By Nina Elkadi for Sentient.
Broadcast version by Mark Moran for Iowa News Service reporting for the Sentient-Public News Service Collaboration

When Brent Hershey entered the hog business, he was told that every pork producer in America uses gestation crates on their farm. Gestation crates are metal enclosures, typically seven feet long and two feet wide, where a pregnant female pig, a sow, is kept during her pregnancy. The stalls are so small that sows typically cannot sit or lie down for four months — the entirety of their pregnancy while in the stall. And these gestation crates, long a fixture in industrial pork production, are at the center of a fierce debate between industry groups and the hog farmers who say they don’t want to go back to using them.

Florida was the first state to ban gestation crates in 2002. At the time, Hershey thought Floridians had no idea what they were doing — that they didn’t “understand good production.” Twenty years and a California ballot initiative later, Hershey would be tearing all the gestation crates out of his 1,000-head Pennsylvania sow farm and his 2,000 head Delaware sow operation.

The new laws got Hershey rethinking the crates. “We thought, look at the life that we are asking the animal to live,” he says. “They’re going to be safe, but they can’t walk, they can’t turn around. At the same time, we started going to see some barns that animals were free in. We looked at that and thought, wow, that really looks more natural.”

California’s Proposition 12 and Question 3 in Massachusetts are state ballot measures that banned the sale of pork born to gestation crate-sows. These laws also offer protections to egg-laying hens and veal calves. Organizations like the American Farm Bureau Federation (AFBF) and the National Pork Producers Council (NPPC) have long called for Prop 12 to be overturned, and in 2023, their case against the California Department of Food and Agriculture Secretary traveled from the Ninth Circuit to the Supreme Court of the United States. The highest court eventually upheld the constitutionality of Prop 12, but the two industry groups did not drop their opposition. Instead, they shifted focus to Congress.

The public position of the Farm Bureau and the National Pork Producers Council on gestation crates has never wavered — both groups insist pork farmers do not want the ban — yet Hershey and other farmers say differently. “As soon as the Supreme Court announced this decision, within weeks, we tore all our gestation crates out,” Hershey said at a briefing for the U.S. House of Representatives. “Now we’re on [the California] standard, and we’re doing better. It’s very ironic.”

Not long after the decision, Kansas Senator Roger Marshall introduced the “Ending Agricultural Trade Suppression (EATS) Act” to the Senate, which would prohibit “against interference by state and local governments with production of items in other states.” In effect, this bill would overturn Prop 12. And in the May 2024 version of the Farm Bill, House lawmakers included language similar to the EATS Act that would “ensure that producers of covered livestock are not subject to a patchwork of State laws restricting access to a national market.”

Farmers like Hershey are concerned that the language, if passed, could destroy the more humane pork market that has been created, nationwide and internationally, for farmers looking to serve the California market. California is the 5^th largest economy in the world, and the state gobbles up close to 15 percent of the country’s entire pork consumption.

Yet the Farm Bureau and the Pork Council continue to deliver a national campaign that all pork farmers are in favor of the EATS Act and that Prop 12 is killing their farms. “It’s not true at all,” Hershey tells Sentient. “They’re saying that they represent us all, but they do not represent us at all.”

Calling “Baloney” on the Farm Bureau

In a statement released after the Supreme Court upheld Prop 12, Farm Bureau President Zippy Duvall wrote, “This law has the potential to devastate small family farms across the nation through unnecessary and expensive renovations, and every family will ultimately pay for the law through higher food prices.”

“I call baloney on that,” says Iowa hog farmer Ron Mardesen, who has been raising hogs in Iowa since the 1980s. Mardesen is a farmer with Niman Ranch, a network of farmers who produce meat that is hormone-free, cage-free and compliant with Prop 12.

Mardesen sees a lack of representation for independent farmers. “We’ve lost 90 percent of independent hog farmers in the last 35, 40 years. The National Pork Producers just sit and bobble their head every time everybody wants to get bigger and wants to get more consolidated.”

In a recent advertisement campaign backing the EATS Act, the Pork Producers Council highlights “Cindy,” a fictional character who runs a barbeque food truck that sources from Perkins Family Pig Farm. Cindy’s operation shutters due to rising pork prices, and the farm does too.

