Big Pork attacks California law on caging
Spring has sprung on Leo Staples’ family farm in Oklahoma, and his Berkshire pigs couldn’t be happier about it. Weighing in at about 550 pounds, Woody, his largest hog (named by a grandson after the “Toy Story” icon) plays “like a puppy” in his free-range paddock, Staples told me, gobbling up the rye, clovers and winter peas that have grown knee-high under the Southern sun. Swine life on Staples’ sustainable family farm is a jarring contrast to the existence of a pig on one of America’s “intensive” corporate-owned mega-farms, where some sows are confined to cages so small they literally can’t turn around or take more than a step or two in any direction. “It’s not necessary and it hasn’t proven to be good science,” Staples, a self-described conservative Republican, said of Big Ag porcine lockups. “It’s also cruel.” That confinement is at the heart of a congressional fight over animal welfare standards that Staples — and California — is likely to lose, though we shouldn’t. At issue is the Save Our Bacon Act, a …
