Police Bodycams Reveal Pattern of Deference to Meat Industry

Along a cordoned-off stretch of highway in Ohio, state troopers and other emergency responders work late into the night, wrangling hundreds of piglets that sprang loose from an overturned semi-truck. The driver failed to negotiate a curve while hauling a trailer of 1,900 piglets, according to Ohio State Highway Patrol records. Most escapees were left to roam the interstate ramp. But some were flung to their deaths.

The aftermath of this crash is captured in police bodycam footage from November 2023, obtained by the legal advocacy group Animal Partisan. It shows a livestock farmer approaching Sgt. Jeremy Wheeland, of the Ohio State Highway Patrol (OSHP), to ask a favor: direct the media to stop filming before the emergency crew unloads the dead piglets from the trailer.

It’s part of a broader pattern of police deference to the meat industry in preventing media access. In videos from three livestock crashes reviewed by Sentient, police deliberately block the media’s access to crash sites beyond what is reasonable to protect public safety, citing concerns about animal rights activists.

In the crash involving piglets, the sergeant’s decision to limit media access came at the direct request of the livestock farmer who raised the piglets.

“One favor I’d like to ask, if you can help. So we have these camera crews here,” says the farmer, referring to a local news crew set up nearby. “Is there any way we can tell them, for their safety, they can’t be here filming this because animal rights people love…” He pauses mid-sentence, appearing to search for the right words. “We’re treating these pigs right, but they take this the wrong way.”

Though Sgt. Wheeland doesn’t agree to order the media to stop filming, he takes steps to limit their coverage. “So, ask them to step back a little bit?” He responds, reassuring the pork producer. “Yep, I can do that.”

Wheeland’s bodycam then captures him walking over to the camera crew from WDTN Channel 2 News, a broadcast station out of Dayton. “I have a slight request,” he says, “So, it’s fine that you’re out here, but maybe not zoom in so much on them actually taking the ones out.” He goes on to explain that some of the pigs they remove from the trailer will be dead, which could draw unwanted attention. “It’s just, well, the concern, like the owner, the concern he has is with, like, animal rights people and so forth, you know what I’m saying,” adds Wheeland.

It appears that the news crew followed the sergeant’s orders. WDTN Channel 2 News aired a live broadcast of the scene and news report, but they didn’t show footage of any of the dead piglets.

This effort to block the local news from documenting the aftermath of a crash is observed in video footage from two other commercial livestock truck crashes. The bodycam footage, also obtained by Animal Partisan, shows state highway patrols in both Ohio and Michigan taking clear steps to block media access, including positioning cars to hide the scene of the crash from public view, discussing turning off their bodycam footage and giving the news media explicit instructions about what they can document.

It’s a level of interference that raises concerns about First Amendment violations, and the close relationship between the livestock industry and law enforcement, says Will Lowrey, a lawyer at Animal Partisan who obtained the videos.

“There is some complicity between law enforcement and the animal agriculture industry that is, in many cases, seeking to keep animal rights activists on the outside — not to let them see what’s happening, not to let them get a glimpse into some of the horrific conditions these animals are suffering,” says Lowrey. It’s partially this effort to conceal the scene that prompts him to file records requests for livestock truck crashes. “That’s all the more reason that we want these videos,” he tells Sentient. “We want to see. We have a right to see it.”

There is very little public data or research on the frequency and causes of livestock truck crashes, an often overlooked aspect of industrial animal agriculture.

The most recent data was published in a pamphlet outlining how to respond to livestock transport crashes, published in 2021 by the Extension Disaster Education Network of the University of Wyoming. These guidelines note that around 291 wrecks involve commercial livestock every year, according to the U.S. Department of Transportation. The vast majority involve a truck rolling over due to driver error, with an estimated 56 percent involving cattle, 27 percent involving pigs, and 11 percent involving chickens.

