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Dear friend,
This week, we won yet one more major victory in the federal courts in our fight to protect Prop 12 in California and Question 3 in Massachusetts – two landmark farm animal protection laws that restrict the sale of pork and eggs that come from animals trapped in cages and crates barely larger than their bodies.
Just days ago, the United States District Court for the District of Massachusetts rejected claims from a Missouri-based factory farming corporation that Question 3, a 2016 voter-approved law in the Commonwealth that prohibited statewide the sale of pork raised in cruel, cramped confinement, was in violation of federal law.
The truth is, the pork companies’ defeat is just the latest in a string of courtroom losses for factory farmers. Animal Wellness Action and the Center for Humane Economy filed an amicus brief in support of Question 3 and the state’s position with the federal court.
Beating the Factory Farmers on Every Field of Battle
It’s been a long series of battles in our quest to halt extreme confinement of farm animals.
First, animal advocates defeated the pork industry at the ballot box by landslide votes in a series of states, including Massachusetts and California.
For the last few years, we’ve been defending those laws from a stream of legal attacks by factory farming interests. The crucial ruling in the long-running legal battle came last May from the U.S. Supreme Court, which rejected an industry attempt to short-circuit California’s Proposition 12 and, by association, Question 3 in Massachusetts.
But the pork industry has its allies in Congress, and that’s where we need to defeat them in yet another setting.
In late May, the Republican chairman of the House Agriculture Committee, Rep. Glenn “G.T.” Thompson, R-Penn., inserted China’s EATS Act, the CHEATS Act, onto a single page in a 1,000-page Farm Bill. The good news is, that bill is so controversial that it’s not moved at all since it came out of committee.
But when it does emerge, we’ll be ready for it. But we are going to need your support. Write your lawmaker today to help us oppose China’s EATS Act. [[link removed]]
Write your lawmaker [[link removed]]
Already, 26 House Republicans have signed letters opposing China’s EATS Act. And not a single Democrat in the House or Senate publicly supports the bill.
Everything Is At Stake for Farm Animals
It’s shocking how some animals in the pig industry are treated, particularly the sows.
About half of the six million mother pigs reared in the U.S. are kept in two-foot-by-seven-foot cages called gestation crates, with the 400-pound sows pressing up against the bars on both sides.
The crates immobilize each mother for her four-month gestation cycle, preventing her from even turning around. She can only take a partial step forward or back on the concrete-slatted floors.
Imagine if you were trapped for months in a porta potty cut down to half its size while you choke on air filled with the waste festering in the basin below. Some farm animals in our food supply chain endure this living situation for months or years without relent.
The sow is so frustrated by her inability to root or to move that she swings her head in a stereotyped fashion. Or she may resort to obsessive biting of the bars. Open sores, created by the constant rubbing on the lateral crate frame, speckle her body sometimes as densely as the spots on a leopard.
Not one of the animals has done anything to warrant this privation. We conscript sows to sacrifice their lives to put pork on kitchen tables. The least we can do, as producers or consumers, is to ensure that their short lives are not filled with misery.
CHEATS Act Would Gut State Farm Animal Welfare Laws
The Farm Bill has been turned into a weapon to attack state laws for animals.
China’s EATS Act is backed by Smithfield Food and the industrialized and foreign-owned pork industry that wants to gut legal standards for animal welfare at the state and federal level. They want no limits on how animals can be used or abused. These factory farmers see nothing wrong with immobilizing breeding pigs for their entire lives in gestation crates and not allowing them to move an inch or ever see the light of day.
Besides the obvious harm it would do to farm animals, the CHEATS Act threatens to deliver a potentially fatal financial blow to countless U.S. farmers who have invested millions of dollars adapting their business practices and working on more humane housing systems so that they can sell pork in states with reasonable animal welfare standards.
Including the CHEATS Act in the Farm Bill is an early Christmas present to our largest global competitor, the People’s Republic of China, which already controls a dangerously high portion (26%) of the U.S. pork supply through Smithfield Foods, which was acquired by a Chinese government-owned conglomerate in 2013.
Please take action and write your lawmakers in opposition to China’s EATS Act today. [[link removed]]
TAKE ACTION [[link removed]]
And please support our work to fight factory farming and other abuses of animals [[link removed]]
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They cannot speak for themselves, and that’s why it’s up to us to be their voices. Every one of us.
For all animals,
Wayne Pacelle [[link removed]] Wayne Pacelle
President
Center for a Humane Economy
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