COLUMBUS, Ohio — Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost (R) is asking the United States Supreme Court to overturn a California law aimed at improving living conditions for farm animals.
Yost said the law allows California to impose its regulations on other states.
“Proposition 12… was passed by California voters back in 2018 and was a law that purported to phase out certain livestock husbandry practices specific to how we can find food animals in the state of California,” Spectrum News 1 agriculture expert Andy Vance said. “That would be things like, you know, pigs, things like chickens, how those animals are housed. And the reason this became a bigger issue with Prop 12 is because it didn’t just affect the animals in California, but the animals that produce any of the food being sold in California.”
Producers of pigs raised in Ohio, but sold as bacon or ham in California, would be required to adhere to Proposition 12 regulations.
According to The Humane League, an animal rights organization, Proposition 12 is “the strongest farm animal protection law in the United States and possibly in the world.”
Under Proposition 12, hens are to be housed with a minimum of 144 square inches per hen and calves raised for veal housed with a minimum of 43 square feet per calf, among other requirements.
Proposition 12 is being challenged in the court system. Most recently, at the highest level.
Yost joined 25 other attorneys general in an amicus brief urging the Supreme Court to overturn a lower court decision regarding Proposition 12.
“The West Coast can’t seem to understand that this is not the ‘United States of California’ and that farmers in Ohio and other states don’t need to be told how to raise animals,” Yost said in a release.
The National Pork Producers Council and the American Farm Bureau Federation previously sued the State of California and argued that Proposition 12 violates the Commerce Clause of the U.S. Constitution. The lower court ruled that California can regulate extraterritorially.
The Supreme Court is now set to hear the case.
Yost joined 25 other attorneys general in an amicus brief urging the Supreme Court to overturn a lower court decision regarding Proposition 12.
