Date: February 28, 2025
Author(s): Kitty Block and Sara Amundson
The extreme confinement of farm animals in cages and crates where they cannot turn around or even move a few inches is not only immensely cruel—it is dangerous. Packing animals so tightly in factory farms means zoonotic disease can spread so quickly as to spin out of control. This is what we are seeing with avian flu right now, and we’ve seen it before with other viruses. We have been warning about this and fighting against it for years.
Now we are seeing entities that have always fought against progress for animals use avian flu and inflation as excuses to move backward on California’s Proposition 12, which sets prohibitions on the sale of food products from farm animals locked in cruel and extreme confinement, imposing basic humane protections for farm animals. Perhaps they are still sour about the loss they suffered when they took Proposition 12 to the Supreme Court of the United States in 2023 and the court upheld the law. And it’s not just California’s law in the crosshairs; there are other laws in states (red, blue and purple) that could be swept up.
Unfortunately, with egg prices inflating (along with pretty much everything else), those pushing to undo the minimal humane standards that Proposition 12 promotes have support from some key people in the U.S. Department of Agriculture and Congress. On Wednesday, The Wall Street Journal published an opinion piece from Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins in which she says she will “remove unnecessary regulatory burdens on egg producers where possible” and that “this will include examining the best way to protect farmers from overly prescriptive state laws” in response to rising egg prices and the coursing spread of avian flu in commercial laying flocks.
That same day, the president of the National Pork Producers Council testified before the Senate Agriculture Committee that Congress needs to intervene to strike down Proposition 12, which would also impact other state laws, a sentiment supported by some of the committee’s Republican majority including Chair John Boozman, R-Ark.
In the face of an avian flu epidemic, it is nothing less than irresponsible and absurd to try to destroy the bulwark of state laws enacted to support public health and higher standards of animal welfare, which were approved with resounding support in more than a dozen red, blue and purple states across the country.
Those fighting these laws—including a handful of foreign-owned corporations—profit so richly from the cruel intensive confinement of animals that they will stop at nothing to decimate humane and health-conscious standards. Where before it was a regressive faction of the factory farming industry fighting tooth and nail against Proposition 12 and laws like it, now the most immediate source of danger to these laws is the U.S. government itself, ideologically captured by the industrial factory farming actors whose backward practices keep us in the stranglehold of intensive farm animal confinement.
The rapid spread of avian flu through confinement systems is, sadly, not a surprise. Through our public awareness outreach and public policy agenda, we have been trying to break the grip of extreme confinement, which is bad for the environment, bad for human health and bad for animals.
Whether it’s avian flu, swine flu, or SARS, it’s the same chilling storyline, always. Large-scale intensive confinement of animals is an incubator and catalyst of viral disease. This practice represents a genuine danger, even as the very agencies and congressional committees charged with their oversight go on whistling past the graveyard.
As for egg prices, let us put it plainly: State laws on public health and animal welfare are not causing inflation, the effect of which is being seen across the board on all kinds of products. Yet Rollins invoked inflationary worries as a rationale “to protect farmers from overly prescriptive state laws” like Proposition 12.
The next day, though, the head of the California Poultry Federation underscored the point that so many egg farms are now cage-free; any obliteration of cage-free standards would inadvertently punish the many farmers who moved swiftly to meet rising consumer demand for products following higher animal welfare standards.
There was a fleeting moment in which we hoped that Secretary Rollins would “kick the tires” on the spurious claims being circulated to torpedo these laws. Rollins’ most recent gig was leading the America First Policy Institute, which is a strong proponent of states’ rights under the 10th Amendment, but Trump’s first administration opposed Proposition 12 and other state laws. Ironically, a federal government populated with champions of the 10th Amendment—which reserves rights to the states and the people, while limiting federal power—is one that might be expected to support the will of state legislatures and their citizens rather than indulge Big Ag industry associations in their campaign to rake in as much money as possible, regardless of animals and public health.
Yet, that’s where we are. Neither the Trump administration nor a few key congressional agricultural leaders respect the sovereign authority of states to legislate on matters of grave importance to their citizens, at least not when it comes to the abject cruelty and health-endangering scourge of intensive confinement of animals. Meanwhile, more than 200 members of Congress, from across the political continuum are on record in vehement opposition to all efforts to unwind these state laws.
It is a disgrace that there is so much prevarication going on at a time when the danger of virulent zoonotic diseases incubating within our agricultural system has never been greater. With respect to the spread of avian flu, there is no evidence that cage-free flocks are more susceptible to the virus. As Daniel Sumner, a leading expert and professor of agriculture and resource economics at UC Davis who also advises the pork industry, put it, “Prop. 12 is mostly irrelevant to bird flu impacts and bird flu is mostly irrelevant to Prop. 12 impacts.” Moreover, according to the USDA, in 2025 thus far, 71% of avian flu outbreaks were in cage systems, whereas only 29% of outbreaks occurred in cage-free systems.
Let’s be clear about what’s going on here. For years, backward-facing elements in the meat industry have been trying to decimate well-crafted public health and animal welfare laws in the sole interest of their own bottom lines. Their call for the gutting of such measures will not advance the public interest in relation to inflation or the prevention of pandemics.
There is plenty that the federal government can do to mitigate inflation and to address the threat of avian flu without coddling factory farming conglomerates—domestic and foreign-owned—shamelessly seeking to take advantage of the crisis. But a mandate that encourages the practice of forcing hundreds of millions of egg-laying hens to live, sleep, eat and defecate in cramped cages where H5N1 and other epidemic threats can flourish? We’ve seen and had enough of that.
Sara Amundson is president of Humane World Action Fund.