A note with the video reads: “This scenario could soon become a reality across America.” The video stresses that Prop 12 especially hurts smaller farmers: “A farm that would have been transferred to future generations deteriorates into ruin or is sold to a big company,” the narrator says. “Proposition 12 has burdened every link in the food supply chain, from the farmer to the business owner.”

Yet Missouri sow farmer Hank Wurtz says he has no idea where this is coming from. All of the farms he knows are converting to Prop 12. If a sow farm is closing, it is not because of Prop 12, Wurtz adds.

 “I know for a fact that there are many [gestational] crate farms in this country right now that are considering shutting down,” he says. “They’re not able to be viable anymore, but that’s not caused by California. That’s caused by 20,000 sow operations going up all over the Midwest. It is the rest of the industry’s large-scale operations that are making the small family farms irrelevant.”

According to data from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, since 1990, “the number of farms with hogs has declined by more than 70 percent as individual enterprises have grown larger.” Meanwhile, the number of hogs continues to grow in the U.S., primarily in concentrated animal feeding operations that typically house anywhere from 750 to tens of thousands of hogs per building.

Rising input costs and stagnant pig prices are causing smaller, independent farmers to turn to alternative strategies to stay afloat.

A New Type of Sow Farm

When Prop 12 was passed in 2019, Wurtz saw an opportunity in a niche market. According to Wurtz’s research, sow farmers have been getting approximately the same price — around $42 — for piglets throughout the past ten years. With Prop 12, Wurtz saw an opportunity to make his farm more economically viable.

“We love farming, but we need to be able to make money and support our families,” he says. “When Prop 12 came along and they’re offering around $50 a pig, that’s a game changer.”

Wurtz says he has invested $12 million into building a brand-new Prop 12 sow barn to replace his gestation crate operation in Northwest Missouri.

“It wouldn’t have been feasible in 2019 to go build a $12 million farm based on just the animal humane aspect of it. We wouldn’t have been able to bankroll it. It had to pay around 30 percent more because it cost 30 percent more to make it Prop 12,” he says.

When the law was challenged by the Supreme Court, Wurtz felt abandoned by the NPPC, and envisioned a future where small, family farms like his would no longer be able to exist.

“We were actually shaking in our boots at that time,” he says. “We’d be no longer financially viable.”

Wurtz did not get into the Prop 12 business for animal welfare — he’s sure to clarify that. But the increased quality of life for his sows has been an unanticipated benefit.

“We didn’t feel like we were abusing our animals all those years. But in hindsight, now looking at the farm that we have in Missouri here, I get the point,” he tells Sentient. “If you grow up a certain way, you just think crates are normal.”

Wurtz says he knows a lot of farmers who do not want to speak out in support of Prop 12 because they do not want to be associated with animal rights activists.

“But the fact of the matter is, Prop 12 is one of the best things, economically, that’s happened to us in a very long time,” he says. “That’s good for American farmers. We need to make a living somehow. If Californians want to pay more for it, we welcome that.”

The Farm Bill as a Legislative Vehicle

The last farm bill to pass through the U.S. Congress was in December 2018. It expired in Sept. 2023, got a one-year extension, and then expired again at the end of September 2024. The EATS Act is included in the House Republicans’ version of the 2024 farm bill draft.

“[The EATS Act] was introduced with the strategy of them trying to attach it to the farm bill,” says Farm Action Fund Senior Director of Programs Christian Lovell at an EATS Act event held at George Washington Law School. “I don’t think anybody thinks that a bill like that would be considered as a standalone item.”

The EATS Act is unprecedented in that the broad language of the bill could have larger ramifications to states’ rights than just what kind of food can be sold. According to a report by the Harvard Animal Law & Policy Program, certain terms in the bill, like “agricultural products” are “defined so broadly as to potentially include vaccines, vitamins, and even narcotics.” The Act could even threaten the labeling of meat, including where it comes from.

At the G.W. Law event, Lovell emphasized that consumers care about where their food comes from and how it was raised, and the EATS Act could obstruct that information.

“The corporations that control our food system, it’s almost like they want to hang a veil over that,” he says. “They don’t want the consumer to see anything until it gets to the grocery store shelves, and that’s because those corporations have rigged a food system that is extractive to rural communities like the ones I grew up in and now live in.”

