By Jessica Scott-Reid for Sentient.
Broadcast version by Mike Moen for Nebraska News Connection reporting for the Sentient-Public News Service Collaboration

Livestock auctions exist all across North America. They serve as a stop between the farms where animals are born, and the farms where they will be "fattened" or "finished;" the stop between life and death, where animals are sold to be slaughtered. In these fast-paced spaces, animals are pushed through like products - prodded, chased, tossed and dragged - by people paid to get the job done, quickly.

Between late 2022 and early 2024, footage was gathered from over a dozen of these auctions, from across 10 U.S. states by Pete Paxton (Sentient has agreed to use an alias), an undercover investigator with the group Strategies for Ethical and Environmental Development, or SEED.

For a recent story for Vox Media, I was tasked with watching this footage, which shows terrified, confused and exhausted animals being handled harshly, or outright abused. Some animals are shown with injuries, while others have already died at auction.

The footage also shows workers with seemingly no regard for the animals' suffering. Some lash out at the animals in frustration, while others laugh at animals in pain.

"Hundreds or even thousands of animals are sold at auctions within hours," Paxton writes on SEED's website, "and workers must keep up the pace to move scared, exhausted, sick and injured animals in and out of pens. Workers experience dehydration, hunger and exhaustion as a result, which often leads to impatience and subsequent abuse."

Writing the Vox story was difficult. The 20-minute compilation of secretly filmed clips initially took me a week to get through; I could only watch for a few minutes at a time before the discomfort became unbearable. But then, over time, something interesting happened: watching the footage became easier for me. And Paxton understands, firsthand, why.

Desensitization and Animal Abuse

Working on the story over a few months, I had to go back to the footage over and over again. As I did, the images and sounds that had once made me gasp and cover my eyes became less horrific. Over time, they even became bearable. I had become desensitized to the animals' pain and fear, a phenomenon common among those who work in animal farming spaces like auctions.

Dr. Philip Tedeschi, a clinical professor at the University of Denver, and an expert in the human-animal connection, explains that for people working in animal farming spaces, empathy can become incompatible with the job, "inefficient" and "inconvenient."

"One of the things we know about studying empathy is that the presence of empathy can be an inhibitor to engaging in the behavior itself," he explains. "If you're required to engage in forcing animals through a meat processing plant, or expected to stick to a very strict timeline," like at auctions or on an assembly line, "you can't afford to be gentle or kind or humane. Then one of the things that's inefficient or incompatible is to have empathy for those individual animals." Emotionally distancing from animals can aid these workers in getting through the work day.

Paxton admits that the work he does as an undercover investigator is "pretty fucking difficult."

"I've had ex-military and ex-law enforcement reach out to me, and they're like, 'I don't know how you do that, because, man, I would lose my shit.'" But Paxton knows he's there to complete an important task, and that allows him to compartmentalize his feelings. "I tell investigators when I train them, 'It's way easier than you think to get used to the abuse, because when you see it there's two things going on in your head: one is, 'Oh, shit, an animal is being abused,' and then the other thing in your head is, 'I have to document that and not get caught.'"

For Paxton, overriding his concerns about the animal abuse he witnesses is an important part of his job as an investigator. For the people who work at animal auctions, Paxton believes desensitization operates much the same way. Abuse of animals at auctions becomes normalized, Paxton reports, as workers are pressured by management to move animals in and out - fast.

The harsh environment forces workers - ranging from inexperienced teens to long-time workers - to handle animals roughly to keep up with the demanding work. They also learn abusive behaviors from each other.

The Mental Health Impact of Working in Animal Agriculture

As part of his investigation, Paxton kept video footage and written records of certain people he met while working at the auctions. On SEED's website, he describes some of these workers as "good people" who "do bad things."

For example, in one small rural town, Paxton met 17-year-old "Audrey." Exhausted and under pressure, she mimicked abusive actions she witnessed from co-workers, reflecting learned behaviors. "As the workday dragged on, her frustrations led her to drag baby lambs and goats by their legs in fits of anger, mirroring the abusive actions she saw around her," Paxton writes. He also recalls "Stewart," a hardworking 20-year-old, dragging goats and jabbing calves with his keys, seeing cruelty as necessary for the job, "a means to an end."

Similar working conditions have also been documented in slaughterhouses, where both workers and animals are known to suffer. Slaughterhouse workers have for decades been documented engaging in extreme cruelty beyond basic animal handling.

