Animal Wellness Podcast:
The era of cage confinement of sows must end
The pork industry is running around Capitol Hill with its hair on fire. Its key trade association—the National Pork Producers Council, and the plaintiff in the landmark case
NPPC v. Ross—is claiming that the Supreme Court’s ruling upholding the constitutionality of Proposition 12 in California is going to disrupt the supply of pork in the United States and create chaos from Iowa to North Carolina.
That’s baloney.
In briefing before the court, it went uncontested that numerous producers promised they are ready right now to supply the California market, including Tyson Foods, Hormel, and the Clemens Group. “A significant number of producers have already implemented the changes necessary to accommodate the California market” and “many distributors have registered recently,” Karen Ross, the Secretary of the California Department of Food and Agriculture, told us in a letter this week.
Is it really surprising? There are 10 states that already ban gestation crates. There are 60 food retailers that have public pronouncements declaring gestation crates are inhumane or at odds with their principles—from McDonald’s to Costco to Walmart. What’s more, thousands and thousands of pig producers see the California law, and a preceding and nearly identical statute from Massachusetts, as a market opportunity for them. The transition to a cage-free future has been underway for years, even as the trade association and some of its key allies continue to misrepresent the situation on the ground for farmers.
The Supreme Court, in siding with the state of California and animal welfare groups like
Animal Wellness Action and the
Center for a Humane Economy, saw through the hyperbole. The Congress should do the same and reject an overreaching legislative proposal that the NPPC has been pushing for years: the so-called Exposing Agriculture Trade Suppression (EATS) Act.
In one fell swoop, the EATS Act would nullify hundreds of states and local laws and regulations—adopted by thousands local and state lawmakers and agency officials and agricultural commissioners—that place well-considered limits on commerce in agricultural products. While it purportedly aims at Prop 12 in California and Question 3 in Massachusetts—which restrict commerce in pork, eggs, and veal from farms that intensively confine some animals—the EATS Act amounts to a scattershot legislative attack that would unwind a vast array of laws that address agricultural pests, food safety, conservation, fire safety, horse slaughter, and other social and science-based concerns other than farm animal welfare. In fact, 99 percent of the laws that would be curtailed by the EATS Act would not relate to farm animal welfare in any way.
The NPPC wants to trample on the states’ rights and the U.S. Constitution, even as it hypocritically argued in court that Prop 12 was unconstitutional.
Recently, Animal Wellness Action worked with Rep. Veronica Escobar to introduce legislation to ban the use of gestation crates nationwide. Her bill, H.R. 2939, would provide a level playing field for all producers and end the cage-confinement era in the pig industry.
Animals built to move should be allowed to move. That’s the elemental concept behind the
PIGS Act.
While we celebrate the ruling in
NPPC v. Ross, we also turn our attention to the effort to pass the PIGS Act and to fend off the EATS Act. The case for action is clear and the American public demands that all animals deserve humane treatment, including animals raised for food.
We hope you’ll write to your lawmakers about the issue using our form linked below. And we hope you’ll donate to us so we can fight for the right policies for farm animals in the Congress.
For the animals,
 |
Wayne Pacelle
President
Animal Wellness Action
|
P.S. For an in-depth treatment of these issues,
please listen to or
watch our brand-new podcast with me, our host Joseph Grove, and my colleague Kate Schultz Barton, who is a senior litigator who helped in drafting our pleading to the Supreme Court. I know you’ll find it a valuable and informative discussion as we launch into the next chapter of our Cage-Free Future campaign.
