Pork industry attack on animal welfare hurts responsible farmers

Nearly every major food retailer in the United States --from McDonald’s to Costco to Walmart to Target -- has issued corporate policy statements declaring that gestation crates are inhumane. The two-foot-by-seven-foot crates immobilize 450-pound sows so tightly the animals are unable even to turn around or take a single full step forward or backward.

Despite hearing common-sense animal welfare concerns from its biggest customers, the National Pork Producers Council (NPPC) is keeping up its fight to repeal key state animal welfare laws –notably Prop 12 in California and Question 3 in Massachusetts. These voter-approved state laws restrict in-state sales of pork from sows kept in coffin-like crates that deny them any kind of normal movement.

For years, the NPPC claimed that Prop 12 was unconstitutional. The trade group and its surrogates filed a blizzard of cases in the federal courts to try to secure such a ruling. But judges turned back the arguments of NPPC and its surrogates in every case -- 20 losses and counting. “While the Constitution addresses many weighty issues,” wrote Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorscuch in his majority opinion siding with the state of California in NPPC v. Ross, “the type of pork chops California merchants may sell is not on that list.”

Frustrated by these serial losses in the courts, and before that at the ballot box, NPPC has turned again to Congress for relief. U.S. Rep. Ashley Hinson, who represents Iowa’s 2nd District, is lead author of the Save Our Bacon Act, a straight-ahead federal repeal of key state anti-extreme confinement laws despite supermajority votes from millions of voters in California and Massachusetts.

Former Iowa Congressman Steve King ran that play on the 2014 Farm bill and then again on the 2018 agricultural-policy bundle. States’ rights matter, said federal lawmakers, and they rejected his proposals.

Hinson’s case is even more hobbled today as NPPC works with Rep. Hinson to hitch the Save Our Bacon Act to yet one more Farm bill. Question 3 and Prop 12 have been in effect for two years and are working well. Were lawmakers to pass Hinson’s bill, they would put thousands of Prop 12-compliant pig farmers in economic jeopardy. These farmers have collectively invested billions of dollars in more humane housing systems to supply 50 million consumers in California and Massachusetts. They cannot, on the whims of Congress, suddenly rebuild massive hog confinement facilities that would cost them many millions more.

NPPC is trotting out the argument that many other farmers will be harmed in the years ahead because they’ll face “a patchwork” of state laws and won’t be able to operate with 50 distinct state housing standards. But this is a spurious claim. There are just the laws in California and Massachusetts. And the policies in those two states are look-alike measures. That’s no patchwork.

And there’s no patchwork looming. Since California voters approved Prop 12 in 2018, there have been no subsequent statewide ballot initiatives on the treatment of pigs. Animal welfare advocates are not promoting state legislation or ballot initiatives to replicate Prop 12. Rather, we are appealing to America’s food retailers to fulfill their pledges to stop sourcing pork from extreme-confinement farms. McDonald’s has already stopped buying pork from confinement operations. So has food-retail giant Costco. Those companies and dozens of others issued corporate policies statements affirming that gestation crate are a problem not because of state legal requirements, but because they are responding to the opinions and values of their customers. This is the way free markets work.

NPPC is not fighting a patchwork problem — the trade group is fighting animal welfare progress. Indeed, few forms of commerce are immune to the forces of change. Consumers and corporations are reflecting the common-sense value that animals raised for food deserve humane treatment. The ability to move is one measure of humane treatment. Group housing and pasture-based systems – which were the traditional forms of rearing pigs farmers chose for thousands of years – are also the future of pig farming.

Wayne Pacelle, an architect of Question 3 and Prop 12, is president of Animal Wellness Action and the Center for a Humane Economy. He is author of two New York Times bestsellers – “The Bond” and “The Humane Economy.”