For example, a 2018 investigation by Animal Aid uncovered UK slaughterhouse workers beating cows with pipes, while encouraging others to join in. In 2022, Animal Equality documented workers in Brazil kicking, beating and dragging cows by ropes, and twisting their tails to force movement.

Research has shown that the slaughterhouse environment, and the nature of slaughterhouse work itself, can and does have notable psychological impacts on workers. For example, slaughterhouse workers are four times more likely to be clinically depressed than the general public, according to a 2015 study. Higher rates of anxiety, psychosis and serious psychological distress are also found among those working in slaughterhouses, compared to the population at large.

As Dr. Kendra Coulter, now coordinator of Huron University's Animal Ethics and Sustainability Leadership program, told Sentient in 2020: in slaughterhouses, both workers and animals are commodified, "animals literally so." But both are ultimately seen as disposable.

Cultural Impact on Animal Treatment

Upbringing and culture can also play a key role in one's ability to turn off empathy for farm animals. As Tedeschi explained to Sentient on the topic of rodeos, if a person is brought up since childhood to believe that something is "culturally defined as a deserving activity," it becomes normalized.

We see this in rodeo activities geared specifically toward children, such as "pig scrambles" and "mutton busting," where children will ride sheep or other animals, "or engage in wrestling an animal or controlling them in some form," Tedeschi says, "And then getting a lot of attention for that. This is early shaping of those behaviors." Organizations like 4H and Future Farmers of America similarly serve to socialize children to emotionally distance themselves from the animals they are tasked to care for, before selling them to be slaughtered.

Paxton notes that the people he met while working at livestock auctions come from this same wider community. "They're the same people," he says. "They fucking love rodeos." This also includes the police and inspectors on site. "If you're a cop and you're in a rural area, you probably have cows, you've probably kicked them," he says. "Your parents have kicked them, and you're not going to bring charges against a fucking kid or elderly person who does the same thing."

"It's cowboy culture," Renee King-Sonnen, a former cattle rancher turned animal sanctuary operator, told Vox. Cowboy culture involves the normalization of inhumane treatment of animals at auctions, she adds. The drive to belong to that culture is what drives that shared behavior.

"People that are part of this community or this culture feel a solidarity with each other," explains Dr. Rebekah Humphreys, a senior lecturer in philosophy at the University of Wales, and an expert in animal ethics. In the case of spaces where animals are farmed, slaughtered, tested on, etc., "the mistreatment of animals," she says, is "reinscribed and perpetuated through cultures. And then anyone that is outside of that norm is criticized as being overly sentimental or anthropomorphic."

Paxton believes that most people working at auctions don't believe they're doing anything wrong when they mistreat animals. "For many of them, it is the right thing, pulling a screaming goat by the ear," he says. "This animal just needs to move, [and] everyone's always done it that way. Does that make me an asshole?" he asks, putting himself in the position of the workers. "Or wouldn't I really be an asshole if I said, 'Everyone stop the entire auction?' If I had to assuage this animal's feelings and recognize this animal as an individual?"

The Bottom Line

Ultimately, both Tedeschi and Humphreys agree that the commodification of farm animals as property, legally and morally, allows places like animal auctions to exist, and for farm animals to be othered so severely. "The industrialization and commodification of [farm animals] has turned them into objects to the extent that we are really quite distanced from them," says Humphreys.

And that distance, Tedeschi believes, prohibits humans from thinking of these animals with more ethical consideration. "We're not likely to see people do a deeper kind of moral investigation into how we interact with other animals, as long as we view them as having the same legal position as the toaster on our counter."

For people like Paxton and me, who exist outside that cowboy culture but are tasked with investigating it, the ability to compartmentalize - to distance ourselves from the natural empathy we feel for animals, in order to get the job done - also reveals just how easily desensitization can happen.

This is in part what allows Paxton to see those who abuse animals at auctions as otherwise good people. "I'm not really scared of these people," he says. "I didn't find them to be violent or terrifying people. They're fucking nice people," he says. As long as you're not a cow.


Jessica Scott-Reid wrote this article for Sentient.


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By Amy McDermott for the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Broadcast version by Suzanne Potter for California News Service reporting for the Pulitzer Center-Public News Service Collaboration.

Wildlife biologist David Wiens was extremely nervous the first time he shot an owl. He steadied himself in the evening darkness of an Oregon fire road, pointed his shotgun at a big barred owl perched on a stump, and pulled the trigger. Nothing happened; the gun's safety was still on. "I had to completely recollect myself," he recalls. "The bird just stayed there." Wiens thought back to the months of firearm training preparing him for this moment, resettled the gun's viewfinder on the owl, then pulled the trigger.

