 Hello everyone and welcome to the 2021 Hot Topics in Environmental Law Summer Lecture Series. I'm Emily Siegel, Assistant Professor of Law with the Center for Agricultural and Food Systems here at Vermont Law School. And we are pleased to welcome all our viewers to her online presentation today. Each talk is worth one Vermont CLE credit, so please keep track of which talks you attend for your records. There will be time for Q&A after today's presentation, so please type your questions in the chat box at any point during the lecture and we'll get to you as many as we're able in the remaining time. I'm pleased to introduce today's speaker. We're very pleased to welcome Sidney Bent. Sidney is an LLM fellow at the Center for Agriculture and Food Systems. She works on diverse topics such as armed animal welfare, consumer protection, and the regulation of bioengineered and novel foods. During law school, Sidney was a clinician in the CAF's clinic where she co-authored a Breed Apart, the Plant Readers Guide to Preventing Patents Through Defense of Publication. She was a summer research intern with the Animal Welfare Institute. She spent a summer in practice at the PETA Foundation. Was a law clerk with the Vermont Human Rights Commission and was an articles editor for the Vermont Law Review where she published her student note on housing discrimination and inequitable gentrification. Sidney graduated cum laude with a B.S. in environmental, geographical, and geological sciences and a B.A. in philosophy from Bloomberg University of Pennsylvania. She also graduated with a Master of Environmental Law and Policy and a J.D. from Vermont Law School. Today's Sidney will present Intimidation and Bearing Witness, Ad-Gag Laws, Criminalizing Animal Interactions. Please join me in welcoming Sidney Benz. Thanks so much. Instead of doing an intro without the slideshow, I think I'm going to jump right into the slideshow because I have a really cute picture of a pig. Let's do this. Good to go. So here's the cute picture of the pig. I wasn't lying. I really like pigs. I think they're really cool. A fun pig fact is that they have at least 20 different vocalizations they use to communicate with each other and mother pigs will sing to their babies while they're nursing. And that really doesn't have much to do with my presentation except for the fact that it makes pigs very relatable and very personable. And I think that's why a lot of people really like pigs. And this ability for people to connect easily with them is the beginning of the chain of events that led to a law in Iowa that on its face seems very simple, but as I found out, is unbelievably complicated. I saw this law. It's called Iowa House File 655 for the first time about six weeks ago. It's a pretty short law with only five subsections. HF 655 in a nutshell prohibits people from interfering with animal transport like animals on trucks that are being delivered to slaughterhouses. But there's this phrase in the law that I read over and over when I saw it otherwise interact with an agricultural animal. And I thought to myself, well, but Iowa legislature can't really mean interact, interact. That can mean anything. That can't be right. And I must be missing something. But interacts isn't defined in the statute or in the chapter or really anywhere that I could find in the Iowa code. So I had to do some Googling. And six weeks later, I'm here and I still don't know what interacts means. So now I'm going to share a truly unpredictable series of events that led me to this presentation. But first, a bit of background. So what are ag ag laws? I came up with a definition that ag ag law is a law that's intended to deter the unauthorized collection and dissemination of information or media that's critical of animal agriculture. The laws frequently focus on undercover journalists or activists who use false pretenses like fake names and job applications to get jobs in slaughterhouses or in industrial animal operations, which frequently involves using covert video recording and photography. And so this map is from June 2020. And as you can see, the courts have gone both ways on whether or not it's unconstitutional or constitutional, pretty even split. The only update to this map is that the Iowa law where it's shaded in here has been ruled unconstitutional. Iowa has a long history with introducing ag ag laws because Iowa is a massive hog production state. This timeline is just the last two years. But Iowa's first ag ag legislation was actually in 2012. But as you can see in the last two years, a lot has happened in trying to pass either a new ag ag law or the courts have found it unconstitutional. And these don't happen in a vacuum. These laws don't happen in a vacuum. They are responses to specific events. So I apologize. There's a lot of information on this slide. But I think it's more helpful to drill down into this so you can see what I mean. So here's one example. In the 10 days between May 19th, 2020 and May 29th, a hidden camera captures disturbing footage inside a barn of one of Iowa's largest hog producers. Matt Johnson, an activist with a group called Direct Action Everywhere, was arrested for placing a hidden camera, but the footage is already out there. The intercept in an animal rights group, Direct Action Everywhere, released the footage and 10 months later, a law is introduced that prohibits placing a secret camera while trespassing. 