Dear John,

The leaders at the National Pork Producers Council don’t have a clue about animal welfare.

This trade association of hog factory farms—including a huge factory-farming operation controlled by the Chinese Communist government—has been on the attack against California’s Prop 12, which limits the sale of pork that comes from operations that confine the sows so severely that the mother pigs cannot even turn around.

Time and again, voters, federal judges, and corporate retailers have said it’s time to move on from these crates because they are inhumane and they immobilize the mother pigs.

The controversy surrounds “gestation crates”—two-foot-by-seven-foot cages that are barely larger than the 400-pound mother pigs’ bodies. Over the years, before we took on the problem, these cages became a routine animal-housing method.

But in recent years, we’ve been winning in our campaign to end the Cage Age in agriculture. The very least a civil society can do is give animals raised for food some opportunity to stand up, move, and turn around.

In this battle between us and the NPPC, the factory farmers have been losing.

• NPPC got routed at the ballot box in Massachusetts when Amendment 3 came up for a vote. Nearly 80 percent of voters said they want to stop the sale of pork that comes from sows cruelly confined in gestation crates.
• California voters made a similar judgment in passing Prop 12 in a landslide.
• After voters approved the ballot measures, the NPPC and its allies went to court, claiming Prop 12 and Amendment 3 are unconstitutional. Eleven federal courts, including the U.S. Supreme Court, turned back their challenges. Remarkable that 11 of 11 rulings went our way!
• While all of that was going on, 60 major food retailers—including McDonald’s, Costco, and Kroger—adopted policies against gestation crates. Sixty corporate policies! Just about every major food retailer in the nation.

Yes, after facing defeat and bucking an emerging consensus that gestation crates are inhumane, the NPPC still has the temerity and the gumption to go to Congress to try to overturn U.S. laws and the will of millions of Americans who engaged in the most direct form of democratic decision-making.

In recent days, the NPPC’s allies in Congress have introduced legislation, known as the EATS Act, that would nullify Prop 12, Amendment 3, and all other laws that seek to impose any kind of condition or standard in agricultural commerce.

Congress needs to tell the NPPC that this pig won’t fly. It’s demonstrably inhumane to confine breeding sows so severely that they cannot even turn around.

And that confinement isn’t limited to a few minutes or a few hours. Pigs are immobilized for up to three years!

Talk about torture.

The poor, trapped animals resort to biting on the metal bars as an expression of their physical and psychological torment.

Let’s face it, the NPPC’s political maneuvering is completely at odds with the principles of states’ rights. And also with notions of basic decency in the treatment of animals.

All animals deserve humane treatment, including animals raised for food. Perhaps especially animals raised for food, given that they are being sacrificed for human appetite.

The EATS Act is so broad that it could subvert not only Prop 12 and Amendment 3, but dozens of other state laws, including state laws limiting overuse of antibiotics and stopping the use of dangerous pesticides.

And for good measure, let’s remember that the NPPC is even dismissing the concerns of thousands of American pig farmers who think the EATS Act will hurt them. The California and Massachusetts laws provide critical markets for the pig farmers who have collectively invested billions in more extensive housing systems and are excited about the ability to sell their products in these states. This truth proves that the NPPC favors the factory farmers over the family farmers.

We need your help to stop Big Pork from nullifying the most important farm animal protection laws in the nation.

We need your help to defeat the NPPC’s EATS Act in Congress.

First, please consider donating to our Cage-Free Future campaign. We will again face the might of agribusiness giants profiting off the gross exploitation of animals.

And second, if you live in the United States, please write to your two U.S. Senators and your U.S. Representative and urge them to reject the EATS Act and to defend states’ rights. We’ve made it easy for you. Take action now.

We’ve fought so hard to win major ballot measures. To defend the laws in the federal courts. Now we must defeat them one more time—in the Congress.

It’s no time to let up. We need your help today! The animals need your help today!

For the animals,

Wayne Pacelle President Center for a Humane Economy