The following year,
the animal agriculture industry successfully lobbied the Iowa state legislature to make what Pachaud had done a crime. The law was one of many so-called
"Ag Gag" laws in agricultural states across the country, which make undercover investigations on factory farms by animal rights groups unlawful (an estimated 99 percent of animals raised for meat are factory farmed; the very few small family farms that are left are being systematically driven out of business by the industrialization and economic consolidation of the industry).
As Ag gag laws effectively criminalize speech, some of the more sloppily written among them have been subject to successful constitutional challenges; Iowa's 2012 law was among them. In 2019, a federal judge struck down Iowa's 2012 law.