Wiens, who works for the US Geological Survey (USGS) in Corvallis, is head biologist of a six-year experiment culling barred owls from areas of Oregon, Washington, and Northern California. Researchers wanted to know if removing barred owls would help another species, the threatened spotted owl, survive.

Management methods that involve killing animals are called lethal control. It's often assumed that reducing the population of one species will help another survive-for instance, killing invasives to protect natives, or culling predators to benefit livestock. Millions of animals are destroyed by lethal control every year in the United States, including coyotes, raccoons, feral cats, prairie dogs, bears, and mountain lions.

Deciding which animals should live or die is not so clear-cut, and context matters. For example, the barred owl is native to North America but expanded beyond its historical range alongside human development. Are they invasive? It depends on whom you ask. Search the literature, and you'll see trade-offs and ethical distinctions between killing invasive species to protect natives and killing native predators, such as wolves and mountain lions, to benefit ranchers.

In general, the public is more comfortable killing exotic, invasive species (think: pythons in the Everglades) than with killing native predators, such as wolves or coyotes, explains wildlife biologist Rachael Urbanek at the University of North Carolina Wilmington. Still, the core question is the same: Is there evidence that killing effectively manages populations? The answers differ case to case, she says.

And then there's the core ethical quandary: Even if lethal control can work, is it the right thing to do? What if you can only guarantee it will work for a few years? How do you value one animal over another? Those questions fuel a heated debate, which simmers ever hotter as public attitudes about animal welfare evolve. Values, as much as data, are likely to determine whether governments and communities abide lethal control as a policy.

Frontier Origins

Wiens had never fired a gun before training for this experiment. Killing any bird of prey ran counter to his ecology education before the study. "Every time I went out there to do it, it was extremely difficult," he says. But Wiens believes that to maintain biodiversity, lethal control has become "more and more necessary," particularly in the case of invasive species.

Others disagree. "I don't think you can find any research that does adequately demonstrate that lethal control works," says William Lynn, an ethicist in the Marsh Institute at Clark University in Massachusetts and the founder of PAN Works, an animal ethics think tank. The US Fish and Wildlife Service hired Lynn 15 years ago to lead a stakeholder group (which included conservation organizations and timber industry representatives) to discuss ethical concerns about the planned barred owl removal experiment in the Pacific Northwest (1, 2). Many participants said they valued the owls' lives and recoiled at the thought of routine killing.

The owl case is one of the most meticulously studied. Barred owls, native to eastern North America, have spread west over the last century (an expansion unintentionally facilitated by humans) and are now encroaching on the last western old-growth forests where threatened spotted owls roost. The hope is that by killing thousands of the encroachers, wildlife biologists can stabilize spotted owl populations.

The results of Wiens' experiment are promising. After removing about 3,000 barred owls over a six-year period, the USGS team found that spotted owl populations stabilized (3). The US Fish and Wildlife Service now plans to conduct a scaled-up 30-year cull of barred owls, starting this year, based largely on the results of the experiment. As of early March, a number of lawmakers from multiple states encouraged the Trump administration to scrap the plan, citing high costs and dubious success.

It's the latest salvo in a long history of efforts to kill in order to manage populations. The story of lethal control in the United States began on the Great Plains in the early 1800s, when European settlers decimated bison, elk, deer, and pronghorn populations, explains Brad Bergstrom, professor emeritus of vertebrate ecology at Valdosta State University in Georgia. Bergstrom chaired the Conservation Committee of the American Society of Mammalogists for nearly a decade. He authored a widely cited 2014 review on the history of lethal control in the United States, among other topical articles (4, 5).

What happened, Bergstrom says, is that starving wolves, bears, pumas, and other predators turned to cattle as prey. The US government responded with a program of shooting and trapping predators to protect livestock. Its modern incarnation is Wildlife Services, an agency within the US Department of Agriculture. "That's how it started, and we're still doing that," Bergstrom says.

Perception vs Reality

The Department of Wildlife Services is still the federal agency largely tasked with lethal control. In 2023, the agency killed 1,454,324 animals, according to their annual report (6), including 24,603 beavers, whose dams are blamed for flooding (7); 18,916 double-crested cormorant birds, whose eating habits are ostensibly pressuring fisheries (8); and 68,562 coyotes, which raise concerns about killing farm animals and pets, though there's little evidence that killing carnivores protects livestock (9).

