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Dear John

In one of the most consequential U.S. Supreme Court rulings for animals in American history, a majority of the justices rejected a pork-industry challenge to California’s voter-approved farm animal protection law (Proposition 12). The high court upheld the rights of states to restrict the sale of pork and eggs that come from animals housed in extreme confinement on factory farms. It is hard to overstate the importance of this victory for our shared cause!

In recent years, voters in California and Massachusetts passed ballot measures forbidding the sale of pork, eggs, and veal in their states if the producers don’t meet common-sense standards on animal welfare and food safety. When it comes to pigs, the factory farmers’ tool of choice is the gestation crate — a ghastly metal cage that measures 2 feet wide by 6.6 feet long and looks like a medieval torture chamber. The crates are so small that the animals are immobilized!

Indeed, it violates every basic notion of animal care to keep an animal indefinitely in a cage that inhibits that animal from even turning around. But that’s what passes for “pork production” in much of the pork industry today.

The National Pork Producers Council and its Big Agribusiness allies wanted to keep these cages in use and to block laws that bar them. Today, they lost before the highest court in the land!

In approving farm-animal protection ballot measures, voters in Massachusetts and California said they’ve had enough of extreme confinement and they rejected the pork industry’s tired old ideas and doom-and-gloom predictions about food prices.

The pork industry then hired high-priced attorneys and appealed the case to the Supreme Court, asking justices to unwind what millions of American voters decided at the ballot box. In a sense, they’ve long been trying to force feed their inhumanely produced pork to tens of millions of Americans. It’s neither a good legal strategy nor a productive consumer outreach approach.

The Pork Producers argued that California was working to extend its reach beyond its borders, arguing that the ballot measure had an “extraterritorial effect.”

But the Supreme Court decided that states have the prerogative to make their own decisions on these issues and that the U.S. Constitution does not bar states from demanding that Iowa factory farmers, if they want to sell pork in California, give the animals an opportunity to move around, even a little.

Now, with the constitutional question settled, there are no more excuses for factory farmers or their big customers. America’s major food retailers — such as Costco, McDonald’s and Safeway — must honor their pledges and stop sourcing pork from factory farms that confine the animals so intensively. Again, no more excuses.

In all more than 60 major food retailers have announced public pledges to stop procuring pork from operations that torment the pigs in this way.

This ruling closes one chapter in our Cage-Free Future campaign and opens a new one. It’s time to rid the nation of production practices that confine animals in spaces barely larger than their bodies.

Big Ag has friends in high places. But so do the pigs, based on the high court’s actions. The pigs and other farm animals also have you and me. And millions of other caring citizens who know cruelty when they see it. We know that a majority of people believe that all animals deserve humane treatment, including those raised for food.

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It’s a moment for celebration! Thank you for caring so much.

Sincerely,
Wayne Pacelle [[link removed]] Wayne Pacelle
President
Center for a Humane Economy
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