For Mardesen, the fact that the EATS Act was just slipped into the farm bill makes the prospect of its passage more likely.

“I have not seen this as a hill that many people are willing to die on. The thing that scares me, and it really worries me, is that, look, if we get into this 11th hour wheeling and dealing, and you’ve got somebody who says, ‘Okay, I’ll do this. If you do this,’ I don’t know how pivotal this is [for legislators] at this point,” he says.

The saddest part for Mardesen is the impact this could have on farmers like Wurtz, who have shifted their entire operation for Prop 12.

“So many guys have already made the commitment, already made the investment, already made the transition to gestation-crate-free systems in order to reap the benefits from the higher markets, and that stool is going to be kicked right out from underneath them,” he says. “And that’s a lot of good, hard working pork producers that we need.”

That includes hog farmers like Hershey, who came to question what he once believed to be a necessary part of his work: “If, hypothetically, that model was the cheapest way to produce pork, putting pigs in cages that can’t turn around and can’t walk for four months at a time, if that’s legitimate, then you gotta ask the question, ‘yes, but is that okay?’”


Nina Elkadi wrote this article for Sentient.


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By Jessica Scott-Reid for Sentient.
Broadcast version by Mike Moen for Nebraska News Connection reporting for the Sentient-Public News Service Collaboration

Livestock auctions exist all across North America. They serve as a stop between the farms where animals are born, and the farms where they will be "fattened" or "finished;" the stop between life and death, where animals are sold to be slaughtered. In these fast-paced spaces, animals are pushed through like products - prodded, chased, tossed and dragged - by people paid to get the job done, quickly.

Between late 2022 and early 2024, footage was gathered from over a dozen of these auctions, from across 10 U.S. states by Pete Paxton (Sentient has agreed to use an alias), an undercover investigator with the group Strategies for Ethical and Environmental Development, or SEED.

For a recent story for Vox Media, I was tasked with watching this footage, which shows terrified, confused and exhausted animals being handled harshly, or outright abused. Some animals are shown with injuries, while others have already died at auction.

The footage also shows workers with seemingly no regard for the animals' suffering. Some lash out at the animals in frustration, while others laugh at animals in pain.

"Hundreds or even thousands of animals are sold at auctions within hours," Paxton writes on SEED's website, "and workers must keep up the pace to move scared, exhausted, sick and injured animals in and out of pens. Workers experience dehydration, hunger and exhaustion as a result, which often leads to impatience and subsequent abuse."

Writing the Vox story was difficult. The 20-minute compilation of secretly filmed clips initially took me a week to get through; I could only watch for a few minutes at a time before the discomfort became unbearable. But then, over time, something interesting happened: watching the footage became easier for me. And Paxton understands, firsthand, why.

Desensitization and Animal Abuse

Working on the story over a few months, I had to go back to the footage over and over again. As I did, the images and sounds that had once made me gasp and cover my eyes became less horrific. Over time, they even became bearable. I had become desensitized to the animals' pain and fear, a phenomenon common among those who work in animal farming spaces like auctions.

Dr. Philip Tedeschi, a clinical professor at the University of Denver, and an expert in the human-animal connection, explains that for people working in animal farming spaces, empathy can become incompatible with the job, "inefficient" and "inconvenient."

"One of the things we know about studying empathy is that the presence of empathy can be an inhibitor to engaging in the behavior itself," he explains. "If you're required to engage in forcing animals through a meat processing plant, or expected to stick to a very strict timeline," like at auctions or on an assembly line, "you can't afford to be gentle or kind or humane. Then one of the things that's inefficient or incompatible is to have empathy for those individual animals." Emotionally distancing from animals can aid these workers in getting through the work day.

Paxton admits that the work he does as an undercover investigator is "pretty fucking difficult."

"I've had ex-military and ex-law enforcement reach out to me, and they're like, 'I don't know how you do that, because, man, I would lose my shit.'" But Paxton knows he's there to complete an important task, and that allows him to compartmentalize his feelings. "I tell investigators when I train them, 'It's way easier than you think to get used to the abuse, because when you see it there's two things going on in your head: one is, 'Oh, shit, an animal is being abused,' and then the other thing in your head is, 'I have to document that and not get caught.'"