"I think Wildlife Services has gotten a lot of negative media attention over many decades," Urbanek says. Much of it is undeserved, in her opinion. The agency's attitude certainly isn't "have at it-let's kill them all!" Wildlife Services studies nonlethal methods as well, she notes, whether directed at deer-car collisions or bird-airplane collisions.

Often, a government agency engages in lethal control-for instance, with coyotes-because of a public outcry, Urbanek says. "It's a social carrying capacity," she says. People start noticing more coyotes, eventually feel there are too many, and then complain to their local government, which can go to state agencies or Wildlife Services to intervene and neutralize the perceived threat. In Wilmington, where Urbanek lives, and where both human and coyote populations have grown in recent decades, "we don't want to get to that point," she says.

So, in 2023, she published survey results that gauged public attitudes toward the growing coyote population (10). The survey quizzed residents on their knowledge of normal coyote behavior and asked how the county should spend tax money-whether on coyote lethal control, public education about coyotes, or other measures. Only 11% of respondents said they'd had aggressive encounters with coyotes. Many of those stories came from wary people who saw a coyote nearby and felt threatened, Urbanek says. Most respondents supported spending tax dollars on public education over culling, except in cases of coyote attacks. Urbanek says the survey, by highlighting the role of education, is helping Wilmington get ahead of a widespread fearful response that might lead to lethal control.

Wilmington's parks and gardens have since begun a series of coyote education events. To keep humans and pets safe, Urbanek says she teaches hazing: "Getting an empty soda can, putting coins or rocks in it, taping it shut, and shaking it." Coyotes run off at the noise.

Silver Bullets

What does the science say? The answers and the caveats vary, case by case.

Consider the Blanding's turtle, a northeastern species that's endangered in some states due to habitat loss and the pet trade. "These guys are adorable and a really friendly turtle," Urbanek says. People tend to poach them as pets. In 2013, the Lake County Forest Preserve District was monitoring the turtles at two nature preserves on the Illinois-Wisconsin border and had two healthy populations left. The district was actively taking eggs from nests and hand-raising them, then releasing the young turtles back into the wild to give them a head start. But raccoons and other predators often discovered the nests and dug them up.

The district asked Urbanek's lab to see if culling raccoons before nesting season would help, by creating a window of time when the nests went undisturbed before the predators moved back in (11).

Her team trapped and killed 45 raccoons from the 2-square-kilometer study area in spring 2013, reducing raccoon population density by about 90%. Because raccoons can carry rabies, they couldn't legally be relocated. In the nesting season that followed, only one of seven, or 14%, of monitored Blanding's turtle nests was attacked and partially eaten.

The next year, though, the researchers repeated the experiment by culling 33 raccoons. This time, 9 of 15 turtle nests, or 60%, were attacked. Foxes, opossums, and skunks had likely moved in on the food source with the raccoons gone.

Urbanek's conclusion: Predator management, especially for threatened species, "can help to some degree"-after all, there was a boost for the Blanding's turtle nests in 2013. But in general, the two-year study showed that "predator management is not the panacea," she says. Killing the raccoons didn't save the turtles long-term.

Maybe if the team had killed foxes, skunks, opossums, and raccoons every year, they'd have seen a lasting impact. Then again, maybe not. There are communities on North Carolina's barrier islands that hire trappers to take foxes, raccoons, and coyotes, in hopes of helping endangered sea turtle nests. In those cases, Urbanek says, predators "move back quickly, even across the water."

Borne on Brown Wings

But it's the case of the barred and spotted owls that's received the most public attention of late-and spurred the most vocal controversy.

In this tale of two owls, the barred is larger, territorially competitive, and better at living alongside people. The northern spotted owl, by contrast, only lives in the old-growth forests of the Pacific Northwest and northern California, roosting in the cracked trunks of old conifers. The northern spotted owl has been a fiercely beloved mascot of the Northwest since 1990, when its listing as a threatened species under the Endangered Species Act gave teeth to forest protection efforts. These two owls have been on a collision course since around 1900, Wiens says, when European settlers planted trees on the Great Plains. Barred owls probably used those trees to hopscotch their way west from their native eastern forests. Since the 1960s, they've arrived in the Northwest, where they're outcompeting the spotted owls for nesting hollows and food.

