The US Supreme Court rarely has occasion to hear an animal law case. Laws having to do with animal treatment are primarily matters of state law, and, historically speaking, precious few of them have threatened industrial animal exploitation to a degree that major federal lawsuits emerged. But California’s Proposition 12, a 2018 ballot measure that was approved by more than 62 percent of voters, sufficiently rankled the US pork industry that it filed a federal lawsuit and, after repeatedly losing, appealed all the way to the Supreme Court.
Prop 12 bans the sale of pork in California from farms anywhere in the country that confine pregnant pigs in “gestation crates” — cages barely bigger than their bodies — for almost their whole lives. This is standard practice in modern pork production, which meant that California’s requirement that female pigs kept for breeding simply have enough space to lie down, stand up, turn around, and stretch their limbs was regarded as an existential threat by the US pork lobby.
A divided Supreme Court upheld the California law yesterday, in a ruling that holds important implications for judicial power under the Commerce Clause of the US Constitution. The case also reflects a vast gulf in US animal law, between those who seek to make the law actually reflect animal well-being and the meat industry officials who usually get to determine what constitutes acceptable animal treatment on factory farms across the country.
In the animal welfare movement, the case has been closely watched and hugely consequential. Had Prop 12 been struck down, as many feared it would, given the Court’s conservative majority, it would have erased years of hard-won progress for animal protection and foreclosed the power of progressive states to regulate products produced under the cruelest factory farm conditions. Now, the US animal movement has the opportunity to further empower ordinary citizens to make decisions about animal treatment…
Read the full article here