10 months might seem like a long time, but the recording was released two weeks before the end of the 2020 legislative session. And that didn't resume until the following January. I think a more direct example is the launch of Project Counterglow. Project Counterglow is a map of animal agricultural operations that was made using publicly available satellite imagery and crowd sourced information. So this launched on May 31st. And five days later, a bill to increase penalties for trespassing on agricultural land is introduced by Senator Ken Rosenboom. Senator Ken Rosenboom is notable because he is also the co-owner of a swine CAFO in Iowa that was four months before this introduction, the target of an undercover investigation. And in introducing this bill, Ken Rosenboom specifically addresses Project Counterglow in his introduction to the bill. So here's what the map for Project Counterglow looks like. And this map is huge. This is huge because even the EPA up until now didn't know exactly how many CAFOs were in the US, much less what kinds they were, what animals were in them. And even if they did, a lot of that information is not accessible by the public. And so this is an open source map that's free and accessible to the public that gives individuals GPS locations of not just CAFOs but all kinds of animal agricultural operations. And for Iowa especially, this map shows how important animal agriculture is in Iowa. There are so many operations, you can almost trace the boundary of Iowa based just on icon overlap. And finally, I introduced the law that has kept me awake at night and the law that brought us all together today. Instead of copying the whole law, I summarized some of the parts but kept the most relevant part in full. Section 2A through B states, a person commits interference with the transportation of an agricultural animal if the person knowingly does any of the following. Stops, hinders, impedes, boards, obstructs or otherwise interferes with a motor vehicle transporting an agricultural animal regardless of whether the motor vehicle is moving. B provokes, disturbs or otherwise interacts with an agricultural animal when the agricultural animal is confined in a motor vehicle regardless of whether the motor vehicle is moving. When I saw this, I most of read Section 2B a dozen times and every time it made less and less sense to me and I was really, really fixated on this otherwise interacts because I thought, you know, that can mean anything. But what I would come to find out is that the animal interference laws in Iowa seem to always be linked to a specific event like we just saw and I figured this couldn't be any different. So maybe if I knew what the event was, I could figure out what does interact mean. On May 31st, three protesters from direct action everywhere chained themselves to the gate of Iowa Select. They were protesting Iowa Select's use of ventilation shutdown. This is related to the hidden camera that we talked about before. The hidden camera was placed in these barns where the ventilation shutdown was happening. On the camera, the ventilation shutdown showed, or the camera showed that ventilation shutdown is a method that's used to kill entire barns of animals at once to put it simply, the vents to the barn are closed and sometimes heat or carbon dioxide can be vented into the barn and this causes the animals inside to either die from suffocation or overheating. Direct action everywhere, one need to call attention to this because of how cool it was. Even under the best conditions, ventilation shutdown can take up to an hour for the animals to die and in other conditions can take up to 16 hours. So the protesters chained themselves to the entrance because they were trying to block trucks that deliver the pigs to Iowa Select who would then be killed using the ventilation shutdown. Five days later, Senator Rosenboom introduces the bill that increases penalties for agricultural trespass and then the session ends and about a month into the next legislative session, the bill criminalizing interference with the transportation of an agricultural animal is introduced. But all of this still doesn't answer what it means to otherwise interact with an animal. So I googled it and in my googling, I just searched that exact phrase and I found Ontario Bill 156, which was introduced in 2020. And if you look at the two laws side by side, you can see that the language from Ontario 156 is very similar to Iowa House file 655. Under the Ontario Bill, no person shall stop, hinder, obstruct or otherwise interfere. In Iowa, it's stop, hinder, impede, board, obstruct or otherwise interfere. In Ontario, it's no person shall interfere or interact with a farm animal. The Iowa law is a little more specific. It includes provoke, disturb, but otherwise interact with an agricultural animal. But still, this is so close to the Iowa law, but it still doesn't define interact. And that's interesting because the Iowa law or the Ontario law is much longer than the Iowa law. The Iowa law is only about two pages, whereas the Ontario law is 10 pages compared to the Iowa law. It's much longer and it includes other prohibited activities, so that does make it longer. But it also has a lengthy