In response, the US Fish and Wildlife Service developed the removal experiment, killing some 3,100 barred owls over six years in areas of Oregon, Washington, and Northern California, to test if their removal would slow, stop, or reverse spotted owl declines. It did seem to help. Spotted owl numbers stopped crashing at the treatment sites-though, notably, their populations didn't grow either. Populations leveled out at a 0% rate of change. In control areas, spotted owls declined by an average of 12% per year. At one control site, there was a single owl left by the end of the study (3). Since those results were published in 2021, Fish and Wildlife has unveiled a strategy of more widespread barred owl killing to be deployed, up to the next 30 years, across Oregon, Washington, and California.

Although Wiens thinks the plan is necessary to save the spotted owl, he also sees potential issues. It's been five years since his experiment, and at a decline rate of 12% annually, that leaves few spotted owls to save in places that already had small populations, such as Washington and northern Oregon. The larger spotted owl populations in Northern California and southern Oregon have been impacted heavily by barred owls recently, in the last 5-10 years, and culls should be effective there, he says.

Without implementing the strategy, and conserving old growth forest, Wiens says we'll eventually see extinction of the northern spotted owl. But barred owls have wider impacts on other species as well. He found the bones of smaller pygmy and screech owls in the stomachs of barred owls during the experiment. And many of these smaller native owls are also competing with barred owls for the same small mammal prey. It's never been just about northern spotted owls, he says; it requires "a more holistic view."

Bergstrom calls the owl research "intricate" and "well-designed" and says those attributes make it "the exception, not the rule" for cases of predator lethal control. But he would argue that a scaled-up cull of barred owls only treats a symptom of habitat loss, not the habitat loss itself. "Extreme habitat specialists are in trouble everywhere," he says, "and the only long-term solution is to restore their habitat."

Even if thousands of barred owls are shot, that won't suddenly free spotted owls to expand beyond the tiny islands of habitat left to them. "I hate to say it, but I think the spotted owl is doomed," Bergstrom says. "Because even if barred owl removal works, is it really going to be funded forever? Or for as long as it takes for the old-growth forests to grow back?"

Toward Value and Virtue

Some argue that lethal control has become so polarizing because it's really more of a values debate than a scientific one. When is it OK to take the life of an animal, especially an intelligent one? "While there are scientific questions in play...there is a more deep-seated controversy that stems from value differences," which often go unacknowledged or underacknowledged, says interdisciplinary scientist Jeremy Bruskotter at The Ohio State University in Columbus. Questions about lethal control's effectiveness are rarely separate from the more emotional quandary: Even if it works, "should we do it?" he says.

Bruskotter coauthored several recent studies suggesting that opinions on lethal control-and how we value wildlife in general-are changing. In a survey of 43,949 people across all 50 states, published in a series of papers (12-14), Bruskotter posed 19 questions about ideal relationships with wildlife and dozens of other questions to gauge public perceptions of wildlife-related issues.

For each question, participants read a statement, such as "the needs of humans should take priority over fish and wildlife protection," and then indicated their alignment on a scale from "strongly agree" to "strongly disagree."

Comparing those results to similar questions from earlier studies, as far back as 2004 and in 19 western states, attitudes had significantly shifted toward viewing animals as "morally relevant," Bruskotter says, meaning deserving of care and compassion, as opposed to just a means to human ends. "People are demanding good answers for why animals should be killed," he says. However, the results were not uniform across the West. The values shift was most pronounced in Utah, Nevada, and California, where more sympathetic views of animals had spread since 2004. But in the same analysis, more traditional views of animals as resources had expanded in 2 of the 19 states, Wyoming and North Dakota. Increasing disparities in public values state to state suggest one reason why disagreements over lethal control are getting more polarizing.

"Science is the surrogate for what is actually a values debate," Bruskotter says. The relationships people wanted with wildlife even 10 years ago aren't the relationships they say they want today.

"In the majority of cases, lethal control doesn't do what people expect and want," says ecologist Adrian Treves at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. The field has become so polarized that researchers are entrenched in camps, he adds. "People have forgotten the lesson that when those scientific debates get so hot, that's when we need more and better data," Treves says.

There are at least ways to make killing more humane. In the case of the owls, Wiens' study included protocols to take only clear shots at close range, using a special type of quiet gun barrel. "Usually, it was one shot, and that's it, so it was very quick," he says. The culled owls were physically intact and became museum specimens for future studies.

Ultimately, lethal control is a response to dilemmas humans have created-poaching, habitat destruction, the spread of invasive species. "In our history as humans, we've moved animals and plants around to hunt them and eat them, or because they look pretty," Urbanek says. "We are still playing that role and trying to fix that."


