Big Pork Peddles False Claims to Obscure Its Efforts to Nullify the Nation’s Most Important Farm Animal Welfare Laws

There are so many reasons to oppose the legislative scheme by the National Pork Producers Council (NPPC) to goad Congress into repealing the two most important state farm animal welfare laws in the nation — Prop 12 in California and Question 3 in Massachusetts.  These policies restrict extreme confinement in the two states and also stipulate that pork sold in those states must be sourced from farms that allow breeding sows to “lie down, stand up, turn around, and freely extend their limbs.”

The legislative maneuvering to preempt state laws is anti-democratic; the trade association and its allies in Congress are trying to nullify ballot initiatives approved in landslide elections. If votes determine outcomes in congressional races, they should determine outcomes in ballot measure races too. If the voters are smart enough to pick senators and representatives, they are smart enough to adopt state policies.

Prop 12, and by implication Question 3, were upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court as a proper exercise of state authority, with the court rejecting NPPC’s years-long campaign in the federal courts to have a handful of judges strike down the votes of millions of Americans.

The NPPC’s congressional bills — the Food Security and Farm Protection Act in the Senate and the Save Our Bacon Act — also amount to a practical attack on thousands of pig farmers who collectively invested billions of dollars in more humane housing systems to comply with the laws in California and Massachusetts. The NPPC’s plan, were it successful, would wipe out markets that these farmers now depend upon for their livelihoods.

What’s also galling about the NPPC’s campaign is its disregard for the facts. Its campaign knits together a series of false claims to justify federal preemption of state laws. And it’s fed these talking points to its allies at USDA and in Congress, and they keep repeating the trade group’s claptrap. 

Former two-time U.S. Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack, when he was serving during the Biden term, repeated this canard from the NPPC when he testified before the Senate Agriculture Committee on the issue of Prop 12: “The reality is that when each state has the ability to define for itself and for its consumers exactly what farming techniques or practices are appropriate,” he warned. “It does create the possibility of 50 different sets of rules and regulations, which obviously creates serious concerns for producers because they have no stability, and they have no certainty.”

One Iowa lawmaker, a booster of the plan to overturn Prop 12 and Question 3, parroted the refrain and even made the outlandish and strange claim that this alleged “patchwork” is already in place: “California’s Prop 12, along with Massachusetts’ Question 3, are based on arbitrary, nonsensical standards and have resulted in a harmful patchwork of regulations across the 50 states, and risk pushing smaller hog producers out of business.”

Are Other States Planning to Replicate Prop 12?

The repetition of these talking points shows message discipline, but it does not confer any truthfulness on the claim. There is no patchwork of 50 state laws providing any humane standards on pork sales. There aren’t five or ten or 25 legal standards. There are just the laws in California and Massachusetts. And the policies in those two states are consistent, not contrasting.  California’s law was largely modeled on Question 3.

The two state-based reforms that the NPPC wants to nullify came about by citizen initiatives.  So, the question is, are other states going to follow, and then would they choose different housing standards for pigs, creating the dreaded “patchwork” and market chaos that NPPC is forecasting?

The answer is an emphatic “no.”  The states with the most pigs — Iowa, North Carolina, and Minnesota in order of annual production — do not allow citizen-led ballot initiatives at all. State policy in those states, then, is entirely controlled by state lawmakers and executive agencies, and not one of the states has ever seen a bill or regulation proposed or introduced to restrict gestation crates, never mind a sales standard.

But even more relevant, the nation’s most populous states — Texas, New York, Pennsylvania, and Illinois — also lack a citizen initiative process. In other words, there is no mechanism in these states for voters to even consider a Prop 12-style measure. And Florida, the nation’s third-most-populous state, already banned gestation crates back in 2002 through a ballot measure, making it implausible that voters would ever revisit the issue.

As a corollary, it would make no sense for animal welfare advocates to pick small states, with relatively few consumers, to adopt humane-sales standards for pork. It would have little value, in a nation with 340 million consumers, to conduct a ballot measure in states with less than 1% of consumers, such as Alaska, Maine, North Dakota, South Dakota, Utah, or Wyoming.  The market effect would be minimal, and the effort required to qualify and pass a ballot measure would not justify the investment. 

And again, not a single ballot initiative state has any stirrings of a ballot measure campaign, and not a single ballot measure of this type has been submitted in any state since voters approved Prop 12 passed seven years ago. Similarly, there are no serious efforts at work in any state legislature in the nation to establish a pork-sales standard.

NPPC’s “Patchwork” Argument Is Hogwash

In addition to California and Massachusetts, the other states that have banned gestation crates — Colorado, Michigan, New Jersey, Ohio, Oregon, Rhode Island, and Washington — specifically passed their legislation or regulations without a sales standard. No such legislation to add humane-sales standards has been introduced in any of these states in the years since their anti-gestation-crate policies were adopted. 

If anything, the action has moved away from statehouses and ballot boxes and into the boardrooms of America’s largest food retailers. Rather than waiting for new state mandates, nearly every major grocer, restaurant chain, and food distributor in the country has adopted its own corporate animal welfare commitments. McDonald’s, Costco, Walmart, Kroger, Target, and dozens of others — collectively representing more than 90% of pork sales — have pledged to phase out pork sourced from producers using gestation crates, not because they are legally required to, but because their customers are demanding those standards.

The reality is, two states set minimum sales standards and food companies selling in those markets have readily adapted their procurement and distribution strategies to meet that demand. Some of the companies are now selling only gestation-crate-free pork on a national scale. There’s no evidence of chaos — only resourcefulness and market adaptation.

On the production side, California and Massachusetts are providing an on-ramp for producers raising pigs for slaughter in housing systems that do not immobilize the sows. Producers have collectively invested billions to comply with those states’ laws, or they simply chose humane housing standards since inception because they thought it was the right ethical or business decision.

When the false narratives are stripped away, it’s evident that the opponents of Prop 12 and Question 3 are not fighting a patchwork problem — they are fighting progress. They are fighting against the mainstream, common-sense notion that animals built to move should be allowed to move.

All animals deserve humane treatment, including animals raised for food. And no amount of smoke and obfuscation should distract us from that ethical norm and mainstream sensibility.