Hannah Thompson-Weeman

speaker

83 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Mar 2025 last heard Mar 2025

Hannah Thompson-Weeman’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Bites and Bytes Podcast · Agroterrorism & Cyber Threats: How Farms Are Under Attack · 4 Mar 2025 podcast

And it really is a lot of times farmers, most of the time live there on their farm. So it feels very personal. There was another ongoing issue in Iowa where, you know, some of it was the trespass and things like that and the break-ins and surreptitious filming and things. But then they were also going to executives' homes.

So they were going to the home of the chief operating officer of this company. And they had been doing this to others as well. They buried dead piglets in somebody's yard. They claimed to have feces from a manure lagoon that they dumped in somebody's yard. And in this one incident, you know, his grandchildren were visiting at this time. So I picked up the phone.

I called and said, hey, you know, this guy's he's about to pull up to your house. And luckily, they knew not to answer because they got that call. Those are some of the ones that that stick out to me. This was like, I don't know, circa 2019. It was a very crazy time that that we've kind of watched from afar and tried to help people on the ground manage this incident.

And then, you know, kind of I mentioned the Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act, too, that the first time people were convicted under that was the Shack 7, the Stop Huntington Animal Cruelty. That was a research-focused campaign. But similarly, they were threatening people's families. They were firebombing, allegedly, vandalism, all of that. And those names are still names that we see around.

They still pop up at activist conferences. They still pop up on social media. So the people that were involved in those... And then again, we have some of the modern activist groups that say that they're inspired by those type of groups, which is very concerning.

So we've really seen kind of a whole gamut of things, you know, some that are more of those reputational concerns, but then, you know, the ones that definitely cross that line to a food chain and food system disruption.

And I don't know who this was. It was an unlisted number, but I got a voicemail once saying that, and it wasn't a threat, but I don't know, a premonition. It said something bad is going to happen to you and you deserve it. So even personally, just doing what we do, we are on the receiving end of emails and phone calls and things. Wow.

Yeah. And that's part of part of what we're up to, obviously, as a nonprofit where we aren't that powerful. Although if you read, you know, the activist stories they make us, we're the private FBI, quote unquote, of the FBI. big ag industry. It was like, wow, I sound very important. But you know, we're just crowdsourcing information.

We're just following things closely on social media that are out there. But there is there is definitely a mental health dimension of this and mental health and agriculture. You know, Andrew's worked with Farm Bureau a lot. Farm Bureau has a great campaign at Farm State of Mind looking at mental health issues in agriculture.

and there's definitely an element of this that comes into play where it is very draining and when you're doing such a demanding job for a public that can be very skeptical of you but then there's these extreme actors making it worse and really playing off of animal welfare and things there's definitely a mental health aspect of this that it can weigh very heavily on producers especially those that are personally targeted

there is no i think mike maybe alluded to this earlier like what what is the profile of an activist or an extremist and really there is no like demographic profile there's no oh they're typically this age and they have this socioeconomic background and this education like it's a very broad gamut and we definitely see that there's also different levels you know you've got you've got the true believers that really believe in this and believe that animals should be treated equal to humans

And then you have others that maybe seem to, at least on the surface, potentially have other motivations, whether it's the fame or the fundraising aspect of it. So sometimes it is like a genuine disconnect or lack of knowledge. But then for some of these people, they just don't believe we should be doing it. So it doesn't matter how well those animals are raised.

It doesn't matter what we're doing in terms of animal welfare and sustainability. If at the end of the day, we are using those animals for food, they just don't believe that that should be done no matter how well what standards are in place. So for those extremists, I mean, they will certainly intentionally or unintentionally misrepresent practices. They will exaggerate things.

But at the end of the day for them, it's not. And we tell our members this, like, don't waste your time trying to engage with those people or educate those people because it doesn't matter how well we're doing it. So there's definitely a lot of different factors at play that bring somebody into this extreme mindset. And Mike, how do you ensure this?

Well, we would love to have folks connect with us. You know, we kind of sit at this unique intersection of animal agriculture and technology. security and activism, activist monitoring. So we have a public newsletter. We're out on social media. A lot of our resources are publicly available. We've got an activist web of who these people are.

We have a radical vegan activism report we put out every year that's public. And then even more so for members, every Monday we send out a recap of activism and what's going on and what's coming up next. We actually have a conference every year where we have at least half day of programming that's dedicated to activism, security. We always have law enforcement speakers.

So we definitely welcome those connections because we need to know who those people are that are interested in this so that we can get you in front of our members and then we can refer members. So Christian's raising her hand for the audio only audience. So yeah, we'd love to be that connection point. And again, we do a lot of speaking.

So if we can get in front of audiences to explain to them why this is important and why we need to partner more across law enforcement and agriculture, we're all ears. But Definitely welcome folks to get engaged with the Alliance on social media and our newsletters and maybe even membership if it's of interest. That's great. Andrew, do you have any thoughts on that?

We do try to end on a positive because obviously our presentations aren't the most uplifting thing and people look at me the way that you

You've looked at me throughout this discussion, but the good news is for the animal agriculture community that the vast majority of people happily consume meat, poultry, dairy, eggs, and seafood, and it's our job to make sure they continue feeling confident doing so.

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