Credit: Advocate for Saving Animals.

Everyone has seen labels on the eggs they buy in grocery stores like “organic” or “free-range.” What most people don’t know is that these loosely defined labels are often fig leaves that cover for the brutal abuse of animals.

But a new lawsuit by animal advocates may have changed all that, pressuring the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) on Monday into creating new labeling standards that require egg producers to be honest about what they do to egg-laying chickens.

Egg production is an almost entirely unregulated industry under federal law; a series of special provisions in major animal welfare legislation allows the egg industry to raise egg hens however they please. For example, the Humane Slaughter Act — the principal federal animal welfare law for farm animals — explicitly exempts poultry from the bill’s protections.

The result is an impossibly cruel farm system, where 95 percent of American chickens are raised in tiny, crammed cages that slice their feet, atrophy their muscles and slowly drive them insane. 25 states allow the poultry industry to define “customary” animal welfare practices however it likes to escape animal cruelty laws. One visitor to an egg “farm” saw mummified dead birds crowded in with live birds in tiny cages, thirsty and filthy birds, among other horrors.” A few plants even force their hens to undergo what’s called “forced molting,” depicted in the image above, where hens are starved until they lose their feathers in order to marginally improve egg production and quality.

Unsurprisingly, the vast majority of Americans don’t want to spend their money subsidizing a system that confines hens so cruelly. As a consequence, a complex labeling system has emerged to inform consumers about the humaneness of their various different egg options. Some of the labels, like “Animal Welfare Approved,” are stringent, third-party standards. Others, like “American Humane Certified” and “United Egg Producers Certified,” allow for precisely the sort of brutal caging these labels are ostensibly supposed to guide consumers away from. You can read a guide to the egg guides here.

The new lawsuit, filed by the Animal Legal Defense Fund (ALDF) and Compassion over Killing (CoK), may render such guides superfluous. The complaint argues that the FDA, by not forcing the industry to describe how eggs are produced in precise terms, is allowing the industry to willfully obscure the way it treats egg hens. As ALDF and CoK put it:

In spite of Congressional mandates, [federal] agencies have failed to take any action to regulate the often-misleading claims and deceptive imagery widely found on egg cartons. Even the United Egg Producers, the U.S. egg industry’s trade association, has endorsed federal legislation containing a similar labeling program.

Under the lawsuit’s petitioned action, egg producers nationwide would be required to clearly label egg cartons with egg production methods, including the identification of “Eggs from Caged Hens.” Co-plaintiffs in the lawsuit include several Bay Area egg consumers who have relied on deceptive egg carton labeling in their efforts to purchase eggs from hens not confined in cages.

On Monday, the FDA caved to the legal pressure. ALDF and CoK have stayed the lawsuit in response to the FDA’s decision to formally respond to a “federal rulemaking petition” on egg labeling by September of this year. Rulemaking petitions are requests from the general public and/or interest groups for a federal agency to change its administrative rules on a particular topic; there’s been an outstanding petition on egg labeling since 2006. The FDA is within its rights to deny the petition, so clearer egg labeling is by no means a given at this point.

Animal cruelty of all sorts is endemic to the American factory farming system. The cruel conditions double as “perfect breeders” for foodborne illnesses.

Andy Holt.

A Tennessee lawmaker sponsoring a new bill shutting down animal cruelty investigations suggested animal rights activists were engaging in “tape and rape” tactics, and were “intent on using animals the same way human-traffickers use 17 year old women.” The representative in question, Andy Holt (R-Dresden), owns and operates a facility that raises pigs, cows, and goats for slaughter.

Holt’s outburst came in response to an email from Humane Society Public Policy Coordinator Kayci McCloud, in which McCloud asked Holt to reconsider his support for Tennessee’s recently passed “ag-gag” law. Ag-gag laws contain a variety of provisions (varying from law to law) designed to make it impossible for undercover investigators to document animal cruelty or unsafe farming conditions on farms like Holt’s. The Tennessee law Holt sponsored and pushed through the legislature accomplishes this end by forcing groups to turn over any documentary evidence of illegal activity on farms to the authorities within 48 hours, making it functionally impossible for them to put together a comprehensive case that could lead to arrests.

Holt responded viciously to McCloud’s inquiry, accusing the Humane Society of America — the country’s leading animal welfare organization, whose investigations have repeatedly led to pro-animal prosecutions and legislation — of functionally supporting the sexual abuse of animals:

I am extremely pleased that we were able to pass HB 1191 [the ag-gag law] today to help protect livestock in Tennessee from suffering months of needless investigation that propagandist groups of radical animal activists, like your fraudulent and reprehensibly disgusting organization of maligned animal abuse profiteering corporatists, who are intent on using animals the same way human-traffickers use 17 year old women. You work for a pathetic excuse for an organization and a pathetic group of sensationalists who seek to profit from animal abuse. I am glad, as an aside, that we have limited your preferred fund-raising methods here in the state of Tennessee; a method that I refer to as “tape and rape.” Best wishes for the failure of your organization and it’s [sic] true intent.

