Sky’s Story
Warning: this post contains graphic and disturbing content
I've always felt morbidly drawn to places like slaughterhouses and factory farms. Places where suffering is carefully hidden behind closed doors and concrete walls. In 2018, I started organizing vigils where we would look in the trucks approaching slaughterhouses, and take photos and videos of the condition of the pigs inside. But over time, I got increasingly curious about what actually goes on at the places where the animals were born and abused before they got loaded onto those trucks, and what I'd be able to see outside of the actual farms.
I didn’t know anyone who lived in my area that knew what going to an animal ag facility entailed, and my activism circle didn’t really have a lot of direct action going on, but I felt like I needed to do more than I was doing. I started looking at satellite imagery to see if I could find any farms near me, and in the course of my research I learned about the Counterglow map.
I found what I thought was a sow farm only 20 minutes from me so I decided to go check it out. The first few times I went there, I only drove by, but on one of those times I noticed an open door. I decided to park really quick and go look in. I was shocked to see a young cow staring right at me when I looked through the door. I was so curious as to what type of farm this could be, it didn’t look like anything I'd ever seen before. After looking into it, I found out it was a veal farm. I noticed the sides were kept open in the summer for ventilation. This would be the perfect opportunity to look right in a farm without entering the building. I went home but I was already thinking about when I’d be able to come back and get a closer look.
I made a plan with some friends to go to the farm together. It close to the road, so we could see the entire property while driving by. One of them dropped us off and we walked up the side of the barn and looked in. There were hundreds of baby calves inside looking back at us. In Indiana, veal crates are banned, so the companies get around that by keeping four calves to a pen, which isn’t much better in terms of space. They were crowded on slatted concrete and dirty, covered in what looked to be diarrhea. It was heartbreaking, especially because they were very sweet and curious. We petted them through the wired windows. That experience made me want to learn more about veal farms in particular and get more experience in the field.
In 2019, after the Fair Oaks dairy investigation was released by ARM, I saw in the video that the farm they investigated was in North Manchester, Indiana, only 40 minutes from me. They didn’t release the address, but there was drone footage over the farm, so I used that and got to work scanning CAFOs in that region on the map until I was pretty sure I’d found it. I looked up the property owner information and sure enough, it was owned by Midwest Veal- it was the same facility. The company had published a statement about shutting down the farm for remodeling, leading me to think it was abandoned. I recruited a team to go check it out anyway because I thought we might still find something valuable there. We were all shocked when we drove through the driveway of the property and stumbled upon a concrete box with 5 dead and bloody calves inside. Some of them hadn’t been dead very long, so it seemed like the company had been lying about closing the farm down.
This was the first time any of us had seen such violence in person. One calf had her neck snapped backwards. We found multiple corpses decayed down to skeleton and muscle littered throughout the fields, presumably picked up by vultures from the dead box and carried to the fields. They had to be only a few weeks old, they were so small. My friends took photos and videos while I stayed in the driver's seat so we could leave quickly if we needed to. I went back a few times after that, and every single time there were bloody bodies in the back. I’m hoping to use the footage we’ve gotten to raise awareness of the “collateral damage” of the dairy industry.
Mallory’s Story
Warning: this post contains graphic and disturbing content
My name is Mallory, and I am an activist from Kansas City, Missouri. My activism used to pertain mostly to vegan outreach involving cubes of truths, vigils, protests and sanctuary work. But I wanted to do more. After learning about Project Counterglow, I realized I’d never actually experienced the world of animal agriculture up close. In winter of 2022, I got the chance to travel to Iowa and see factory farming myself for the first time.
I had spent the morning looking at satellite imagery from Counterglow’s map for pig farms where I could see dumpsters located at the end of their driveways. I was able to see a blob of pink in the middle of a dumpster outside of a nursery- a type of farm where baby pigs are raised- and realized this facility was throwing pigs away no more than ten feet from the public road. I was by myself and I was a little nervous about that, but I planned to stay close to the road so I figured it would be okay. I jotted the crossroads down and headed out with my camera.
When I arrived I could see the CAFO (Concentrated Animal Feeding Operation) just up ahead, and the dumpster was overflowing with dead bodies. I drove past once to see if there were any visible humans or vehicles on the property. It was all clear so I turned my car around to park, and ran up to the dumpster. I saw dead piglets who had been thrown on the ground due to the dumpster being overfilled with corpses. It was like something out of a horror movie. I took as many photos as I could in just a few minutes, ran back to my car and drove off.
I remember being shocked about two things. One- even though I’ve seen footage of what happens to animals inside factory farms, seeing them discarded outside the dumpster like trash was still somehow shocking even with my prior activism work. Two- I couldn’t believe how easy it was to find a dumpster full of bodies near the road, and without anyone around to stop me from documenting what I was seeing. I was able to use my experience to create a Papertrail entry on Counterglow’s website, detailing all of the owner’s history exploiting the animals, workers and causing immense destruction to the environment. I also took my story and footage and shared it with the activists in my city and other people I knew.
Not only did it really grab people’s attention that I’d literally been to this place myself, some of my friends and acquaintances told me that they’d never been so close to a facility like that and they were interested in doing a similar visit. Not even two weeks after returning home I had a group of seven people from Kansas City eager and ready to plan a trip to Iowa.
We used the map to find out which counties in Iowa were the most heavily populated with pig facilities and planned a route that maximized the number of farms we’d go by. In just one day driving around two different counties we were able to visit 35 facilities. The first morning, we all packed into one car and headed out before the sun was up. It was a gloomy, very windy and wet day (there were actually active tornados in the area) so that made things even more intense.
Our very first stop, we saw a CAFO which consisted of two long sheds. At the end of each one was a door for the employees to access the buildings. Workers had to walk up six to eight steps in order to get to the door. This made it so there was a drop outside both of the doors- at the bottom of each drop there was a pile of dead pigs. We knew an employee had dragged their bodies out of the building and pushed them off the ledge and onto the ground below them. When we decided to move on to the next facility, we saw an employee dragging a large pig by their leg with a rope to the dumpster at the end of the road. They were all so shocked, and it happened so fast that none of them got footage of the worker. This was our biggest regret as a team, and from there on out we made sure to always have the camera running while at a facility. You never know when something will happen.
When we debriefed at the end of the day, my friends said that, like me, they’d had a life-changing experience. They were leaving with a stronger commitment to focus their lives on fighting for an end to this system, and they felt more confident in and familiar with doing direct action. Several expressed that they’d like to get more involved in fieldwork in the future. Personally I grew a lot, because I’d never taken on a leadership role like that. We were also all excited to use the footage we’d gathered in outreach and to talk to people about what we’d seen with our own eyes, and to add information to Counterglow that would help others in the future. I’m helping one girl plan her own trip she’s going to lead, and I’m excited to see even more people get an opportunity they probably wouldn’t have had otherwise to expose this cruelty.