Amy McDermott wrote this article for the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.


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By Grey Moran for Sentient.
Broadcast version by Terri Dee for Indiana News Service reporting for the Sentient-Public News Service Collaboration

The U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Livestock Behavior Research Unit, the primary federal lab dedicated to farm animal welfare research, has been decimated — with now just one scientist remaining on staff — by the Trump Administration’s mass firings of federal employees, Sentient confirmed with two former laboratory staff members. The unit’s research — over the course of three decades — helped develop the scientific measures for animal welfare on farms and informed some regulatory standards, such as Proposition 12.

“Without the scientists, the unit will be earmarked for closure, I’m sure,” Jeremy Marchant, who worked as an animal research scientist at the lab between 2001 and 2023 and maintains communication with the team, wrote in an e-mail to Sentient. “To see it be dismantled like this is heart-breaking and bad for U.S. farm animal welfare.”

The world-class research institution’s animal scientists — Jessica Pempek and Kaitlin Wurtz, who were both probationary employees — were both fired on February 13, leaving just Heng-wei Cheng as the sole scientist remaining. These terminations came at the directive of the Trump Administration’s Office of Personnel Management, which ordered federal agencies to lay off nearly all probationary employees — a sweeping, abrupt overhaul affecting hundreds of thousands of staff in the first few years on the job.

The loss of the probationary scientists gutted an already short-staffed laboratory, yet to hire replacements for Marchant and another scientist who left in 2024.

“The unit was already down from five scientists to three scientists,” Marchant tells Sentient, in an interview. “And then with the hiring freeze coming in straight away, it meant that we could no longer be replaced, and then two of the three [scientists] were still in their probationary period. So, now it’s down to one scientist who is due for retirement anytime soon.”

Sentient called Pempek on February 14, as she was packing her office to confirm her termination. She described the firings as “catastrophic” for farm animal welfare research.

Sentient could not get ahold of Wurtz by phone or e-mail. The auto-response to her U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) e-mail states, “I am no longer with the USDA-ARS Livestock Behavior Research Unit, and this email is no longer being monitored.” Following a brief phone call, Pempek did not respond to further interview requests.

What the Dismantling Means for Farm Animal Welfare

The Livestock Behavior Research Unit, embedded in Purdue University in Indiana, is part of the in-house research branch of the USDA’s Agricultural Research Service (ARS), which is carried out through a network of nationwide research stations. Established in 1992, the unit has led federal research into the study of animal pain, nutrition, cognition and stress in response to the conditions on farms, helping develop this scientific field, and in some cases contributing to the establishment of better on-farm animal welfare standards.

“We did a whole range of quite applied studies to more fundamental studies. We’ve worked quite a lot on pain. We’ve looked at painful procedures. That’s a really important area, trying to demonstrate that certain things that get carried out on farms are painful and really need to be ameliorated with pain relief,” Marchant says.

This has included research into the gruesome mutilations and injuries routinely suffered by farm animals, including the pain experienced by livestock during and after castration (the removal of the testicles to prevent further breeding); the far-ranging psychological and physiological impacts of heat stress on farm animals and methods to increase cooling, and ways that farm animal stress is passed down to their offspring. The unit’s position within a land-grant university allowed the USDA to extend the reach of this work, collaborating with university professors and graduate students in the agricultural sciences. The researchers also developed presentations and other materials for livestock producers to help inform animal welfare protocols.

Notably, the laboratory’s research informed the legal justification for Proposition 12, California’s 2018 ban on extreme animal confinement, which was pushed for by animal rights and public health advocacy groups. This includes Marchant’s research documenting how gestational crates, metal enclosures to confine pregnant sows, affect the animal’s health and well-being; it was cited in an amicus brief to the Supreme Court in support of the law, which outlawed the sale of pork from pigs housed in gestation crates.

Even Elon Musk benefited from the laboratory’s collaborative research model that helped launch the careers of a wide-range of animal behavior scientists. This included Autumn Sorrells, who worked at the laboratory as a graduate student at Purdue University, which she attended between 2000 and 2003, according to her LinkedIn. She later became the head of animal care at Musk’s brain-computer interface company Neuralink, which was investigated by the USDA for animal cruelty and deaths while under her oversight in 2022. 

Like Marchant, Sorrells’s research as a student focused on animal welfare for pigs and gestational crates under the supervision of the unit’s USDA scientists.