Holt’s outburst is unusual for reasons beyond the vicious smears: while ag-gag supporters typically sell the laws as a means to help animal rights investigations, Holt admits that the law’s true purpose is to limit the ability of pro-animal groups to expose cruelty. It’s also unclear how “suffering months of needless investigation,” which mostly means being videotaped, is worse for farm animals than being crammed into crates so tight that they are forced to stand in their own feces and acquire bleeding sores from attempting to move even slightly — a common fate for pigs in American factory farms.

In addition to his work in the state legislature, Holt owns and operates Holt Family Farms with his wife. Because Holt’s operation raises animals for slaughter (though they are not killed on premises), it’s exactly the sort of farm that might be subject to the type of investigation Holt is attempting to outlaw. Human Society President Wayne Pacelle describes Holt Family Farms as an “industrial hog” farm. Holt, who recently took a vacation to Hawaii paid for by the American Farm Bureau Federation, is taking a lead role in the effort to legalize horse meat production in Tennessee.

Tennessee, which is ahead of the national curve with respect passing ag-gag laws, is also in the midst of a controversy about the endemic abuse of horses as part of the Tennessee Walking Horse show “tradition.”

Tens of thousands of Tennessee Walking Horses are born in the United States each year, many of which are destined to perform a crazy-looking walk called “the Big Lick” in one of many famous shows. But trainers today beat, burn, whip, and electrify horses to make them act this way — and federal law will allow them to get away with it unless a new law proposed this week is passed.

The basic horror for horses is a practice called “soring,” wherein trainers deliberately burn and slice horses’ hooves and ankles to twist their manner of walking in a way that’s painfully unnatural, but prize-winning in horse shows. The most common form of soring involves applying blistering chemicals like kerosene to a horse’s hoof and ankles, often for days. Even harsher soring might involve “pressure shoeing,” where trainers slice off large parts of the horse’s hoof and force the animal to put pressure on its sensitive and wounded feet. Horses are also more conventionally tortured — that is, beaten and electrocuted — as part of a training regimen aimed at “perfecting” their walk. Here’s some undercover footage from a Humane Society investigation of prominent trainer Jackie McConnell, who’s now pled guilty to criminal charges:

Soring has technically been a federal crime since the Horse Protection Act of 1970 (and is a felony in Tennessee), but the practice remains widespread. Department of Agriculture (USDA) investigators tested 52 horses at the 2011 Tennessee Walking Horse National Celebration: all of them tested positive for foreign chemicals. A large percentage had also been given anesthetics, which mask the pain symptoms from soring during inspections. “Every trainer sored horses,” said Barney Davis, a former trainer convicted of soring his horses. “Without the soring, without some kind of soring, they’re not going to do the Big Lick.”

This massive, systematic abuse goes on because the USDA lacks the resources and legal backing to stop it. Because USDA funding is so scare, horse industry groups are allowed to hire “designated qualified persons” (DQPs), private trained citizens, to essentially self-regulate in lieu USDA inspections. But, according to an internal USDA audit, this system fails to provide meaningful accountability because the DQPs are loathe to report on the abuses of the people who pay their checks. As the audit report puts it, “Essentially, the horse show management gets the best of both worlds: use of DQPs so its liability is limited regarding the Horse Protection Act and an ineffective DQP process that rarely finds horses that are sore or eliminates horses from their show.”

On Monday, a bipartisan group of Congresspeople introduced legislation to end this failed system of self-regulation. The Prevent All Soring Tactics (PAST) Act would create a new USDA regulatory scheme for horse shows, ban certain soring devices, and impose harsher criminal penalties on convicted sorers. A similar bill was introduced in 2012, but did not pass.

The importance of undercover soring investigations given the currently weak state of federal laws illustrates the danger of so-called “ag-gag” laws, which functionally criminalize these kinds of animal cruelty investigations. Tennessee is currently considering one such law.

Two Senators are trying again to close a loophole in federal law that allows for the torturous treatment of potentially hundreds of thousands of puppies around the country. The Puppy Uniform Protection and Safety (PUPS) Act, sponsored by Sen. Dick Durbin (D-IL) and Sen. David Vitter (R-LA), attempts to close a loophole in the Animal Welfare Act (AWA) of 1966 that allows for totally unregulated breeding of puppies for sale online. The AWA requires breeders that sell to pet stores to acquire licenses, but allows them to sell dogs directly to customers without oversight. The Internet has made it possible for breeders to connect directly to consumers, meaning that breeders now double as de facto online pet stores.

This loophole allows “puppy mills,” breeders who aim only at profit and keep puppies in cheap, utterly horrific surroundings, to operate legally and profit handsomely. They sell the puppies directly to happy pet owners, who are oblivious to the fact that their new family member came from a place with “inadequate food and water, [where dogs were housed in] in wire cages with wire flooring so their paws never touch the ground; [and] female dogs mated to produce litter after litter until they can no longer do so and are then killed.” Inspections of two puppy mills in Ohio found, respectively, that “dogs and pups [were] living in horrid conditions and many were sick, emaciated and had visible infections and sores” and “[dogs were] matted with urine, feces and fleas [whose] nails were curled under the pads of feet…Many [had] severe dental disease and 17 [had] eye infections.”