introduction and statement of purpose, more phrases in the definition section. But unfortunately, interact was not one of them. But like the Iowa law, we can trace the Ontario bill back to a specific set of events. The Ontario bill can kind of be traced back to June 22, 2015. On that day, an activist named Anita Prance is arrested for criminal mischief in Burlington, Ontario, which is just outside of Toronto. She was giving water to pigs in a transport truck. Anita is the founder of an activist group, an animal activist group, called the Animal Save Movement. We'll talk a little bit more about that group in a few slides, but to get to the events of June 22, she was arrested for criminal mischief. While she was giving water to the pigs, the driver of the truck was aggravated, got out, and confronted Anita. Anita ended up getting arrested. At her trial on May 4, the court dismissed the criminal mischief charges because the court found that giving water to pigs wasn't a harm, and the state had failed to prove that under the criminal mischief that any harm had occurred that was a necessary component. So Anita was free to go. And then we see Ontario bill 156 introduced, and that doesn't require that the state prove harm, merely interaction. Bill 156 also includes a provision that releases a transporter from civil liability if the transporter injures someone who's interfering or interacting, unless the transporter is acting with deliberate intent to harm or reckless disregard. The next day, the day after the Ontario bill comes into effect, a pig transporter hits and kills Reagan Russell, who's an animal activist that was attending a vigil for pigs at a slaughterhouse. The driver wasn't charged with a criminal offense, and there's a lot of dispute over whether or not the driver was acting recklessly. But there's video of the event, there were plenty of attendees there, and based off of the video and their statements, a few things seem pretty uncontroversial. The truck was stopped at a red light for several minutes, and then went into a left turn rather rapidly, hit Reagan Russell and kept driving for some feet. Reagan was either on the sidewalk or in a crosswalk within a few feet of the sidewalk. Because the driver wasn't charged with a criminal offense, his identity wasn't released and very little is known about the driver. So it probably helps to know what the animal save movement is because this is where Reagan Russell was, this is what Anita founded, this kind of seems like the beginning of a lot of this. The animal save movement started in Toronto in 2010, and since then has expanded internationally with nearly a thousand chapters, including in Iowa, the animal save movement engages in a purely nonviolent form of protest that includes two kinds of activities, primarily. The first is bearing witness. So bearing witness is, bearing witness is the act of connecting and sharing experiences with another, especially in the context of painful or traumatic experiences. And the animal save movement believes that bearing witness is their moral obligation. Bearing witness frequently includes stopping transport trucks to allow attendees to approach the animals and give them water, to have a connection with the animals, occasionally take photos and document the conditions inside the transport trucks. But primarily, I think the focus is for people to have this individual connection with the animals in the truck. The attendees focus on this act being just a few minutes of compassion towards the animal that they may have never felt before. The second kind of demonstration is a vigil. The vigils are much longer, they can be several hours to even a few days and include traditional forms of protest, like having signs, having speakers, music, sharing food. But I think the vigils are much like a vigil in the commonly understood sense that they're very solemn and it's a group of people coming together to mourn. Most of these events happen on a set schedule with permission and necessary permits. The animal save movement strongly encourages chapters to develop safety agreements with the places they're going to be to try and make sure that everybody is being safe. But the animal save movement is not without criticism. Some criticisms of bearing witness include participant safety, driver safety, stress, and mental well-being. And in fact, the Ontario law specifically mentions that one of the purposes of the bill is to decrease the stress on drivers. The presence of protesters may increase a driver's stress. Another big one is biosecurity and that was talked about with Iowa HF 655. The argument being that the protesters could introduce poisons or contaminants into the food supply by giving the pigs water. The Ontario court in Anita's case rejected this argument, which I'll talk about when we get into the biosecurity section. And finally, I think there is some legitimate concern about animal welfare by stopping the trucks, especially on hot days. It could prolong the amount of time the animals have to remain in a stressful environment. However, there is also some argument that the animals would have to be in there just as long anyways. It's just a difference of waiting on one side of the gate versus the other. So now you're caught up on some of the factual background that led up to HF 655. A woman in