By Sara Amundson and Kitty Block
In a win for animals, the Senate Agriculture Committee’s Farm Bill draft has rejected the pork industry’s Hail Mary play for language to eviscerate some of the strongest animal welfare laws in the country, California’s Proposition 12, Massachusetts’ Question 3 and related state-level animal welfare and public health laws that address the cruelties of intensive confinement.
In the previous two Farm Bills, lawmakers on both sides of the aisle opposed attempts to override state animal protection. More than 7.5 million Californians (63%) voted for Proposition 12 nearly a decade ago; the Supreme Court upheld Proposition 12 in 2023; and the market is actively moving away from the extreme confinement of farm animals.
As we’ve mentioned many times, 15 states across the U.S. spanning the political spectrum have enacted laws to address cruel confinement of farm animals. That’s because most people believe:
- Animals should be able to stand up, turn around, extend their limbs and lie down comfortably.
- States have the right to set health, safety and animal welfare standards for products sold within their borders.
- A few Big Pork producers and their trade associations should not be able to rewrite the rules when voters rejected their cruel practices.
The fight is certainly not over, but this is a substantial win, which makes it harder for pork lobbyists and pork-rolling senators to maneuver once the Farm Bill comes to the Senate floor for a vote.
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The looming showdown
The end of this current fight to exclude the Save Our Bacon Act language from the Senate Farm Bill could come down to the senators from Iowa. Charles Grassley, for example, has been pushing hard to protect industrial pork conglomerates at the expense of small, independent pig farmers across the country. And against consumers and voters who have made their preferences for higher animal welfare standards in agriculture clear in market after market, jurisdiction after jurisdiction. And Iowans who have seen and experienced the cruelty, stench, health crises, environmental devastation of their state’s land and water, and devitalization of its rural communities over the course of the last half century—all of it the result of intensive confinement of pigs and other animals kept for food.
When pork lobbyists and senators who are in the pockets of giant pork corporations do show up, we expect Grassley to be at the head of the pack with an attempted amendment to the package, a last-ditch effort to destroy animal protection and public health protections approved by voters and legislators in more than a dozen states, red, blue and purple.
And that’s where we must prevail in our decade-long battle to preserve the legislative gains, the ballot initiatives, the judicial rulings, the corporate social responsibility initiatives and the strong consumer market for higher animal welfare standards. In the Senate, where Big Pork’s man in Congress will again attempt to defend the indefensible.
Grassley makes much of his background as a pig farmer, but there’s one indisputable fact about his tenure and his relationship to the pork industry. In the years since he joined the Senate in 1981, Iowa has lost approximately 90% of its pig farms, and we know why.
With the full-throated support of Grassley and other Iowa politicians, massive, cruel and unregulated pig factories have expanded and pushed out small family farm operations and the Iowa farmers who owned them. Grassley and many other members of Iowa’s congressional delegation have looked out for the pork titans and the intensive confinement model that has created a kind of Iowa pork oligarchy.
The momentum has been building
We knew the tide had turned some weeks ago when Senator Roger Marshall (Kansas), a longtime critic of Proposition 12 and similar measures, and a supporter of legislation to nullify them, withdrew his co-sponsorship of the Food Security and Farm Protection Act (S. 1326), a companion bill to the Save Our Bacon Act that the House included in its Farm Bill. The National Pork Producers Council was characteristically graceless in its reaction, suggesting Marshall had capitulated to “political intimidation” while complimenting allies like Grassley for not succumbing to “scare tactics.” It didn’t occur to the NPPC that Senator Marshall might have reached the conclusion of dozens of other senators, including a number from large farm states: Big Pork no longer deserved his support in their quest to undermine these popular laws.
We also saw momentum building in the court of public opinion. A host of editorial writers, including Ezra Klein, Nicholas Kristof and Kathleen Parker, condemned Big Pork’s brazen attempt to overturn duly enacted laws that tens of millions of Americans had voted for and supported. So did a number of writers in the agricultural press, who are familiar with the hypocrisy and ideological capture that so often characterize the largest agricultural trade associations. And many small family farmers and independent producers who have embraced higher welfare standards shared their thoughts in op-eds and the letter columns of newspapers and websites across the country.
The protracted fight over Proposition 12 and other state-level animal welfare and public health measures has definitively proven that Big Pork is a sore loser. No matter how many times its positions are rejected—in legislatures, in courtrooms and in the broad arena of public opinion—the NPPC keeps serving up the same swill it’s been peddling since the first of these animal protection measures began to appear over a decade ago.
It’s a near certainty that the NPPC’s principal Senate champions will take one last crack at the public policy bulwark that now protects millions of animals from the worst of agribusiness cruelties. We sincerely hope the vampire-like resurrection of the pork industry’s feckless attack on animal welfare will die on the Senate floor. And it’s our job to see that it does. And you can help.
Kitty Block is president and CEO of Humane World for Animals.