These videos offer a rare glimpse into what happens when transportation of live farm animals goes wrong. “It’s very profound to witness the scene. You can hear the pigs screaming, and you can see them standing there shocked, and it goes on and on and on,” Lowrey tells Sentient. By the end of the nearly 1.5 hour video, capturing a crash from June of 2024, injured pigs can still be heard squealing along the roadside.

Note: the video contains footage that some may find disturbing.

Infringing on First Amendment Rights

While law enforcement has the authority to limit the public’s access to a crash scene for the sake of public health and safety, the bodycam footage captures multiple occasions of state police forces explicitly acting to protect the livestock industry, raising concerns about the police’s infringement on protected rights under the First Amendment.

For instance, Sergeant Wheeland is captured directly discussing with other officers about the need to safeguard the meat industry’s reputation. “The owner asked, ‘Hey, just for the sake of not just the business, but the industry, you know, can they scale it back just a little bit?’ So that’s what I asked them to do.” Yet he also acknowledges to the other officers that he doesn’t have much authority to tell the press what to do. “That’s a fine line, what I can tell them they can and can’t…you know,” says the sergeant, presumably referring to First Amendment rights.

But for Lowrey, this isn’t a fine line. He claims that the police’s effort to block WDTN Channel 2 News’ access to the crash is a violation of the First Amendment, prompting him to file an administrative complaint with the Ohio State Highway Patrol.

“It is clear that the Ohio State Highway Patrol was suppressing speech,” says Lowrey. “It’s clear just based on the conversation that happened that they were looking to shut down speech. And the speech I’m specifically referring to is the video recording by the news crew of dead and injured piglets,” he says. “They did that at the behest of the pork industry.”

Lowrey argues this is viewpoint discrimination — prohibited under the First Amendment — when the government, including law enforcement officials, restricts freedom of speech based on perspective. In this case, the restricted viewpoints are those of animal rights activists.

The complaint led to an internal investigation, but it did not address the First Amendment concerns. Instead, Wheeland and other troopers received informal counseling for using “unprofessional language” and for muting or turning off their body cameras at times while responding to the 2023 crash, according to OHSP records.

“I agree that this was a serious First Amendment violation,” wrote Andrew Geronimo, the director of the First Amendment Clinic at Case Western Reserve University, in an e-mail to Sentient. “The right to speak includes the right to gather information, and law enforcement should not be directing members of the media or the public in what to record or not record.”

While there are exceptions, it would need to be an “exceedingly important reason — and embarrassment to a particular industry should not be sufficient,” Geronimo added.

The Ohio State Highway Patrol disputed that its requests to the media violated First Amendment rights.

“In certain situations, such as when animals must be euthanized or other sensitive circumstances arise, we may respectfully request that close-up images not be captured or broadcast,” wrote Sgt. Brice Nihiser, a member of the Ohio State Highway Patrol’s public affairs unit, in an email to Sentient. “These requests are made solely out of consideration for the public and those directly affected, not as restrictions on press freedoms nor as directive orders to the media.”

“The Ohio State Highway Patrol is committed to upholding the constitutional rights of all individuals, including the freedoms guaranteed under the First Amendment,” added Nihiser. “Our troopers receive annual training to protect these rights while ensuring safety at incident scenes.”

A Pattern of Blocking Media and Activist Access

The Ohio State Highway Patrol’s efforts to block media access occurred again in a June 2024 crash of a truck hauling 150 pigs along the interstate. The recovered bodycam footage from June 2024 captures the aftermath of the accident and shows at least twenty full-grown pigs, mangled and bloody, piled under the overpass ramp.

Just before 6 a.m., reporters with Channel 7 WHIO-TV are shown driving toward the crash site. As they roll to a stop, they are greeted by state trooper Alexander Price, who allows the reporters to move closer to the crash but tells them twice to “stay out of the scene.” Half an hour later, as a pair of reporters set up tripods, they are approached by a member of the fire department. The reporters then pack up their belongings and leave — at least exit the frame of the scene captured in a nearby police body camera.