Ontario was arrested for giving water to pigs, but she couldn't be convicted because there was no injury. The Ontario government passed a law criminalizing her interactions with the pigs and at the same time removed civil liability for truck drivers that negligently killed protesters. The next day, a peaceful protestor, Reagan Russell, was hit and killed by a pig transporter. The driver wasn't charged with a crime. And 1,000 miles away, an activist group was chaining themselves to the gate of Iowa Select, a pig CAFO, interfering with the delivery of hogs after secret cameras revealed remarkable cruelty. And it's possible that the Iowa legislature drafted HF 655 with no knowledge of the events in Ontario, but the similar language between the two bills leads me to believe that Ontario Bill 156 served as the template for the Iowa House file 655. Of course, this is still not the whole story, but we only have so long. And so I want to come back to otherwise interact now with more context, but still no answers. But what do we do about it? I find a lot of these events to be very unsettling, but the bill has passed. How do we address it? And I believe that depending on how otherwise interact is interpretive, Iowa HF 655 may be a violation of the First Amendment. The First Amendment of the Constitution states that Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of speech. Protest is a protected form of speech. So I think it's at least looking at whether it's at least worth looking at whether the animal-save movement demonstrators are protected by the First Amendment. But that being said, the First Amendment doesn't protect all speech. If you own property and there are protesters on your property, you can tell them to leave. It doesn't include trespassing as a form of speech necessarily. And so some of the events that we talked about on that timeline aren't covered by the First Amendment, but a lot of them are. One of the most critical parts of the First Amendment analysis is whether the law regulates speech based off of content or if it's a neutral regulation of the time, place, and manner in which the speech can take. A law that regulates speech based on content is much more likely to be unconstitutional than a content-neutral law. And I'll just say flat out, I think there's arguments on either side of whether or not this is based on content or if it's content-neutral. Some ideas that come to mind to make me think that it's content-based would be looking at the events in Ontario and how it was a response to someone giving water to pigs, the protests that were happening there. But also, if you think about maybe a hypothetical scenario where a truck has stopped at a red light and you see someone coming up to the door and talking with the driver, maybe the driver puts on his hazard lights, if you're a police officer and you're watching this and you're trying to decide whether or not this is a violation of HF 655, if this person is interfering with the transport, you probably have to know what that person is saying. And so the content can be important. But at the same time, I think there's counter arguments. And so if we look at it as content-neutral, I still don't think it passes constitutional muster. If it's content-neutral, the government can regulate it if it's a regulation of the time, place, and manner of protected speech. But the state must show that the law is related to an important government interest. The law directly furthers that important interest and the restriction is narrowly tailored to serve the government's interest. In short, there has to be an actual harm that the law directly addresses. And so in reading more about this and looking into this, I looked at some of the stated purposes and interests. And I have to say, I didn't totally buy it. So let's go through some of the interests. The biggest one was biosecurity. Iowa Senator, I'm going to start with Bisignano on April 6. And this is when an act was introduced into the Iowa Senate that prohibited the placement of the covert cameras, as well as taking unauthorized samples from water or air on an agricultural operation. So the senator said, the bioterrorism is a different story because it's one we ought to take a lot more seriously. So I've been in the chamber a long time. We've never had that discussion. We've never had that discussion here. So it's clearly on the mind of the legislature. They see it as something they have to do, but maybe haven't totally addressed before. But Iowa's previous agricultural trespass law, the Ag-Gag law that was overruled as being unconstitutional, the court recommended amending Iowa Code 71784, which addresses biosecurity. That law pretty much says you can't put poison into the food system. You can't put poison on crops, things like that. And in that case, the government failed to show that biosecurity was a compelling interest because they didn't show how the trespassing or prohibiting the trespassing actually did anything to further that. So even though the court recommended that if biosecurity is a compelling interest, you should look at the biosecurity law, maybe amend that law. Since 2004 when it was introduced, it doesn't appear to have ever been used or have been amended. So if we look at the biosecurity risks that are clearly an interest, some things become apparent. I