For Paxton, overriding his concerns about the animal abuse he witnesses is an important part of his job as an investigator. For the people who work at animal auctions, Paxton believes desensitization operates much the same way. Abuse of animals at auctions becomes normalized, Paxton reports, as workers are pressured by management to move animals in and out - fast.

The harsh environment forces workers - ranging from inexperienced teens to long-time workers - to handle animals roughly to keep up with the demanding work. They also learn abusive behaviors from each other.

The Mental Health Impact of Working in Animal Agriculture

As part of his investigation, Paxton kept video footage and written records of certain people he met while working at the auctions. On SEED's website, he describes some of these workers as "good people" who "do bad things."

For example, in one small rural town, Paxton met 17-year-old "Audrey." Exhausted and under pressure, she mimicked abusive actions she witnessed from co-workers, reflecting learned behaviors. "As the workday dragged on, her frustrations led her to drag baby lambs and goats by their legs in fits of anger, mirroring the abusive actions she saw around her," Paxton writes. He also recalls "Stewart," a hardworking 20-year-old, dragging goats and jabbing calves with his keys, seeing cruelty as necessary for the job, "a means to an end."

Similar working conditions have also been documented in slaughterhouses, where both workers and animals are known to suffer. Slaughterhouse workers have for decades been documented engaging in extreme cruelty beyond basic animal handling.

For example, a 2018 investigation by Animal Aid uncovered UK slaughterhouse workers beating cows with pipes, while encouraging others to join in. In 2022, Animal Equality documented workers in Brazil kicking, beating and dragging cows by ropes, and twisting their tails to force movement.

Research has shown that the slaughterhouse environment, and the nature of slaughterhouse work itself, can and does have notable psychological impacts on workers. For example, slaughterhouse workers are four times more likely to be clinically depressed than the general public, according to a 2015 study. Higher rates of anxiety, psychosis and serious psychological distress are also found among those working in slaughterhouses, compared to the population at large.

As Dr. Kendra Coulter, now coordinator of Huron University's Animal Ethics and Sustainability Leadership program, told Sentient in 2020: in slaughterhouses, both workers and animals are commodified, "animals literally so." But both are ultimately seen as disposable.

Cultural Impact on Animal Treatment

Upbringing and culture can also play a key role in one's ability to turn off empathy for farm animals. As Tedeschi explained to Sentient on the topic of rodeos, if a person is brought up since childhood to believe that something is "culturally defined as a deserving activity," it becomes normalized.

We see this in rodeo activities geared specifically toward children, such as "pig scrambles" and "mutton busting," where children will ride sheep or other animals, "or engage in wrestling an animal or controlling them in some form," Tedeschi says, "And then getting a lot of attention for that. This is early shaping of those behaviors." Organizations like 4H and Future Farmers of America similarly serve to socialize children to emotionally distance themselves from the animals they are tasked to care for, before selling them to be slaughtered.

Paxton notes that the people he met while working at livestock auctions come from this same wider community. "They're the same people," he says. "They fucking love rodeos." This also includes the police and inspectors on site. "If you're a cop and you're in a rural area, you probably have cows, you've probably kicked them," he says. "Your parents have kicked them, and you're not going to bring charges against a fucking kid or elderly person who does the same thing."

"It's cowboy culture," Renee King-Sonnen, a former cattle rancher turned animal sanctuary operator, told Vox. Cowboy culture involves the normalization of inhumane treatment of animals at auctions, she adds. The drive to belong to that culture is what drives that shared behavior.

"People that are part of this community or this culture feel a solidarity with each other," explains Dr. Rebekah Humphreys, a senior lecturer in philosophy at the University of Wales, and an expert in animal ethics. In the case of spaces where animals are farmed, slaughtered, tested on, etc., "the mistreatment of animals," she says, is "reinscribed and perpetuated through cultures. And then anyone that is outside of that norm is criticized as being overly sentimental or anthropomorphic."

