Hey readers,

In 2018, Erin Wing worked for two months at a 1,000-cow dairy farm in Chambersburg, a small Pennsylvania town about three hours west of Philadelphia, where she was one of 10 employees who milked and fed the cows. But something set her apart from the other workers: Wing wore a hidden camera, living a double life as an undercover investigator for Animal Outlook, an animal advocacy nonprofit.

During her stint, Wing captured a variety of horrors on film. Some were inhumane but legal and not uncommon in the dairy industry, like removing calves’ horns —which is done to prevent the horns from injuring workers — without pain mitigation like anesthesia or anti-inflammatory drugs.

But she also documented acts of cruelty that seemed wholly gratuitous, like employees beating, stomping on, and kicking cows, and many others I’ll omit for the sake of our readers’ peace of mind.

“All told, we documented over 300 incidents that we believed violated Pennsylvania’s laws,” Will Lowrey, an attorney with Animal Outlook, told me.

The Pennsylvania State Police opened an investigation. But over a year later it assured the public that the farm had taken steps to improve training and animal handling procedures, and announced the district attorney of Franklin County in Pennsylvania, where Chambersburg is located, would not press charges against the farm as a corporation, the owner, and 14 current and former employees. (The Pennsylvania State Police declined an interview, Martin Farms could not be reached for comment, and the Franklin County district attorney did not respond to requests for comment.)

The DA’s decision wasn’t surprising. Many undercover investigations that document cruelty to farmed animals don’t result in prosecution, and when they do, it’s usually over the more egregious, often one-off acts of cruelty conducted by stressed out, low-paid workers, while the routine yet inhumane practices instituted by the owner — and often pervasive throughout the industry — go unexamined, even though they account for much more animal suffering.

And with 9 billion animals churning through the meat, dairy, and egg industries each year and just a handful of undercover investigators documenting how they’re treated, consumers and policymakers are left in the dark. This system persists because farmed animals are largely invisible in the law.

But due to a quirk in Pennsylvania’s legal code — the ability of private citizens to challenge government officials’ decision not to prosecute — Animal Outlook was able to circumvent that invisibility and set a new precedent for animal law. But before I get to that, it helps to understand the legal system under which animals are farmed.

How the animal agriculture lobby erased farmed animals from the law

At the federal level, there are no laws that protect animals while they’re on the farm.

Every state has an anti-cruelty statute on the books, but a few exempt farmed animals altogether, and most exempt what are considered “customary farming practices” — or as Pennsylvania law puts it, “normal farming operations.” It doesn’t matter how inhumane those practices may appear as long as they are commonly used, year after year.

“In most of the United States, prosecutors, judges, and juries no longer have the power to determine whether or not farmed animals are treated in an acceptable manner,” wrote animal law professors Mariann Sullivan and David Wolfson in their seminal text on state and federal anti-cruelty exemptions. “The industry alone defines the criminality of its own conduct.”

As a result, only more extreme acts of cruelty – like some of the acts documented at Martin Farms – are potentially prosecutable under the law. But they’re typically only uncovered if a group like Animal Outlook sends an investigator onto one of America’s tens of thousands of factory farms, setting up a game of animal cruelty whack-a-mole, leaving most abuse undocumented and unaddressed.

This challenging legal landscape, and the political and cultural factors that block the gaps that could overcome it, have long stymied animal lawyers and advocates. But due to the above-mentioned quirk in Pennsylvania law — the ability to petition a court to overturn the district attorney’s denial of prosecution — Animal Outlook shifted what practices can be deemed “normal” in the first place.

The organization’s initial petition was denied, so it appealed to Pennsylvania’s Superior Court. Last month, in a precedent-setting decision, the court’s three-judge panel ruled that the lower court was required to order the Franklin County district attorney to prosecute Martin Farms for animal cruelty, including over common practices like dehorning without pain mitigation, thus creating a crack in the meat industry’s ironclad legal armor.

Animal Outlook's investigation could influence the future of animal law

“I do think it’s an amazing and important case,” Sullivan, an expert on state animal welfare laws who teaches animal law at Cornell Law School and hosts the Animal Law podcast, told me. “Obviously it’s limited to Pennsylvania, but the fact that an appellate court looked at this situation and was clearly horrified … feels like a very big deal.”

The case would still be influential if it had merely centered on the more malicious acts of animal cruelty, but what makes it more important is that the court also questioned whether dehorning calves without pain mitigation should be considered “normal”in the first place (and if not, it could then be prosecutable).

Since Pennsylvania’s anti-cruelty statute exempts “normal agricultural operations,” this decision could lead to advocates challenging other common farming practices in the courts.

Dehorning without pain mitigation exists in a “normality gray zone” because while some dairy industry organizations don’t like it, a lot of farmers still do it because they don’t think pain mitigation is necessary, they’re unfamiliar with the available drugs, or the drugs take too much time to administer. A 2021 survey of 217 dairy farmers in Wisconsin, which ranks second in dairy production, found that less than half used pain relief for the procedure.

Does that make it a normal agricultural practice? When does a practice go from normal to abnormal, from legal to illegal? As battery cages for egg-laying hens get replaced by cage-free systems, what will the threshold be that tilts cages from normality to cruelty in the eyes of the law? Someday, a Pennsylvania judge may decide.

It could be months or even years until the case is resolved, and ultimately, the precedent could be undone if the district attorney successfully appeals the decision. But whatever the outcome, the Pennsylvania Superior Court decision illustrates what can happen when standard yet horrific farming practices are put under a microscope: The institutions that govern how America farms and eats might be forced to evolve.

—Kenny Torrella

Questions? Comments? Email us at futureperfect@vox.com or find me on Twitter at @kennytorrella. And if you want to recommend this newsletter to your friends or colleagues, tell them to sign up at vox.com/future-perfect-newsletter.