got these quotes from a report from Ohio State University that includes several veterinarians that put it together. And they work in the Dairy Department and Department of Preventive Medicine at Ohio State University. So they classified different biosecurity risks. The lowest risk to on-farm biosecurity was that visitors from urban areas or people who have very little livestock content present very little risk of introducing the disease to the farm. Medium risk, people who routinely visit farms but have little to no contact with animals, such as sale men and fuel delivery personnel. But the highest risk are transport vehicles. High-risk visitors to the farm include inseminators, processing crews, veterinarians, livestock haulers, and livestock owning neighbors. Entry of exposed or carrier animals, contaminated feedstuffs, and contaminated equipment represent the greatest threats for disease entry. And so if we're thinking about how Iowa could address biosecurity on farms and if we're looking at transport vehicles and we're saying that we don't want anybody interacting with the transport vehicles because it's a biosecurity risk, I agree we should be regulating the transport vehicles. And this isn't to say that Iowa hasn't done anything to regulate the transport vehicles. They have options, they have the ability to do it. The Department of Agriculture can adopt any necessary rule for the control of an infectious or contagious disease affecting animals within the state. One of the things they can do is issue a general standstill protocol which says all of the trucks carrying vulnerable animals have to stop right where they are. The Department of Agriculture can also provide for the disinfection of suspected yards, buildings, or articles so they can set standards for places where these animals are to make sure that they're clean and sanitary and set specific standards. And then if people don't meet those standards they can impose civil or criminal penalties for violations. So the framework is in place for the Iowa Department of Agriculture to start addressing biosecurity in a way that says, you know, transporters and haulers have to have a certain standard of cleanliness so that we don't have disease spreading in between farms and we can address biosecurity. However, under the current regulations it's actually kind of hard and convoluted to report a concern if you think that there's an outbreak. You have to submit in writing the information to the state veterinarian which implies that you have to know that there's a state veterinarian and that you're supposed to email them or write to them who then can take necessary action but also has to report the same information to the Department of Agriculture. And so there's a couple steps here and it just doesn't seem straightforward to me that if you think that there's a possible disease outbreak that you would first of all know that there's a state veterinarian that you have to report that to and that you have to do it in writing. The second part and I mean this is an exhaustive list of all of the things. There are numerous record keeping requirements and veterinary inspection certificates but livestock being transported directly for slaughter appear to be exempt from many of those requirements. One law that I could find in Iowa is that railroad and transportation companies must provide for proper drainage of all stockyards, pens, alleyways, and shoots and to clean and disinfect the same between April 15th and May 15th of each year and at such other times as deemed necessary. I couldn't find anything from the Iowa Department of Agriculture that said specifically when it's necessary, specifically how clean it has to be, any measurable objective standards simply that if you are transporting agricultural animals you have to clean and disinfect at least once a year between April 15th and May 15th. And that seems like a very low standard and if we're really concerned with biosecurity it seems like a very easy action to say we're going to set an objective standard for when it is necessary to clean the trucks. And the transporters probably know when it's necessary but having the state act to say this is when seems like a very good way to make sure that that's happening. And despite all of this Keith Algets who's an Iowa Veterinarian who's been managing large operations and I think currently manages something like 30,000 hogs says that overall on a year to year basis the health of our farms improves and according to him 2020 was a really good year because biosecurity was there were heightened procedures including the use of video cameras which is something the legislature has been working to make sure doesn't make it into these places. However trailers are still the biggest biosecurity problems we have in the business and so while operators and transporters might have biosecurity like they have a strong interest in having good biosecurity because it's it's more money for them if the animals don't get sick trailers are still a problem for biosecurity and somehow it just doesn't seem to make sense that instead of regulating the trailers themselves we want to first regulate the low-risk people who have contact with the trailers. Another important interest is public safety these are people that are approaching huge trucks there's traffic heightened