At about the same time that the Supreme Court was entertaining arguments over California’s Prop 12 law last month, a lower court in Utah acquitted animal activists charged with breaking into a local Smithfield Foods farm in 2017 and stealing two piglets.

No doubt, it’s a tough regulatory landscape for raising animals. I’d venture, though, that there’s a lesson in the ironically timed clash of these two matters of justice: It’s better to know defined parameters than to operate under interpretive law.

The Supreme Court, having studied the Prop 12 arguments, may ultimately side with the National Pork Producers Council and the American Farm Bureau Federation. After all, it doesn’t seem right, as they argue, that a California law would dictate the livestock raising practices of all other 49 states, let alone the higher costs of adapting their systems to comply.

But what if the high court goes the other way?

Approved by California voters in 2018 and to take effect March 1, 2023, Proposition 12 would ban the sale of pork in California if the pigs (with similar rules for eggs, veal and poultry) were raised in breeding pens too small to let them turn around. More specifically, the law stipulates that each breeding sow have 24 square feet of space, while prohibiting traditional gestation stalls.

If those details are where the devil resides, though, at least they are familiar. Smithfield has been transitioning out of traditional systems for 15 years now, and many others have followed. Companies such as Perdue Farms’ Niman Ranch and DuBreton’s North Country Smokehouse already are in compliance with Prop 12 and support the law. And Hormel and Tyson Foods already are rebuilding their operations to comply.

Be it Prop 12 or the Utah case on pig theft, there is no doubt that each has been driven by animal activists who would like to end animal agriculture. Industry can lament the influence the likes of the Humane Society of the United States have had on major meat companies, but that ship has sailed. Costs have increased, but so has the marketability of the resulting products.

More concerning, arguably, to those raising livestock are the implications of a Utah jury acquitting Direct Action Everywhere activists Wayne Hsuing and Paul Picklesimer of breaking into Smithfield property and stealing two piglets. In that case, Hsuing’s argument that “there’s a big difference between stealing and rescuing” the animals clearly struck an emotional nerve with the jurists. The activists have found similar successes in courts in Iowa and elsewhere.

Laws may arise out of emotion, but laws should not be allowed to be broken because of emotion. Breaking and entering and theft are crimes, period. My 6-year-old son would understand that; he knows that there are consequences for taking a cookie out of the cookie jar without asking, even if his rationale was “I’m hungry.”

The Prop 12 case gives the meat supply chain certainties: a final judicial decision, a law whose parameters are clearly defined and practices already in the works. Should the law come to be upheld by SCOTUS, companies can decide whether to comply and market new products, or do business elsewhere.

But that might be cold comfort, given the uncertainties reared by a ruling like the one in Utah, which opens the door for extremists to sabotage producers’ businesses — no matter what the law says.

Editor's note: This article ran as the Editorial in the November issue of Meatingplace.

The devil you know

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