None of the court opinions they're ostensibly basing this on are named or cited. There's just no substantiation at all.
Furthermore, if Obama's administration *did* have this in the works and DJT's people genuinely thought "whoa hey no, this ain't right, the public has a right to know what's going on," they could easily just... not delete the records!
But they didn't do that, because that isn't what happened here. What did happen here is that Klippenstein (who, again, has a long long history of trying to protect factory farmers and puppy millers from accountability) saw an opportunity to use the DJT administration's love of deleting information to benefit his longtime benefactors.
And this *does* have a long history to back it up. Factory farmers and puppy millers have been trying to avoid the public eye for years.
In fact, the APHIS statement's note that "you can get the records through FOIA!" is particularly eyebrow-raising when you remember that ag groups have been trying to dodge out of FOIA scrutiny for a while now, see, e.g.: http://bigstory.ap.org/…/inside-washington-ag-groups-seek-e… and http://www.sej.org/…/commodity-groups-slip-foia-exemption-h…
"Lobbying by agricultural commodity groups can sometimes be embarrassing — which is why House Republicans slipped language carving them a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) exemption into the Agriculture Appropriations bill now awaiting passage.
It was FOIA'd emails that revealed the American Egg Board trying to strangle an egg-free mayonnaise startup in its crib in 2015. The Egg Board is one of the commodity-specific "checkoff" boards funded by industry to promote agricultural products. Congress has made industry contributions to the boards mandatory.
After a collection of ag commodity lobby groups wrote a letter earlier this year to the House Appropriations Committee requesting a FOIA exemption, that panel wrote one into the funding bill."so yeah: big ag has been trying to limit USDA scrutiny on animal welfare violations for a long time; Klippenstein was a lobbyist for exactly that purpose; DJT comes into power, lets Klippenstein run the USDA transition; mysteriously USDA scrutiny on animal welfare violations vanishes; ostensibly there's a FOIA exemption (for now), but hm yes big ag has been lobbying the GOP to make that go away too, wonder how long that'll last.
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