tensions there's always going to be a safety risk with pedestrians and you know if the truck has stopped at a red light for several cycles you have traffic congestion and all of the risks that come with that but in looking at the Iowa laws and even calling around to different Iowa agencies I couldn't find any specific law regulation that prohibited pedestrians from obstructing traffic there were laws that said you can't use your car to obstruct traffic you can't place something in the road that obstructs traffic but I couldn't find anything that specifically applied to a pedestrian using their body to obstruct traffic until recently though there was a bill introduced that would prohibit that prohibit pedestrians from obstructing traffic but in the same bill it removes liability for motorists that hit, injure or kill protesting pedestrians. Reagan Russell an animal activist was hit and killed by a truck driver the day after the similar Ontario bill came into effect and it's really hard to even google Ontario 156 and not see her story see her name and see her face and so it's troubling that the Iowa legislature or you know whoever wrote this could have seen this and then still decided that even though day afterwards there was this violent event that this still could be furthering a public safety concern. In Iowa has a similar history Michael Ray Stefnick sped into a crowd of protesters that year to quote give them an attitude adjustment and I think it's worth noting that these weren't animal protesters this was part of the Black Lives Matter movement but it does show that there are people in Iowa who consider it okay to run over protesters. In 2020 there were at least 104 incidents of protesters being hit by cars compared to eight incidents for the same time period for the rest of the world. Of those incidents incidences researchers concluded that 44 percent showed clear malicious intent and that 37 percent were possibly malicious but even so the incidences of protesters being hit by cars has risen since 2019 and of the vehicles that have hit pedestrians semi trucks are far and away the most people so there's clearly a concern here about keeping people safe making sure that they're not hit however the concern isn't necessarily that the protesters are doing something it's that somebody is driving into the protesters with their car and if we're concerned about pedestrians and pedestrian safety it seems unreasonable to put a pedestrian obstruction law in the same law that makes it okay to hit and kill them. One other concern is deterrence. When we looked at the animal safe movement a lot of that is a very traditional form of protests with the signs being together it's nonviolent there's no property destruction but other forms of protests might involve civil disobedience and criminal activity like breaking and entering and things like that and people have been charged with similar crimes people have been arrest for trespassing burglary um criminal mischief things like that so there is there is an important interest the state has an important interest in deterring crime that's why we have a whole criminal system so on increasing the trespass penalties of which deterrence deterring trespassing was a stated interest senator Rosenboom stated that the current penalties felt very inadequate to him and that the penalties mean nothing to these people he also stated that activists are the greatest threat to animal agriculture specifically the ones that record and photograph operations so I mentioned some of the incidences I mean changing yourself to the gate could be trespassing going into the buildings and taking the animals that could be burglary so I can see the important interest there however while they're being arrested they're not actually being prosecuted very often and usually at the request of the facility owners many of the charges are dropped and never prosecuted so this is Matthew Johnson he has been involved in a lot of direct action work in Iowa and despite being called a leading foe of the livestock industry the charges were dropped against him for placing that secret camera in Iowa select and then other charges were dropped against him later um when blocking the entrance to Iowa select and I spent a long time looking at protests looking where there might be criminal activity and digging through Iowa criminal records because those are open records and I couldn't find really any prosecutions that happened recently and it's totally possible that those records are not open and are not available to me and they are happening but for somebody that's been called a leading foe of the livestock industry if you really want to deter this kind of activity it seems like you should prosecute them and of course there's prosecutorial discretion but it just makes me wonder how important is it and it according to the people who've been arrested they aren't being prosecuted because that opens up the operations to the lack of privacy that comes with a court case they can they can depose witnesses which include workers they have more access to information more access to files and all of that potentially becomes public information and so even if these operations aren't doing anything illegal and everything is totally legal totally above board they might not want the public to see what's