PETITION CLOSED
PETITION TARGETS: U.S. President Joe Biden and U.S. Department of Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack
UPDATE (5/10/2023): The Supreme Court has upheld Prop 12 in a commonsense ruling that is still a major victory for animals everywhere, according to news reports! Thanks to everyone who signed our petition and who stood up for increased animal welfare standards for farmed animals! – Lady Freethinker Staff
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Every year in the United States, millions of animals on factory farms spend their entire lives imprisoned in cold metal cages in hellish conditions.
Sensitive and intelligent mama pigs languish in metal gestation crates, where they don’t even have enough room to turn around. Chickens are smashed into battery cages, where they can’t spread their wings. Baby cows can be relegated to stalls where they don’t even have enough space to stretch their limbs.
But California voters tried to change that in a landslide 2018 vote for Proposition 12, which prohibits producers from confining farmed animals into cruel metal crates. Out-of-state producers who want to sell their products in California also will have to abide by these new humane, health, and safety standards.
The amendment, which has been hailed as “the nation’s most critical animal welfare law” — is set to take effect in January. But stakeholders in the meat and dairy industry are pushing back — hard — to get these life-saving and common-sense regulations scuttled.
Three separate lawsuits — filed by the National Pork Producers Council, the North American Meat Institute, and the American Farm Bureau Federation — allege that Prop 12 violates the country’s commerce clause, which seeks to prevent states from favoring their own businesses. The Supreme Court has consistently rejected those claims, noting that while upgrades to create better living conditions for millions of imprisoned and innocent animals might be “costly or difficult” — it’s not a violation of Constitutional rights.
We must speak up now to prevent decades of preventable and extreme suffering for millions of animals.
Sign our petition urging the U.S. Department of Agriculture to publicly support Proposition 12.
We’re also urging the Biden Administration to withdraw several amicus briefs filed by the former administration in support of the meat and dairy industries’ arguments — as not doing so implies the new administration implicitly agrees with the regression to hellish conditions.
