WASHINGTON (Michigan News Source) – The U.S. Supreme Court will listen to arguments regarding a California animal cruelty law that will potentially raise the price of bacon and other pork products across the country.
The $26 billion annual pork industry could be largely affected by the results, and the outcome may also limit a state’s ability to pass laws with impacts outside its borders.
The case is National Pork Producers Council v. Ross, 21-268, and stems from California’s Proposition 12, which was passed in 2018. The proposition declared that pork sold in the Golden State had to come from pigs whose mothers were raised in a space of at least 24 square feet, with the ability to lie down and turn around. This proposition would preclude many of the metal enclosures common in the pork industry.
The Iowa-based National Pork Producers Council (NPPC) and the American Farm Bureau Federation have both sued because of the proposition. Despite California consuming 13% of all pork in the U.S., almost 100% of hogs come from areas outside of the state. The majority of sows are not raised in the conditions prescribed by Proposition 12.
The NPPC has declared this to be unconstitutional as the ban on the sale of out-of-state pork is a restraint of interstate commerce and a violation of the U.S. Constitution. It has also declared it would increase food prices and disrupt supply chains because the cost of implementing Prop 12 has been measured to approximately $3,500/sow, a cost that farmers will need to pass onto to consumers at a time of record-high inflation. Moreover, it also declared that the proposition would impose arbitrary standards which lack any scientific, technical, or agricultural basis.
The Supreme Court will be answering whether California has impermissibly burdened the pork market and improperly regulated an industry outside its borders according to AP.
As a result of the pork market’s methods, various cuts of meat are combined from different vendors before sale, which would mean that more than likely all of the producers would have to meet the proposition’s standards to be sold to California. Estimates suggest that to do that, it would cost the industry between $290 million and $350 million, they said.
While numerous lower courts have sided with California and its animal-welfare proponents, the Biden administration has spoken in support of the pork farmers. The administration has declared that it would “wholesale change in how pork is raised and marketed in the county.” It has also described how the proposition has thrown a wrench into the workings of the interstate market in pork.
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The People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) group released a statement indicating that they will host a protest outside of the Supreme Court in which protesters will wear pig masks and lay down in taped outlines of the spaces that pigs have to live in currently. “The demonstration will also appeal to all Americans to take personal responsibility by choosing not to eat pigs, thereby rejecting intensive confinement entirely and not supporting their terrifying trips to the slaughterhouse and painful deaths,” the statement said.
The proposition also asserts control on other animal rearing habits such as egg-laying hens and calves being raised for veal. But these are not issues in this Supreme Court case.
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