going on inside because it risks having a bad media image um people taking the footage and misconstruing it things like that and in these two cases at least the stated reason why the charges were dropped is because the workers didn't want to testify so there are already several laws that address more narrowly the same activity that House file 655 purports to address like the reason that hf 655s needs to exist is for public safety for biosecurity and to deter crime but we already have criminal mischief trespass livestock abuse use of pathogens to threaten animals and crops unlawful assembly unlawful assembly harassment and burglary but they're not being used they already address the same stated activity without getting into any controlling of speech but we still don't know what interact means and so I want to go back and think what does interact mean the thing that Iowa has made illegal I was able to find exactly one case that uses the phrase otherwise interact that's relevant and it's a case from a district court in Arkansas which happens to be in the same circuit as Iowa so that's good the city in Arkansas adopted an anti-panhandling ordinance that said no person shall interact physically with an occupant of a motor vehicle that's in operation on a public roadway or street for any purpose it seems very relevant to the Iowa lawyer it seems very applicable of course in Arkansas we're talking about people communicating with people we're talking about panhandling versus people communicating with people and animals and other protest activities but still you have people approaching the vehicle interacting with someone in the vehicle the ordinance defined interact physically as to make or attempt to make physical contact with a motor vehicle or any object they're in and that seemed very applicable to the Iowa law but the Arkansas panhandling law was struck down as unconstitutional as a content based restriction of speech and there was really good language in that opinion the judge said when it comes to physical action between or physical interaction between humans the act itself is often both the message and the conduct in many instances the two are so intertwined it is not possible to separate the speech from the non-speech elements so this can be taken two ways and I think both are very helpful for figuring out what does interact mean and for holding this Iowa law unconstitutional the first being you have to communicate with the driver of the truck if you're at an animal safe protest or at any kind of protest that involves something around animal transport you have to interact with the driver you have to ask them to stop you're having some interaction with the driver and that interaction is speech you can also say and I think this lines up a lot with the purpose of the animal safe movement is the speech is the interaction with the animal it's the message it's the conduct it's both it's intertwined it's the connection with the animal it is the speech it is the interaction the same opinion also said messages conveyed through physical interaction include acknowledge support contribution charity love gratitude agreement acceptance instruction compliance cooperation inclusion generosity praise discussed aggression sympathy and sadness just to name a few and I think a lot of these adjectives apply in the animal safe movement at these protests and demonstrations people are are feeling sympathetic and empathetic with the animals they are feeling discussed in anger that they are being treated the way that they are there's charity and love and gratitude and I think a lot about the purpose of of interacting with these animals is being just a few minutes where the animals can feel compassion and love and empathy when they may not have had any interaction with humans similar to that and so one interaction that happened just to bring this full circle is someone in Iowa had an interaction with a pig farmer and from that interaction the owner agreed to surrender these two pigs on June 26 2020 their names are Reagan and Russell named after the woman who's killed in Ontario and they were surrendered to Arthur Arthur acres animal sanctuary and so I think there's a lot of value in the interactions we have with animals and it's something that we should continue to protect and fight to protect and to simply say that it's it's criminal to interact with an animal and try to use biosecurity or public safety as a reason why that should be unallowed I don't I don't buy it and I'm sure Reagan and Russell here would agree and that's the end of my presentation and I'd be happy to take some questions let's see my cat is also wandering right in front of my screen thank you Sydney Marty so much for that speaking of animal interaction yeah we do have a few questions in and just as a reminder for the audience if you're watching on our website live stream you can click on the watch on live stream icon at the bottom of the video and that'll bring up a chat box where you can enter your question if you're watching on our Facebook live stream you can add your question directly to the comment box below so we'll try to get through as many as we can um one of the first ones that I saw come in was whether other states have come up with more reasonable state interests to legitimize these types of laws I mean I haven't