Posing as a slaughterhouse worker, an animal rights advocate secretly took this film of a sick cow being hoisted by a forklift.

Cameras as small as a button are easily hidden.

By KIM SEVERSON

An undercover vegan wired with a camera no bigger than a sugar cube spent six weeks last fall working at a Southern California slaughterhouse. To fit in, he brought sandwiches made with soy riblets and ate them in a dusty parking lot with the other workers.
He tried not to worry about the emotional toll that long days escorting cows to the kill might have. He had more practical concerns, like making sure he was successful in recording images of workers flipping sick dairy cows with forklifts, prodding them with electrical charges and dragging them by their legs with chains so that they could be processed into ground meat.
Soon the Humane Society of the United States turned the man’s video over to government prosecutors, and then distributed an edited version on its Web site and to a newspaper. Within weeks, the shocking images had been seen by millions of people and aggressive corrective actions were under way by United States authorities from the national to local level.
The events marked a new plateau in the rapidly changing ways that information - and in its broadest sense “news” - are transmitted in today’s interconnected world.
Empowered by sophisticated hardware like tiny recording devices, and by blogs and social networks, virtually any person now can spread information upward and outward, becoming part of the so-called citizen journalism that has begun to affect policies, laws and even entire economies.
Video downloads like those of the California slaughterhouse can be especially effective because they can be easily picked up by the mainstream media.
“Sometimes a video will just catch on and be powerful regardless of your political perspectives, said Eric Klinenberg, a faculty member at New York University who has written a book on the changing media landscape.
He said audiences are increasingly sophisticated at dissecting images on the Internet, he said. But the Humane Society’s slaughterhouse recordings were effective, he said, because “Americans know enough about the inside of the food industry now to believe an image like this.”
The citizen journalism approach is especially useful for groups with special causes that struggle to be heard. A new generation of cameras so small they can be hidden in eyeglass frames, a buttonhole or hat, has done for animal rights advocates what the best-organized protest could not.
Perhaps more than other social agitators, peo- ple concerned about animals raised for food have discovered that downloadable video can be the most potent weapon in their arsenal.
After the California video was circulated, animal cruelty charges were filed, the slaughterhouse was shut down and the United States Congress held hearings. The United States Agriculture Department announced the recall of more than 65 million kilograms of meat, the largest in American history.
After more than 25 years of tactics that have included tossing a dead raccoon on to the lunch plate of a famous fashion editor; boycotting fast-food restaurants; and staging legal challenges, the animal rights movement had a bona fide hit.
“Most activist organizations working on a national or international scale have already integrated all kinds of Internet content into their strategy, said Mr. Klinenberg, the author of “Fighting for Air: The Battle to Control America’s Media.
The video was also part of a well-coordinated legal and media strategy. The undercover vegan applied for a job at the Westland/Hallmark Meat Company in Chino, California . “I went to this place almost on a hunch, the investigator said recently.
“Really, that is exactly how it happened. It was too good to be true.
He declined to talk about certain aspects because of continuing civil and criminal investigations tied to his work at the plant.
Ingrid Newkirk, a founder of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), pioneered the video technique in the early 1980s when she hid in a cardboard box outside a laboratory, serving as lookout for an undercover employee photographing mistreated monkeys inside. The case led to federal reforms that improved life for research animals.
The Westland/Hallmark video was shot and edited in ways that made it more effective than some earlier undercover slaughterhouse videos, according to people who work in the meat processing industry and longtime animal rights advocates. The recording showed clear legal violations but avoided the bloody images of many past undercover videos. As a result, local and national television stations could replay the images over and over.
“The video itself had the right balance of violence,’’ said Wayne Pacelle, the president and chief operating officer of the Humane Society.
With research, legal fees, production costs and accommodations, an investigation can cost as much as $67,000, Ms. Newkirk said.
And investigators who work for the Humane Society and PETA say it is getting tougher to get hired at plants because managers are increasingly suspicious of applicants who don’t fit the profile of the typical slaughterhouse worker, often a Spanish-speaking immigrant.
But the success of this video has given the technique a boost.
“A picture is worth a thousand words,” Ms. Newkirk said, “but a good video is worth a mil lion.