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May 2024 Animal Law Updates: The Gambit and the Other Shoe

Author Bio

Jareb Gleckel received his J.D. magna cum laude from Cornell Law School and his B.A.... Read More

In chess, a gambit is an opening involving sacrifice. A player risks one or more pawns, or a minor piece, to gain an advantage in position. We’ll come back to this.

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May 2024 brings two new updates to a high-stakes tug-of-war between the animal law movement and the meat industry. On one side of the rope, animal law coalitions have successfully mobilized voters in states like California and Massachusetts to pass increasingly powerful laws protecting farmed animals. On the other side, the meat industry is up in arms to stop states from passing these welfare laws. Here’s a recap of the back-and-forth we’ve described in several earlier columns:

Animal law coalitions and, in particular, the Humane Society of the United States, mobilize voters to pass laws like California’s Prop 12 and Massachusetts Question 3. These laws ban (1) gestation crates and (2) the in-state sale of pork derived from animals kept in gestation crates. More importantly, they pave the way for states to pass even stronger animal protection reforms.
The Meat industry challenges these laws in court, arguing that they are unconstitutional.
Animal law coalitions win in court. Most notably, they intervene in a case called National Pork Producers Council v. Ross, and alongside California, they successfully defend Prop 12 in the U.S. Supreme Court.
Having lost in the nation’s highest Court, the meat industry turns to Congress. It pushes for the EATS Act, which is the King Amendment in fancy new clothes — it asks Congress to prevent states from passing their own protective laws like Prop 12.
Animal law coalitions successfully lobby against the EATS Act.

That brings us to May 2024, when the industry made two new maneuvers. First, the House Agriculture Committee snuck pieces of the EATS Act into the new 2024 Farm Bill. Among other things, language in the Bill could nullify laws like California’s Proposition 12, subsidize the U.S. mink farming industry, create obstacles for animal rescue groups, and weaken the Endangered Species Act. Fun times. But at least the next steps for the animal law movement here are clear: fight these parts of the Farm Bill tooth and nail in the House and Senate.

The second industry move is more complex — it’s a cell-based meat ban in Florida. Most (though not all) of the animal law movement agrees that cell-based meat is an important piece of the “how to protect animals” puzzle. In short, if cell-based meat replicates the taste and texture of dead animals, it can replace the mass slaughter regime that we currently call the food industry. So Florida’s maneuver has the transparent goal of preventing competition with agriculture. But it’s also a gambit — bait, tempting the animal-law movement to challenge it — because if the animal-law movement jumps recklessly to challenge the Florida ban, we risk arguing against the very state rights we need, and have fought for, to establish stronger animal protection laws. (Hence the other shoe.) So the movement needs a bit of patience now, and unity. There are strong challenges to Florida’s cell-based meat ban, and I’m hopeful that we can outplay the gambit.

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Easy Ways to Help the Planet:

Eat Less Meat: Download Food Monster, the largest plant-based Recipe app on the App Store, to help reduce your environmental footprint, save animals and get healthy. You can also buy a hard or soft copy of our favorite vegan cookbooks.
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