looked at every ag-gag law in every state um but the most common the most common reasons that are stated biosecurity is always at the top of the list um animal welfare is often stated but not really extrapolated on exactly how a trespassing law or an interaction law furthers the animal welfare and private property rights are another big consideration in that anybody coming on to your property is a harm is an injury and that the state has an interest in making sure that that doesn't happen another big interest is agriculture itself as an essential industry in that if agriculture even animal agriculture is being targeted the state should work to protect that and have higher higher protections for that because it is so essential um but like we saw with the map it's 50 50 on whether or not courts agree that this really is I think they often agree that it's an important interest I think the disagreement comes with how the law actually serves that interest because the state has to have substantial evidence that it is a real harm and that the law actually does directly address that great thank you I think that leads nicely to another question that came in and how do you see the Iowa and the Ontario laws that are focused on transport vehicles fitting in with the broader story of traditional ag gas that focus on facilities one of the biggest differences that I didn't get into but when I first read the law just really confusing is this is so different than the other ag ag laws we've seen because this is mobile this has a zone of mobile ag ag where the trespass can now come to you and realistically if you're at a vigil or if you're at a protest near a slaughterhouse you know that the the trucks are going to be there um but maybe you're not at a protest maybe you're at a rest stop and this doesn't just include you know the huge industrial large semis that's not what the statute says it says a motor vehicle so this can be somebody's personal trailer where they maybe are are transporting horses they're stopped at a rest stop the interaction between you and those horses would be criminalized and you didn't even intend to see them there and now the illegal the object of the illegality the trespass is mobile and can come to you whereas before it's been stationary you have to enter onto the property and I think that's one of the biggest differences okay thank you another question we came in looks like it refers to the cases where charges were dropped and asked how can the law support workers in testifying um it's difficult I mean as far as I understand it it seems as though even if in the cases where we're talking about Iowa select and Iowa select requested to drop the charges it's my understanding that the state doesn't have to drop the charges I mean the the witnesses might be uncooperative but they could still proceed with the charges with or without um the cooperation of Iowa select it's at the state's discretion um so I'm not entirely sure how to reconcile that with prosecutorial discretion because you want to have discretion um because of you know how important it is to be able to choose the most effective cases and things like that so balancing that with if well we want cooperative witnesses and if there are workers that do want to testify we want to make sure that they have the ability to say what they're gonna say and so probably whistleblower laws are a good way to address that making stronger whistleblower laws so that even if they're not saying it in court they have an opportunity to report what they're saying to some entity that's going to take them seriously okay thank you and I think it looks like we have one more that's come in so far and it's going to open this up a little bit more I think could these laws restricting interaction between people and transport vehicles be used to support current proposed laws restricting people from giving water to people in voting line I think it's the same sentiment I don't know that you could use the same biosecurity arguments but I think it's it's a very similar genre of law where we're trying to put up legal barriers of interactions of people trying to be helpful and compassionate and sympathetic and so I don't know if this is a larger legal movement that goes beyond animal transport beyond agriculture and is more a trend in civil rights but it does it does seem like they have the same general flavor and I don't know if the same arguments necessarily apply to both and I hope it's not a trend and I hope that you know the right people can identify where we're going in the road and the path that we're on and say that no actually we do want people to interact with each other and we do want people to be able to exercise their first amendment rights their voting rights to the fullest extent that they can you know those are good legal testifications but philosophically we might also want to encourage people to have feelings and interact and have those kind of experiences with one another and with animals all right well thank you Sydney we're just getting to the end of our hour here thank you so much for sharing your presentation today and thank you to all of our viewers for joining us today as well our next hot topics talk will take place here on June 15th at noon eastern time and we hope you can join us again then thank you everybody thank you