The Most Important Decision For Animals in American History

The factory farms are trying to keep pigs in cages so they don't have to feed them as much. It's up to us to stop them.

(I think this is one of the most important things I’ve written, so I’d appreciate if you could like, share, and restack it. And if you know what’s at stake, and just want to know what to do, skip to the end).

What’s at stake

Sometimes, the operations of factory farms are so wicked that if they were described in a work of fiction, you’d think it was a cartoonish caricature of evil. Perhaps there is no better example of this than gestation crates. Pregnant mother pigs are penned up in tiny crates without enough room to turn around, for many months. Their feces piles up around them, so that these animals with amazing senses of smell must inhale shit all day. They have no source of enjoyment, no ability to live any kind of real life—all they can do is bite the bars of the cage and pine for a freedom that will never come.

Why would the farms do this? What could be the point of this cruelty? The main reason is that the industry saves on food costs when their animals don’t move around as much. If you’re kept in a cage where you can’t turn around, you’ll be less active and eat less food. It is cheaper to feed caged prisoners than those who can taste freedom.

Pigs are smarter than dogs. They’re playful, social creatures. They can recognize themselves in mirrors, remember information over long time periods, communicate, and even use tools. When you interact with a dog, you notice ways they resemble small children. Pigs are the same way.

A pregnant mother pig deserves better than solitary confinement in a crate. If it came out that some demented psychopath was locking dogs for months in cages where they couldn’t turn around and had to dwell in feces non-stop, we’d all call that torture and send them to jail. But this is what the factory farms do to countless pigs for a quick buck. And they’re fighting desperately to override the will of the voters, to keep pigs confined.

Across many states—California, Massachusetts, and more—voters passed laws outlawing gestation crates. Voters recognized that stopping the torture of countless pigs mattered more than marginal profit for pork companies. They recognized that there is something deeply twisted and evil about an industry that keeps animals confined like factory products, so that they don’t have to feed them as much. That pigs, as animals, deserve to be treated as individuals, not products.

Immediately, the pork industry began scheming, attempting to overrule the will of the voters.

They sued, arguing that it was illegal for states to regulate what kind of meat could be sold in their own state, on grounds that this would interfere with activity outside of their state. The case went to the Supreme Court. They lost. Unable to win with either voters or the Supreme Court, they decided to try to get Congress to pass a bill that would destroy state animal welfare laws. To their eternal shame, the House passed the bill. Big ag’s lobbying seemed to be paying off.

The provision, euphemistically named the Save Our Bacon Act, was slipped into the farm bill. It wouldn’t just obliterate state protections for pigs that prevent them from being crated. It would prevent states from passing future animal welfare laws that restrict what kind of meat can be sold in their state. It would be the biggest defeat for animals since factory farms were invented.

All across the political spectrum, prominent voices have spoken up against this evil bill. On the political left, Noah Smith called the way we treat pigs “torture, plain and simple,” and urged people to call their senators telling them to vote no on the bill. Nicholas Kristof wrote “think of your dog enduring what pigs face, and you realize that the moral cost is incalculable.”

Right-wing voices spoke up too. Tomi Lahren interviewed Lewis Bollard and declared, “we don’t actually need to allow Chinese-owned factory farms to jam pigs into crates. The Farm Bill is bullshit. Spread the word.” Mike Cernovich called it “demonic stuff,” and other prominent conservatives described it as an “outrage against God.”

Experts in animal behavior have been similarly univocal in their condemnation of the bill. Donald Broom of Cambridge once called this confinement, “much worse than severely beating an animal.” And of course it is—I’d much rather be beaten once than confined in a tiny crate for months. Temple Grandin compared it to having to live your life in an airline seat, without ever being allowed to enter the aisles, even to go to the bathroom. This understates it. At least in an airline seat, you have some form of entertainment, and if you really want to, you can turn around. No such luck for the pigs.

Crucially, the public spoke up as well. Countless people called Congress, telling them to vote no on any version of the farm bill that would include a pig torture provision. There was a groundswell of popular support, opposing this wicked bill. It seems there’s agreement from everyone not paid by the pig torture industry that this is a step too far—that we are hypocrites if we condemn others for animal cruelty while keeping pigs in crates so that for months they cannot turn around.

And yet even with all of this, it’s not clear if it will be enough.

While Senator Boozman successfully stripped the SOB provision from the first draft of the farm bill in the Senate, senators like Joni Ernst and Chuck Grassley will try to add it back. People I’ve talked to in the know say that there’s about a 50% chance the farm bill will pass with the SOB provision, and destroy state animal welfare laws. We can’t let that happen.

William Blake’s poem Jerusalem discusses the juxtaposition between goodness and evil—beauty and wickedness dwelling right beside one another. Blake wrote:

And did the Countenance Divine,

Shine forth upon our clouded hills?

And was Jerusalem builded here,

Among these dark Satanic Mills?

I thought of this passage a lot when reading about the fight against the SOB Act. What could be a better description of factory farms than dark Satanic mills? The fight for pigs has been led by those who were decent and courageous—who stood up for the innocent and vulnerable not because they expected to get anything in return, but just because it was the right thing to do. All across the spectrum, people united for a common cause.

And yet even then, they might be drowned out by ghastly agribusinesses who torture pigs to save literally pennies per animal. Those for whom being cruel to animals is their job description, for whom compassion is a taboo concept. Those who built hell on Earth, and sent the pigs to live there.

The world is a complicated place with many tricky moral dilemmas. This isn’t one of them. You don’t need a degree in philosophy to know that we shouldn’t torture pigs in crates for months to save a tiny amount of money feeding them. They say you can judge a person by how they treat their inferiors. If this is so, then who could possibly merit more condemnation than the pig-torturing factory farms and their bootlickers in Congress?

If this bill passes, it will be a betrayal of our principles, of our pigs, and of justice itself. It will send a signal that big ag can do whatever it wants, and that Congress is too spineless to stand up to them. It will be a dark day in America, and countless tens of millions of pigs will cry out from within the confines of the prison that cages them, for we will have failed them.

What can be done

Fortunately, there are a number of actions that can be taken right now to stop this bill. The three big ones:

1. Call your senators and tell them to vote no on any version of the farm bill that includes the Save Our Bacon provision. If you’re not sure what to say, here’s a helpful call script. Tell the people you know to do the same. You can find your senators here and call the Capitol switchboard at 202-224-3121—they’ll connect you with any senator. A lot of people plan to do this and then forget—please, don’t forget, this really matters. Do it now if you can.

2. Donate to the AMPA, which is campaigning to help defeat the bill. My friends in the animal welfare space who are closer to this than I am estimate that donations here are many times more impactful than the best standard animal welfare donations. There’s a pretty serious shortage of funds, so this is a really good place to give. I know people who have given tens of thousands of dollars because of the extreme urgency of the cause.

3. Help get the word out. Tell people about this terrible bill. Post about it on social media. If you have a blog or some other large platform, please write about it.

Another world is possible: one where the conditions farmed animals undergo aren’t so bad that they’d be called torture if inflicted on a human or dog. Yet the factory farms are trying to take us backwards—to reinstitute Stone Age barbarism and inflict it on defenseless and innocent animals. For the animals, these are some of the most important days in history, and what we do in the coming weeks will determine whether hundreds of millions are tortured. Now is the time we must act, so that silent nights are not punctured by the screams of the innocent.