The Federal War On Animal Welfare

How the federal government is trying to stop state-level pig and chicken torture laws

The federal government is carrying out a multi-part war on overwhelmingly popular state-level animal welfare laws. These laws include California’s Prop 12 and Massachusetts’ Question 3 which require egg laying hens, pigs, and other animals to have enough space to lie down, stand up, extend their limbs, and turn around. In other words, the federal government is trying to outlaw efforts by states to ban locking animals in cages too small to turn around in.

Of course, were a person to lock a dog in a crate too small to turn around in for its entire life, they’d be unquestionably jailed for animal abuse. But the federal government, under the pay of big agriculture, is trying to mandate that states allow animals to be treated like unfeeling objects, and subjected to grotesque cruelty.

Pigs are smarter than dogs! Does a pregnant mother deserve this? We wouldn’t treat serial killers this way, and we should not treat innocent animals that way either, whose crime is only having body parts that taste nice. America does not suffer from an excess of burdensome animal cruelty laws, but from a shocking absence of animal cruelty laws. Requiring animals be allowed to stand and move is just about the most minimal requirement conceivable. And across most of the country, locking an animal in a crate for its entire life where it can never turn around, stretch, or see the sun is perfectly legal. Such a dystopian life is the reality for most of the nation’s animals.

There are multiple prongs to the federal government’s assault on state animal cruelty laws. First, the DOJ has sued California in an attempt to overturn Prop 12. Second, Congress has been moving to sneak elimination of state level animal welfare laws into the farm bill. Despite 19 previous failed judicial attempts by the pork industry to overturn state level animal welfare laws, they are still trying, and this time relying on their puppets in Washington, to whom they give millions of dollars. Efforts to sneak such provisions into the farm bill are particularly worrisome. Elimination of state animal welfare laws would never pass on its own, so they’re hoping they can sneak it in to a popular law without much scrutiny.

These initiatives are wildly unpopular, with most Americans believing that pig gestation crates are morally unacceptable. They’re right. Pigs deserve better—they deserve our compassion. They are neither robots nor consumer products, but thinking, feeling creatures who can feel pain and sadness, joy and loss, and deserve more than a lifetime in a dark and filthy cage, unable to turn around or express their natural behaviors. It’s just as unacceptable to confine a pig in a crate for months as to confine a dog in a crate for months.

In order to justify these draconian measures, big ag has to lie and mislead and distort. The recent Congressional hearing on state animal welfare laws was a Stalinesque show trial where not a single supporter of animal welfare laws was allowed to speak. The hearing peddled ridiculous lies from big ag, with no one to push back.

One particularly ludicrous charge was that if pregnant pigs weren’t locked in crates too small to turn around in, then they might step on and smush young piglets. Now, perhaps by this logic we should keep all pregnant women in a cage when giving birth, so that they don’t step on their children! But this is even more ludicrous, because the law only applied to pregnant pigs, not to ones giving birth! It has quite literally no effect on piglets.

All the people bemoaning the horrific impact of such laws on small, local pig farmers worked for organizations representing huge pig factory farms. In fact, small pig farmers likely benefit, because it’s primarily the giant factory farms that occupy most of the pork market and lock pigs in gestation crates. If you’re a farmer who doesn’t keep animals confined in a cage too small to turn around in, then you only benefit from the laws.

Lilly Rocha complained that “Proposition 12 is not something that the people of California understood when it was passed,” but instead was “a pet project of the very wealthy, financed by the Silicon Valley billionaires and Hollywood stars.” Apparently, the voters of California who overwhelmingly passed the initiative, were too stupid to understand a rather simple law, that kept pigs out of farrowing crates. She also complained that such laws would “continue to dismantle the cultural and economic fabric of California’s communities, leaving families without access to their heritage and businesses on the brink of collapse,” and be a “detriment [to] its most diverse and vulnerable populations.”

This illustrates the way that woke corporate HR speak often acts as a smokescreen for corporate cruelty. There’s something particularly outrageous about complaining about an overwhelmingly popular initiative—including with ethnic minorities—that keeps pigs out of crates, on grounds that it is a detriment to California’s most vulnerable populations. There’s a special place in hell for those who use woke language about diversity to justify unspeakable cruelty against the most vulnerable population on the planet.

The genuinely vulnerable populations affected by these laws are the pigs who must spend the entire time they’re pregnant in a tiny crate because big agriculture is allowed to practice flagrant and horrifying cruelty without legal sanction. If it would be wrong to hit and kick a pig, how wrong must it be to inflict the vastly greater suffering of trapping them for months in a cage? Those who are against oppression are the ones trying to keep hens and pigs out of the ghastly cages.

The industry also claimed that state animal welfare laws have majorly raised the costs of animal products. In reality, however, the impact on animal product costs was fairly minor. The overwhelming reason for elevated recent egg prices was the bird-flu outbreak, as a result of the industry cruelly cramming together huge numbers of birds. It is big ag’s malfeasance, not animal welfare laws, that have raised animal costs.

But as economists overwhelmingly agree, when an industry inflicts immense harms on others, it should pay higher prices. If a company pollutes, then it should have to pay for the harm it causes to others, for otherwise it has an incentive to continue polluting even if doing so produces less benefit than harm. If the animal industry fully internalized its externalities, every animal product would cost vastly more.

Even if we buy pretty high-end estimates, such laws may have increased egg prices by around 50 cents for a dozen eggs. Hens lay about 250 eggs a year, or 20 egg cartons per year. This means it takes a hen about 18 days to produce an egg carton. Thus, consumers pay about a penny per 8 additional hours hens spend in a cage. What kind of a craven cost benefit analysis values a penny more than 8 hours spent in a cage too small to turn around in? If a dog was to be trapped in a cage for 8 hours unless you spent one penny freeing it, morality would require such an action. At the very least, it would require that companies that killed dogs not trap them in tiny crates for their life. If meat companies had to pay for the suffering they inflict on animals, they’d switch to cage free overnight.

A morally decent society must value the interests of vulnerable animals, suffering by the billions, more than dirt. If we are going to consume animals, at the very least we owe them more than a life in a cage. And other animal welfare laws have even smaller impacts on costs.

Though I am not very old, I am old enough to remember a different era of American politics in which politicians actually discussed morality. There was endless discussion of the moral majority, what we owed to other countries, and what the ideals of the founding fathers demanded of us. America was seen not merely as a band united by common interest, but as a nation founded on an idea, founded on a moral vision.

Something has gone badly wrong in our politics if moral appeals no longer hold sway. Morality demands that we treat animals better than we have so far. Cheap eggs are sinful if they were produced in a way that we wouldn’t hesitate to call abuse if done to a dog. We condemn China when it locks dogs in crates too small to turn around in—if we do the same to pigs and to chickens, then on what basis can we judge them?

To their credit, the voters have not bought these ludicrous appeals. The voters have consistently recognized that it’s worth paying a bit of extra money for animal products if doing so enables us to be free of particularly pernicious kinds of animal abuse. If a company produces cheap eggs by trapping vulnerable animals in crates and cages, then the voters have every right to demand better practices for animals. Such wickedness and torment and cruelty has no place in a civilized society.

If the Trump administration dismantles state-level animal welfare laws by sneaking these wildly unpopular provisions into the farm bill, this won’t just be a major assault on federalism and a serious capitulation to big agriculture—it will be the cause of hundreds of millions of vulnerable animals languishing in cages. It will be a source of animal cruelty like little else. Please, contact your local representative about this and give money to organizations combating animal cruelty nationwide.