American consumers are becoming increasingly aware farmed animals suffer greatly during farming processes that aim to provide meat at the lowest possible price. It has become standard practice on industrial farms for animals to be crowded into spaces so small they cannot move freely; deprived of sunlight and outdoor access; denied basic social interaction; artificially inseminated or restrained for forced insemination; painfully dehorned, debeaked, detailed, and castrated; and forced to endure unsanitary conditions, promoting diseases that lead to antibiotic resistance from frequent treatment.
Consumers’ buying patterns increasingly reflect consideration for animal welfare due to awareness of such practices. Because these consumers are voting for more humane treatment with their wallets, it is not surprising that corporations are starting to cater to this growing market. A prime example is the popular certification program Whole Foods uses to rate food based on animal welfare using a six-point scale. The scale requires, as a baseline, room for animals to move around, no cages, and extends, at the highest level, to ensure an animal spends its life on the same farm with no physical alterations like those described above. Consumers who desire to use their buying power to avoid causing animal suffering are also turning to meat alternatives that are becoming increasingly realistic replicas of the meat they attempt to evoke.
Despite these strides in the availability of “humane” meats and alternatives, the conscientious consumer is currently faced with the daunting task of making sense of a patchwork of private labeling standards, each of which promises a different level of care. Moreover, serious questions have been raised about the accuracy of many private labeling regimes. High-profile exposés spearheaded by animal rights organizations have repeatedly shown the conditions for animals whose meat later bears a “humane” label to fall far short of their advertised goal, undermining consumer trust in their efficacy. All the while, the largest agribusinesses hide behind so-called agricultural gag (“ag-gag”) laws that criminalize independent investigations and exposés of their operations, narrowing the gap between well-meaning businesses that opt into a private labeling scheme and those which close the doors and insist that the public take them at their word.
Governmental regulations of meat labeling claims have largely focused on consumer welfare instead of the animals themselves. One of the only governmental standards addressing farmed animal welfare is the regulation of the term “organic.” However, even this standard is lamentably underenforced. Other standards, such as the Animal Welfare Act and the Humane Methods of Slaughter Act, provide some requirements for humane treatment for some animals in some circumstances. There has been success when existing regulations are violated and brought to the government’s attention. Such success shows a promising path towards more rigorous public labeling standards that meet the desires of the public and lend themselves to ready enforcement. In this morass, lawyers have had and will continue to play a role in improving and enforcing labeling standards in three different realms.
Part I will discuss the lawyer’s role in ensuring transparency of farmed animal welfare conditions by challenging ag-gag laws and agency failures to comply with the transparency required by the Freedom of Information Act and the Administrative Procedure Act. Part II will discuss current governmental regulations and legal routes to their successful enforcement. Part III will discuss avenues for challenging private “humane” meat labeling that falls short of consumer expectations. This Note argues that lawyers have an important, if constrained, role to play in the improvement of meat labeling claims.