Dear friend,

The chutzpah of the hog factory farmers is incredible. They don’t seem to be deterred by serial losses at the ballot box or in the courts.

They don’t seem to care that Americans think it's wrong to keep animals immobilized in extreme confinement.

They keep pressing to use their favored housing systems even if that means they must unwind the democratic decisions of American voters.

Let’s remember that the National Pork Producers Council (NPPC) — whose work is driven in part by big, foreign-owned operations like the Chinese-controlled Smithfield Foods (26 percent of U.S. pork production) and the Brazil-based JBS (14 percent of U.S. production) — opposed Prop 12 and Question 3 when they were on the ballots in California in 2018 and in Massachusetts in 2016.

Despite their campaigning and their expenditures to defeat the ballot measures, NPPC lost in landslide votes in both states. About 63 percent of California voters rejected gestation-crate confinement and favored Prop 12. And 78 percent of Massachusetts voters supported Question 3 and banned gestation-crate production in the state and the in-state sales of pork from gestation-crate systems, no matter where the farms are situated.

Then, the NPPC and its allies challenged these voter-approved laws in the federal courts, as is their right. But they have lost case after case. In fact, last month, a U.S. District Court rejected the latest courtroom maneuvers by a Missouri-based factory farming conglomerate that argued that Question 3 is preempted by federal law.

That was the 13th successive federal court case that the hog factory farming clan has lost. And that includes a case before the highest court in the land. Last May, a conservative U.S. Supreme Court rejected an attempt to nullify Proposition 12, and by implication Question 3 in Massachusetts, under a Commerce Clause challenge.

You would have thought that the routs at the ballot box and before the federal courts, including the Supreme Court, would cause the factory farmers to begin to accept that states have rights to restrict inhumane in-state production and sales practices.

But just in late May, the Republican chairman of the House Agriculture Committee, Rep. Glenn “G.T.” Thompson (R-Penn.), shoved the EATS Act onto a single page in a 1,000-page Farm Bill. NPPC and Smithfield encouraged Thompson to do that. The good news is, that bill, which we refer to as China’s EATS Act, or the CHEATS Act, is so controversial that it’s not moved at all since it came out of committee.

When it does get to the next stage in the legislative process, 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.

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.

Because Everything Is At Stake for Farm Animals, We Cannot Relax or Relent

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 backward on the concrete-slatted floors.

Imagine if you were trapped for months in a porta potty cut down to half its size while you choked 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, as I noted above, has been turned into a weapon to attack state laws for animals.

China’s EATS Act is backed by Smithfield Foods 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 runs Smithfield Foods and already controls more than a quarter of all U.S. pork production.

China is already developing high-rise hog factories that are 30 stories tall. If Smithfield and the NPPC nullify all state laws to assure even minimal standards for humane treatment of pigs, why wouldn’t the overlords of Smithfield in China try to employ the same production practices in the United States that it’s pioneered in its homeland?

Please take action and write your lawmakers in opposition to China’s EATS Act today.

And please support our work to fight factory farming and other abuses of animals.

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 President Animal Wellness Action