Last month, in a welcome surprise to animal welfare advocates, the US Supreme Court sided with pigs over the pork industry.
In a 5-4 decision, the Court upheld Proposition 12, a California law that partially bans the sale of pork from farms that keep pregnant breeding pigs, known as sows, in tiny enclosures called gestation crates. They’re akin to forcing a human to live their entire life in a bathtub. (Other parts of the law, which require eggs and veal to come from cage-free animals, took effect last year and were not a part of the Supreme Court case.)
While it was a victory for those who argue against caging intelligent, social animals like pigs for months on end, animal welfare wasn’t the main point for the justices. Rather, the case hinged on the ability of US states to set their own standards for how goods imported from other states are produced. California imports nearly all of its pork from other states, and the National Pork Producers Council, an industry trade group that brought the lawsuit, argued that the state’s heightened standards were imposing an unfair burden on other states, particularly top pork producers like Iowa and Minnesota. The industry estimated it would have to spend $294 million to $348 million to convert enough barns to crate-free.
Given the conservative, business-friendly majority on the Court, and the fact that 26 mostly red states and the Biden administration sided with the pork producers, the mother pigs’ odds didn’t look good. Animal welfare advocates I spoke to before the ruling assumed it likely wouldn’t go their way, which could have posed an existential threat to animal welfare laws in other states. (Disclosure: The effort to pass Proposition 12 was led by the Humane Society of the United States, where I worked from…
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