There’s nothing like a locked door to spur one’s curiosity, and there’s nothing more suspicious than a blatant effort to conceal the truth.

Considering this, a recent effort on behalf of the animal agriculture industry has given us yet another reason to be cynical about their treatment of animals and the integrity of the industry as a whole.

In several states where animal agriculture is a dominant force both economically and politically, legislators have been vigorously pushing forth efforts to outlaw undercover investigations of factory farms and slaughterhouses. Such investigations generally involve the inadvertent hiring of an undercover animal activist who, while going about his or her assigned duties, is able to record the operation’s behind-the-scenes practices via a hidden camera.

The use of covert investigations to expose abuse in agriculture is nothing new. In 1904, the journalist Upton Sinclair worked in meatpacking plants for several weeks while gathering research for his book The Jungle. He included detailed descriptions of the plant conditions, which, upon the book’s publication in 1906, prompted federal regulation of the industry for the first time in American history.

As the nation’s largest producer of eggs and pork, the state of Iowa has been at the forefront of efforts to ban such tactics.

“A bill currently before the Iowa legislature would make it a crime to produce, distribute or possess photos and video taken without permission at an agricultural facility,” reads a recent New York Times article.

“Similar legislation is being considered in Florida and Minnesota, part of a broader effort by large agricultural companies to preemptively block the kind of investigations that have left their operations uncomfortably – and unpredictably – open to scrutiny,” the Times writes.

Yet this unpredictable susceptibility to scrutiny is precisely what must be preserved. Undercover investigations of animal agriculture facilities have revealed tragic conditions and horrific molestations that would have continued indefinitely had law enforcement not been alerted.

The NYT article reports: “After a 2008 investigation of an Iowa pig farm showed workers beating sows and piglets as well as bragging about the abuse, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals turned over its unedited video to law enforcement, leading to criminal convictions against workers for animal abuse.”

Without a lingering fear of these whistleblowers, what’s to stop workers in these inherently violent industries from engaging in such sadistic behavior? The fact that livestock operations and slaughterhouses are so vehemently opposed to the distribution of footage taken at their facilities speaks to the reality of these abusive acts.

The industry will do whatever it takes to maintain the illusion of shiny red barns and merry farm animals as they invariably appear in children’s books – renditions that bear absolutely no resemblance to real-world operations.

A similar bill before the Minnesota legislature takes the proposal a step further. Not only would it outlaw photographs and videos taken without permission at farms and slaughterhouses, it would extend the injunction to other animal industries, such as puppy mills and pounds.

The bill’s language explicitly prohibits the production, distribution or possession of photos and video taken without permission at an agricultural operation, and distribution is kind of the media’s thang…

But wait, there’s more. As if this blatant breach of our rights to free speech and free press wasn’t enough, they also want to make it illegal to simply possess such images. In other words, they want to make it illegal for anyone to have visual evidence of animal abuse – itself a crime, need I remind you.

So you can see the absurdity (not to mention the unconstitutionality) of this whole proposal. And yet, despite the obvious impropriety of such a bill, its proponents have the whole agricultural industry behind them. If history is any indication, this provides reasonable cause for concern; when First Amendment rights come up against the economic interests of Big Industry, the battle often goes to the bully.

Yet this doesn’t have to be the case. According to The Guardian, the British government “is calling on nearly 370 slaughterhouses to install surveillance cameras to help enforce legislation against cruelty to animals.” This move was precipitated by a 2010 exposé involving undercover footage of cows, sheep and pigs being kicked, stamped on and improperly stunned in seven slaughterhouses across England. The footage was taken from hidden cameras that had been secretly installed in the slaughterhouses by members of the U.K. animal-rights group Animal Aid.

The British government’s reaction to this footage puts America to shame in its priorities. Tim Smith, the chief executive of the Food Standards Agency (FSA) in Britain, said that although he would not condone the way the footage was obtained, he sees Animal Aid’s actions as an overall positive thing. He explained, “It doesn’t really matter how the footage was obtained, or how it came into our presence. [What matters] is what the FSA as the enforcer in this area thinks.”

In our culture, seeing is believing. People will generally not accept an allegation against a company or industry (especially one they contribute to) on the basis of word alone, and I’m certainly not suggesting that they should. People demand (and deserve) hard evidence before making any alterations to their purchasing habits, and producers are well aware of this; they are therefore promoting legislation to make such evidence harder to come by.

Paul McCartney once said, “If slaughterhouses had glass walls, everyone would be a vegetarian.” It’s simply a matter of knowing. We mustn’t let producers make the walls any more opaque than they already are.