Paxton believes that most people working at auctions don't believe they're doing anything wrong when they mistreat animals. "For many of them, it is the right thing, pulling a screaming goat by the ear," he says. "This animal just needs to move, [and] everyone's always done it that way. Does that make me an asshole?" he asks, putting himself in the position of the workers. "Or wouldn't I really be an asshole if I said, 'Everyone stop the entire auction?' If I had to assuage this animal's feelings and recognize this animal as an individual?"

The Bottom Line

Ultimately, both Tedeschi and Humphreys agree that the commodification of farm animals as property, legally and morally, allows places like animal auctions to exist, and for farm animals to be othered so severely. "The industrialization and commodification of [farm animals] has turned them into objects to the extent that we are really quite distanced from them," says Humphreys.

And that distance, Tedeschi believes, prohibits humans from thinking of these animals with more ethical consideration. "We're not likely to see people do a deeper kind of moral investigation into how we interact with other animals, as long as we view them as having the same legal position as the toaster on our counter."

For people like Paxton and me, who exist outside that cowboy culture but are tasked with investigating it, the ability to compartmentalize - to distance ourselves from the natural empathy we feel for animals, in order to get the job done - also reveals just how easily desensitization can happen.

This is in part what allows Paxton to see those who abuse animals at auctions as otherwise good people. "I'm not really scared of these people," he says. "I didn't find them to be violent or terrifying people. They're fucking nice people," he says. As long as you're not a cow.


Jessica Scott-Reid wrote this article for Sentient.


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Animal rights organizers are regrouping after mixed results at the ballot box in November.

A measure targeting factory farms passed in Berkeley but failed in Sonoma County. Measure J, to ban concentrated animal-feeding operations, only got 15% of the vote and Ordinance 309 to ban slaughterhouses failed in Denver.

Cassie King, an organizer with the Coalition to End Factory Farming, helped raise $280,000 to promote the ban in Sonoma County, even as opponents raised $2.2 million.

"We learned that money and the ability to lie during political campaigns is a very powerful combination of factors to be up against," King asserted. "I was shocked by the amount of misinformation that came out from the No on J campaign, just statistics that had no basis in reality."

Measure DD in Berkeley passed but is mostly symbolic since the only existing concentrated animal feeding operation, a horse racing operation called Golden Gate Fields, closed last June.

King stressed win or lose, the measures went a long way toward raising public awareness of the pollution and animal welfare issues at large factory farms.

"It's a test case, and whether it wins or loses, it's generating tens of thousands of conversations in the county and many more beyond," King contended. "And making the end of factory farming visible for a lot of people who haven't realized that it's something we can achieve in our lifetimes."

The "No on J" campaign and opponents of the Denver slaughterhouse ordinance argued the bans would have hurt jobs and tax revenue.

This story is based on original reporting by Seth Millstein for Sentient.


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Advocates said a lack of animal welfare laws is leading to pain and suffering on American factory farms.

Close to 99% of livestock is now raised in industrial-type facilities, where animal welfare groups said efficiency and profitability take precedence over animals' well-being.

Delcianna Winders, associate professor of law and director of the Animal Law and Policy Institute at Vermont Law and Graduate School, said while more than a dozen states have banned what are deemed torture-like confinement for animals, there is no federal law protecting them from abuse.

"If most people were aware that the animal they're sitting down to eat couldn't move throughout their entire life, just to give one example, I don't think they would want to support that," Winders contended.

Winders pointed out the Humane Methods of Slaughter Act requires animals be knocked unconscious before they are killed but corporations running factory farms are lobbying for the law to be weakened in order to speed up meat production.

So-called "ag-gag" laws in several states criminally penalize those who seek to expose animal suffering on farms, in slaughterhouses and at animal auctions. Winders added she is concerned a second Trump Administration could allow factory farm owners to further erode any remaining health and safety standards.

"They've been able to carve themselves out from complying with the laws that everybody else has to comply with," Winders asserted. "That certainly includes cruelty-to-animals laws. It also includes pollution laws, worker-safety laws, the whole gamut."

Winders advised people concerned with animal welfare to try more plant-based alternatives to meat and learn more about how their food is raised. She stressed as consumers increasingly turn to "organic" and "free-range" meat options, corporations are working to lower the standards for what those labels mean and the conditions under which those animals can be raised.

This story is based on original reporting by Seth Millstein for Sentient.


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