Bad News For Bacon Lovers

[Riddick]

The Supreme Court on Thursday backed a California animal cruelty law that requires more space for breeding pigs, a ruling the pork industry says will lead to higher costs nationwide for pork chops and bacon.

A majority of the high court agreed that lower courts had correctly dismissed pork producers’ challenge to the law.

“While the Constitution addresses many weighty issues, the type of pork chops California merchants may sell is not on that list,” Justice Neil Gorsuch wrote in an opinion for the court.

Gorsuch said the pork producers challenging the law were asking the justices to “fashion two new and more aggressive constitutional restrictions on the ability of States to regulate goods sold within their borders.”

Animals rights groups cheered the decision.

“We’re delighted that the Supreme Court has upheld California Proposition 12 — the nation’s strongest farm animal welfare law — and made clear that preventing animal cruelty and protecting public health are core functions of our state governments,” the president of the Humane Society of the United States, Kitty Block, wrote in a statement. The organization had backed Proposition 12 and was a participant in the case.

The Biden administration had urged the justices to side with pork producers, telling the court in written filings that Proposition 12 would be a “wholesale change in how pork is raised and marketed in this country” and that it has “thrown a giant wrench” into the nation’s pork market.

Industry groups have said the law would mean expensive, industry-wide changes even though a majority of the farms where pigs are raised are not in California, the nation’s most populous state, but instead in the Midwest and North Carolina.

Pork producers argued that 72% of farmers use individual pens for sows that do not allow them to turn around and that even farmers who house sows in larger group pens do not provide the space California would require.

They also say that the way the pork market works, with cuts of meat from various producers being combined before sale, it is likely all pork would have to meet California standards, regardless of where it is sold. Complying with Proposition 12 could cost the industry $290 million to $350 million, they said.

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Doubtless the bulk of the extra cost will be borne by consumers across the nation. Thanks for making us pay around a third of a billion bucks more for pork & bacon CA!

I gotta say, I'm surprised the Brandon admin sided with pork producers. I'da thot with the war on meat, anything that makes it more expensive would be jake with them.