In general, progress on improving farm animal welfare standards has been an uphill battle, marked by slow, incremental changes. “So the pig industry has not been particularly proactive in dealing with pain management,” says Marchant, which was his primary research focus. “The cattle industry was beginning to be a bit more so. The poultry industry, I think, was probably the area where most inroads were made.”

For instance, the remaining scientist Heng-wei Cheng’s research helped show that trimming the beaks of birds to reduce feather pecking (pulling the features and skin out of another bird) was also painful, which helped inform alternative methods.

However, it is unclear how much longer Cheng will be able to carry out this research for the USDA-ARS now that he is the unit’s only scientist. “Usually ARS has a policy of, you know, if it gets down to a kind of certain size it becomes non-viable,” says Marchant. He notes that it might be possible for his unit to merge with the laboratory’s sister unit in Texas, the only other USDA-ARS laboratory that has some farm animal welfare research in its remit.

The USDA didn’t respond to questions about the financial and staffing status regarding both the USDA-ARS laboratories in Indiana and Texas. Cheng and the two scientists at the Texas unit also didn’t respond to requests to confirm details, or interview.

Scientists Mourning Multiple Losses

The news of the firings of probationary staff came during a particularly challenging time for the USDA’s small, close-knit farm animal behavioral research community. The Livestock Behavior Research Unit’s former research leader Don Lay Jr., passed away earlier this month, before he could learn of the dismantling of the research laboratory he helped build over 22 years. Marchant was helping plan a USDA announcement about Lay Jr.’s passing when he received a text from Pempek about how she and Wurtz were just terminated, he says.

As this research community grieves, Marchant anticipates that the broader world will soon feel the loss of the unit’s contributions to animal welfare knowledge.

“The industry will definitely feel its loss. Advocacy groups will feel its loss,” says Marchant, noting that while there is still privately funded research, USDA research into farm animal welfare was critical because it tended to be trusted by a wide range of stakeholders. “It’s going to be broad-reaching across anybody who’s involved in farm animals and the welfare of farm animals — it’s going to be felt by them, for sure.”


Grey Moran wrote this article for Sentient.

By Gabriella Sotelo for Sentient Climate.
Broadcast version by Danielle Smith for Keystone State News Connection reporting for the Sentient-Public News Service Collaboration

Farms across the U.S. are still struggling to contain the spread of avian flu. The virus has infected farms in all 50 states since the beginning of the outbreak, according to the CDC. Two states - Pennsylvania and Georgia - have recently declared themselves bird-flu free, after stepping up testing efforts and biosecurity protocols. Yet the ongoing spread nationwide - both on factory farms and from infectious migratory birds - raises questions about what a "bird-flu free" announcement really means for the U.S. food system.

Large confined animal feeding operations (CAFOs) can house over 125,000 broiler chickens or 82,000 laying hens at a time, creating a perfect environment for diseases like bird flu to spread. Similarly, large cattle farms may house over 1,000 cattle while dairy CAFOs can house 700 or more dairy cattle.

Pennsylvania state officials announced that they reached "HPAI-Free," or bird-flu free status in their dairy industry in February. By March, Georgia Agriculture Commissioner had also announced poultry operations in the state were "HPAI-Free."

Achieving "free from bird flu" status requires strict biosecurity protocols and significant collaboration between local, state and federal authorities, according to industry researchers. The USDA sets national guidelines for monitoring and testing, which each state adapts to its specific needs. In other words, states can implement their own testing strategies, but these are based on USDA guidelines, and it's the USDA that confirms the findings.

No matter how thorough the protocol, Corinne Bromfield, a University of Missouri extension swine veterinarian with a background in biosecurity, says even the best biosecurity plan on paper is still very difficult to enact on an actual farm. "For something that is transmitted by wild birds, we can only take the steps that we can control," Bromfield tells Sentient.

State Bird Flu Containment Strategies, Explained

In January 2025, Georgia confirmed its first bird flu case in a commercial poultry flock. Georgia raises around 1.4 billion broiler chickens and 18 million layer hens at any given time, making it one of the nation's leading chicken producers. The state responded quickly to the outbreak, containing the virus within 48 hours (according to a press release from state officials) and suspending all in-state poultry activities, including exhibitions and sales.

Tom Tabler, extension poultry specialist at the University of Tennessee Extension Service, told Sentient by email that the steps for containment include "quarantine, depopulation, disposal, cleaning, disinfecting, testing and time," including both state and federal guidelines.

