There’s nothing stunning about the allegations of misconduct at the former DeCoster egg farm, now Quality Eggs of New England, in Turner. The farm was suspect long before the U.S. Department of Labor hit it with a $3.8 million fine for labor conditions over a decade ago.

What is stunning is the shrug of state officials, who were apparently blindsided by the allegations of cruelty an undercover animal rights group, Mercy for Animals, showed them – hens trapped to die in cages, swung by their necks or kicked into filthy manure pits.

Don Hoenig, the state veterinarian, says Maine agriculture officials have been given carte blanche access to Quality Egg for inspections almost every day. They don’t look for cruelty, per se, but if it was observed – says Hoenig – it would have been dealt with.

This doesn’t seem likely. Either the anonymous operative for Mercy for Animals was lucky to catch the worst cruelty offenders in the act, on videotape, or the state regulators charged with keeping tabs on the farm failed to see the conditions for what they were – deplorable.

Admittedly, factory farms are an inhumane business by nature. Yet the allegations put forth by Mercy for Animals shouldn’t be ignored as over-sensitive claims from an interest group. They should be viewed as part of a pattern for a facility with long-standing concerns about its operations.

The watershed moment for the then-Decoster farm should have been 11 years ago, when a six-page expose published in the Rumford Falls Times revealed working conditions that made then-U.S. Labor Secretary Robert Reich call it an “agricultural sweatshop.”

At that time, DeCoster eggs became supermarket pariahs, with four big New England chains boycotting them from their shelves. The federal fine was eventually settled at $2 million. This should have been enough to convince the company to change more than names.

Perhaps it did. The allegations from the animal rights group say otherwise. Regardless, it should have never gotten this far because state officials were inside this farm, sometimes every single week, to monitor its compliance with myriad regulations. To be scooped on their beat, essentially, by an animal rights group is an embarrassing situation.

Given their regular presence, officials were either blind to the conditions at the farm, or employees did masterful jobs in concealing it. This shows the regulation was toothless and the farm, despite past problems, hadn’t really changed. Talk about the worst of both worlds.

This shouldn’t happen again. The egg business is broken – just as one cracked shell makes a shopper pass on an entire dozen, so could one cracked company affect all the others. Egg farming in Maine should anticipate, perhaps invite, greater regulation and public scrutiny.

Inhumane treatment of animals neither needs a statute to define it nor a checklist to identify it. It was apparently there at Quality Egg the whole time. Mercy for Animals found it.

The state, however, missed it.