As the emergency crew prepares to kill the injured pigs later that morning, Fire Chief Ronald Fletcher raises his concerns about the media witnessing the process, with state troopers. “Our guys that are gonna do the ‘hog work’ would like to not necessarily have the news media in range of them having to shoot a bunch of hogs… I already ran them off once,” he says. A state trooper agrees to position their vehicles so the media “can’t even see it,” as the emergency crew euthanizes the injured pigs.

A similar incident occurred in Michigan in December 2023. Bodycam footage from this hog transport crash shows a local sheriff from Branch County discussing with a Michigan State Police trooper how to block the view of the pigs being euthanized, including shutting down the road. As they prepare to pull dead pigs from the wreckage, the sheriff informs an officer about the plan to use trailers to block the view and voices concerns about “PETA people” catching wind of it. The footage also shows an officer saying the sheriff didn’t want any photographs taken because “the animal rights people” would “have a cow.”

Efforts to prevent animal rights activists from documenting livestock crashes are familiar to Daniel Paden, PETA’s vice president of evidence analysis. While living along a route used by trucks hauling pigs from Smithfield Foods in eastern North Carolina to a Virginia slaughterhouse, he often arrived at early hours in the morning to capture the scene and advocate for quick euthanasia of injured animals to end their suffering.

“On a number of occasions, we very clearly saw Smithfield personnel go to law enforcement on the scene, point at us, act angry, upset, frustrated and then lo and behold that those officers come and will tell us, ‘You need to move. You need to leave. Not record,’” says Paden.

Paden would push back and argue he has the right to be on public property and would respect the safety boundaries set up by the police. “The answer again and again was ‘Well, you know, the company doesn’t want you here, ’” he shares. “It really did feel like law enforcement was acting at the behest of the pig industry, and not the city or the state that they are serving, and the public.”

Over time, as he continued to assert his right to observe the crashes and met with some of the police agencies responding to these crashes, Paden said he found that the police began to shift away from their earlier deference to the livestock industry. The officers appeared to recognize “that their role at these crashes was not to be the security arm of Smithfield Foods,” says Paden.

The Michigan State Police, Branch County Sheriff’s Department, and Fire Chief Ronald Fletcher did not respond to a request to comment on the claims made in this article.

A Collaborative Relationship Between Police and the Livestock Industry

The collaborative relationship between the meat industry and law enforcement is not limited to the aftermath of livestock crashes, observes Justin Marceau, a civil rights litigator who runs a legal clinic for animal rights activists at the University of Denver.

“It’s difficult to generalize across all law enforcement, but there is a consistent pattern of police aligning with the interests of industrial agriculture—often working to limit transparency rather than facilitate it,” Marceau wrote in an email to Sentient. “In the context of livestock truck crashes, it’s not uncommon for officers to restrict journalists, advocates, or even bystanders from documenting the aftermath, despite clear public interest.”

In his work, Marceau has noted that the police play a key role in enforcing the growing criminalization of animal rights activists, including nonviolent rescues and “ag-gag” laws that prohibit documenting of livestock farms. “These dynamics suggest that law enforcement often serves as a buffer between the public and the realities of animal agriculture,” he wrote, “prioritizing industry protection over transparency or accountability.”

In northern California, animal rights advocates have also noted the “extremely cozy relationship” between the animal agriculture industry and the sheriff’s department, says Almira Tanner, the lead organizer for Direct Action Everywhere. For instance, in 2021, the Sonoma County Farm Bureau honored the sheriff’s office with its “Friend of the Farm Bureau” award for their close work together, including co-hosting an event.

More recently, at the Animal Liberation Conference in May, she said she saw police vehicles escorting “slaughter trucks into the slaughterhouse so that activists aren’t able to document what’s happening.” The trucks were flanked by police cars in a “convoy” with one police car in front and another behind to block their view — a tactic familiar to observers of livestock truck crashes.