Putting Farm Animal Protection on the Map, One Step at a Time

At the beginning of this decade, not a single state in the nation had an anti-cruelty law that explicitly prohibited any standard agribusiness practice, regardless of how much suffering the practice may cause. Today, seven states have banned and are phasing out some of the most extreme forms of farm animal confinement; one state has banned and is phasing out both the production and sale of foie gras; and just this month, California, our nation’s largest dairy-producing state, became the first to ban any kind of common farm animal mutilation, in this case tail-docking of cows.

Clearly, times are changing, and for the better. Concern about the treatment of farm animals has never before been so firmly cemented in the mainstream.

For years, U.S. animal protectionists looked at our allies in Europe and wondered why we were falling so far behind them on basic farm animal welfare issues. While we’re still significantly trailing the European Union’s admittedly modest animal welfare laws, that gap is now slowly closing, and the political strength of the American farm animal protection movement is greater than ever.

The fact that farm animals are beginning to gain a semblance of state-level legal protection from certain abuses makes sense, given that Americans have long believed that animals deserve some legal protection. Dog fighting is a felony in all 50 states, and cockfighting is criminal in all 50 states. It’s hard to find anyone who believes that these laws are inappropriate; if anything, they’re not strong enough.

So the change isn’t necessarily how people feel about animals, but rather it’s in our application of longstanding anti-cruelty sentiment to animals whose suffering, for far too long, we simply ignored.

Of course, it doesn’t take a logician to realize that if we—correctly—believe that putting two chickens in a ring and allowing them to fight is so heinous that it warrants criminal sanction, perhaps we ought not be putting eight chickens in a cramped cage where they can barely move an inch for their whole lives.