Upholding Animal Welfare: California’s Law on the Treatment of Confined Farm Animals

Use these links to jump to different sections:

• How California’s Proposition 12 Requires Greater Animal Welfare in Industrial Farming
• Legal Challenges to Proposition 12 Rejected by the U.S. Supreme Court
• How Proposition 12 Has Been Implemented

In its 2018 general election, California passed Proposition 12, the Prevention of Cruelty to Farm Animals Act. According to Bruce A. Wagman, an animal law attorney at Riley Safer Holmes & Cancila in San Francisco, the law “provides for humane housing of three kinds of farm animals: veal calves, gestating pigs, and egg-laying hens.”

The proposition, which received 63 percent “yes” votes from California voters, established minimum confinement square-feet space requirements for those three animals and banned sales of meat and eggs from animals kept in conditions that don’t meet those standards—regardless of what state the products come from—in California stores.

How California’s Proposition 12 Requires Greater Animal Welfare in Industrial Farming

“So you can’t sell a product in California from a veal calf that wasn’t treated the way California requires its veal calves to be treated,” says Wagman, who notes that egg-laying hens, pregnant pigs, and veal calves are normally confined in ways in which they cannot move. “The definition of the required behavior is that they’re required to be able to stand up, lay down, turn around, and stretch their limbs without touching the sides of an enclosure or another animal. And further, with respect to egg-laying hens, Prop 12 envisions, ultimately, cage-free housing.”

In 2008, Californians passed a similar ballot initiative, Proposition 2, but it didn’t include the cage-free housing caveat and also didn’t ban sales of products that didn’t meet the standards. “In other words, producers could still do what they wanted in their states and send veal and pork to California. Now, they can’t.

“When [Prop 12] was written, the idea was to focus on some of the most, one could say, egregious, problematic types of practices in industrialized agricultural farming,” he continues. “The idea is not to make the world vegan, but to give the animals we eat somewhat more a modicum of a better life while they are on the planet.”

Though enforcement of such a law may seem a difficult task for The California Department of Food and Agriculture (CDFA), the department was already enforcing Prop 2. Now, they simply intend to send agents to other states that are shipping food products to California (like Missouri, Iowa, Massachusetts), to ensure they are complying with the updated requirements.

Legal Challenges to Proposition 12 Rejected by the U.S. Supreme Court

After Proposition 2 passed in 2008, the egg industry ultimately attempted five lawsuits against the law. And so, unsurprisingly to Wagman, the North American Meat Institute also sued the state for Proposition 12, claiming the new law violated the U.S. Constitution’s Commerce Clause. In 2021, the U.S. Supreme Court rejected that lawsuit.

In 2023, The Supreme Court upheld Proposition 12 against another lawsuit brought by the American Farm Bureau Federation (AFBF) and the National Pork Producers Council (NPPC). The lawsuit alleged that California’s law violated the U.S. Constitution’s Dormant Commerce Clause, which limits a state’s ability to pass laws that impact interstate commerce. A majority of Supreme Court Justices determined that the law did not violate the Dormant Clause in impacting the pork industry supply chain.

How Proposition 12 Has Been Implemented

Federal law governs food labeling, so California won’t have any labeling for products that meet requirements—though, of course, the products would be illegal if they don’t. The state is also allowing a phase-in period regarding the enacted changes, so the industry has what Wagman calls “a significant amount of time to change their practices and get up to speed.”

For Wagman, the proposition is simply a step forward. “We’ve been moving forward in an effort to provide a modicum of better treatment for these animals who have been subjected to intensive confinement that causes amazing suffering,” he says. “It’s something we hope will move around the country.”

Visit the Super Lawyers directory to find an experienced animal law attorney for legal advice related to compliance with Proposition 12 or other issues regarding animal welfare. For more information on animal protection laws, see our overview of animal law.