One estimate suggests that several hundred thousand puppy-mill dogs per year are sold online because of the online loophole. Investigators at the International Fund for Animal Welfare asked several experts on puppy mill operations and dog breeding to examine the ads at major online sellers and develop an estimate, based on general characteristics common to puppy mill ads, of how many puppy mill dogs were sold through these websites per year. Their results were shocking:

Using the criteria developed by the expert panel, investigators found that 5,911 of the ads qualified as “likely puppy mill,” which equaled 62% of the ads analyzed from the six dedicated puppy sale websites. Further applying this 10% sample with the 62% “likely puppy mill” findings to the six websites would mean that as many as 57,447 ads and 107,425 individual puppies would potentially be classified as stemming from a “likely puppy mill” on that one day of the investigation…given the conservative nature of the determinations and the strong likelihood that many puppy mill ads were overlooked due to marketing manipulation, the expert panel and investigators felt that the total number of puppies coming from puppy mills may have been significantly underestimated.

The PUPS act would (judging from a draft proposed last legislative session) address this problem by extending the AWA commercial breeder rules to all breeders that sell 50 or more dogs per year and creating new exercise standards requiring breeders to let their dogs move around. The USDA recently proposed its own regulation accomplishing a similar effect last year, but it has yet to be implemented.

The overwhelming scientific consensus is that most animals, including dogs, are conscious, feel pain, and have complex internal and emotional lives.

Ohio, one of the epicenters of cruel “puppy mill” style dog breeders, passed a landmark bill on Tuesday restricting the ability of breeders to mistreat the dogs they are raising for sale. Because Ohio had virtually no legal oversight of breeders, it became “one of the biggest unregulated states” for puppy mills, understood as breeders who keep their dogs in confined, unsanitary, and cruel conditions until they’re sold as a strategy for maximizing profit. The new Ohio law, among other provisions, “requires state licensing and inspection of breeders who annually sell 60 dogs or at least nine litters; authorizes Ohio’s agriculture director to specify standards of care; and denies licensing to anyone convicted of animal cruelty in the last 20 years.”

These reforms are badly needed: a recent puppy mill case involving 241 dogs has resulted in 723 counts of animal cruelty because “dogs and pups [were] living in horrid conditions and many were sick, emaciated and had visible infections and sores.” In another November case, a breeder released 34 dogs “matted with urine, feces and fleas [whose] nails were curled under the pads of feet…Many have severe dental disease and 17 have eye infections.” The tighter licensing and inspection provisions are expected to prevent many dogs from ever having to endure these conditions by making it harder for abusive breeders to hide cruel practices.

The new legislation isn’t everything proponents of strict animal welfare protections could hope for. Animal advocates worry that the veterinarians conducting the inspections could be on a puppy mill payroll and that the minimum size for cages, six inches from nose and tail, are still much too small. And Ohio law still has serious deficiencies with respect to the treatment of animals. But the law is generally considered to be a step in the right direction in limiting the puppy mill epidemic.

Alleged dog torturer Sean Janas.

Mary, a German Shepherd/Lab mix, was allegedly poisoned for months by her owner’s girlfriend, who kept a diary chronicling her joy at causing Mary extraordinary pain. Sean Janas, the woman in question, has been charged with animal abuse for routinely feeding the dog bleach, drain cleaner, and pills, and may face up to five years in jail. Pages of her diary are some of the key evidence presented in the criminal complaint:

I need to find a way to kill her without it looking like I killed her. I’ve done lots of things already. I’ve given her drano bleach & a lot of pain pills lol one night she got all tweaked out because of it, it was so funny. I beat the living shit out of her a few days ago & shes got a huge like sack on her head and she won’t stop puking on everything. So imma give her more pills & hopefully that dumb bitch dies. Because Steve thinks she ate something outside & that’s why shes sick. …

I just wanna beat her till she fucking dies. Which I mean I have beat her I mean. I tell you I don’t care how long it takes I’m just gonna keep feeding her pills & shit till she croaks because shes already sick & we don’t have any money to take her to the vet so hopefully she just dies so I don’t have to ever see her dumb ass again. I have never hated an animal so much in my life, much less hate one or beat one. But the pleasure I get from watching her whimper in pain & cry out for help as I shove drano & bleach down her throat is like no other.

The brutality of Janas’ actions has galvanized a petition campaign asking the Marathon County District Attorney to seek the maximum punishment allowable by the law in question. Brutal abuse of dogs and other pets is sadly common around the United States, in part because several states have very weak legal mechanisms for prosecuting animal abuse. The abuse of animals is even more routine in factory farms. Both problems are aided and abetted by federal inaction on animal welfare issues.