Meanwhile, Pennsylvania, ranked 8th in total dairy production in the U.S, took a proactive testing approach to prevent the spread of bird flu in dairy herds. Since late November 2024, the state's Animal Diagnostic Laboratory System has tested over 22,000 bulk milk samples from nearly all of its dairy farms, according to the state's official press release. Pennsylvania has remained one of 33 states with no confirmed cases of bird flu in cattle, at least as of this publication date, according to USDA data.

When avian influenza is first detected in a flock, producers are supposed to report sick or dead birds to their state veterinarian or a state animal health official, according to USDA's Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS) guidelines. If the virus is confirmed, the USDA steps in to assist with the inventory for indemnity, investigation and depopulation.

Here, the term depopulation means wiping out an entire flock at once, as quickly and cheaply as possible. Producers often rely on an inexpensive slaughter strategy called "ventilation shut down plus." Most birds die of heat stroke or suffocation during the process, with any surviving birds typically killed by hand. Producers also must create a flock plan, which should include steps for getting rid of the virus and getting the farm back into production.

To eliminate bird flu in U.S. dairy herds, the USDA has developed a National Milk Testing Strategy (NMTS) that includes a combination of silo monitoring at dairy processing plants and mandatory testing for interstate movement of lactating dairy cattle.

A state must complete at least four rounds of monthly testing with negative results in order to achieve official "unaffected" status. Pennsylvania is one of nine states that, as of this publication date, has been listed as "unaffected" on the NMTS page. If a state's dairy herd tests positive, the producer is supposed to quickly detect and respond to affected herds, including increasing biosecurity protocols and using contact tracing to pinpoint the spread.

These strategies help to mitigate the spread of bird flu, but maintaining bird-flu free status is an ongoing challenge that can be undone at any time.

Biosecurity Protocols Can Be Quickly Undone

Much like any other virus, bird flu won't be deterred by a border on a map. The virus is unpredictable, threatening to resurface at any time. Containing bird flu spread then requires constant vigilance, as experts tell Sentient that any lapse in biosecurity can undo years of efforts.

Even the best on-farm protocols can't control for wild birds entirely. "We're doing everything that we can to minimize the risk to the animals that are under our control," Bromfield says, "but we also have this added layer of animals that are not under our control."

Pennsylvania state officials are aware of the challenge, it seems. "We are not out of the woods yet, and the threat demands that we keep our guard up," Pennsylvania Agriculture Secretary Russell Redding said in the February 12 press release.

States must remain prepared to implement emergency control measures at a moment's notice - ready to establish control zones around affected farms and halt the movement of chickens and cows.

"We're always going to have migrating animals that happen to come through areas that we live in or our animals live in," Bromfield says.

Tabler, a poultry scientist, had a similar warning. "Migratory birds or a lapse in biosecurity could easily start the whole process over again," he wrote in an email to Sentient.

Factory Farms and Wild Birds Keep Threat Levels High

Biosecurity protocols do not address a persistent factor for disease spread - the conditions in which factory-farmed poultry are raised. With tens of thousands of birds confined in cramped, unsanitary spaces, factory farms are the ideal breeding grounds for diseases like bird flu.

Overcrowding combined with massive amounts of waste can make it nearly impossible to contain the spread of pathogens. On top of this, wild birds help to spread the disease, making confinement to any one farm exceptionally difficult.

Currently, the standard approach to outbreaks is depopulating - killing infected flocks en masse, often with methods that are cheaper and less humane than standard slaughter methods - and large-scale operations have received indemnity payments for their losses. A December 2024 report from the USDA found that the indemnity program was failing to incentivize producers to take increased biosecurity precautions. Changes to the program were subsequently instituted, though the payout scheme has already resulted in record profits for leading egg producer Cal-Maine.

For smaller farms or backyard poultry owners, maintaining biosecurity measures is also an ongoing challenge, thanks to increased exposure to wild birds and their droppings. Without the infrastructure or resources available to large-scale commercial operations, these smaller operations can be quickly wiped out.

The Bottom Line

While states like Georgia and Pennsylvania have declared themselves bird-flu free, the threat from avian flu is far from over in any part of the country. The virus continues to threaten the food system and public health, as risk of a larger pandemic - currently low - looms overhead. The process to contain the virus is ongoing, as any new outbreak can quickly undo progress, demonstrating the fragile nature of any bird-flu free announcement.


Gabriella Sotelo wrote this article for Sentient.


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