The way we treat pigs is a sin

The practice of "crating" is torture, plain and simple. Voters want to end it, but Congress might not let them.

Photo by Humane Society via Wikimedia Commons

I consider myself a pretty good and decent guy, overall. I don’t commit crimes. I’m nice to the people I meet. I help out my friends. I take good care of my pet rabbit, and I donate lots of money to other people who take care of abandoned and sick rabbits. My politics might not always be correct or wise, but I want things like the end of poverty, the end of war, and so on.

And yet just down the highway from me, there are facilities for the mass torture of animals. In the United States, there are 73 million pigs in “concentrated animal feeding operations”, more commonly known as factory farms:

Source: OWID

There are many horrors experienced by chickens and other animals on factory farms, but the way pigs are forced to live is probably the worst. For most of their lives, female pigs (sows) are kept in tiny cages — either “gestation crates” when they’re pregnant, or “farrowing crates” when they’re nursing. A sow will spend most of her life in one of these cages.

In a gestation crate or a farrowing crate, sows don’t have enough room to turn around — all they can do is either stand or lie down in a pile of their own feces. Imagine living your entire life in an airline seat, where you couldn’t even get up to go to the bathroom or take your seatbelt off. That’s how these pigs live.

Pigs are social creatures — they exhibit “emotional contagion”, meaning that when one pig is scared or happy, other pigs start to feel the same, and they give comfort and support to other pigs who are in distress. Research suggests that they’re at least as smart as dogs, and probably smarter. But a pig in one of these crates will never get any social interaction in her entire adult life — she can’t even turn around to look at her babies.

This is torture. The pigs who are confined this way bite the bars of their cages, desperate for a freedom that will never come. They have their tails chopped off as babies (generally without anesthetic), so that they can’t chew each other’s tails in anguish. But no relief ever comes — they live out their entire lives and die in these tiny torture-cages.

I have no other word for this except “sin”. This is a sin. If there is a God,¹ and if that God is in any way good and moral, then that God is looking down with disgust on the way my society treats pigs. I go about my daily life — hanging out with my friends, petting my rabbit, going out to eat at nice restaurants — never thinking about the horrible suffering that has engulfed the entire lives of those tens of millions of pigs.

And it’s for my own benefit that those animals are being tortured. When I eat delicious guanciale, sumptuous char-siu, or mouthwatering carnitas, I’m eating the flesh of animals who were tortured for their entire lives so that I could devour their faces and shoulders and bellies for a slightly cheaper price.

OK, so why don’t I just stop whining and become a vegetarian (or a vegan, since milk cows and hens are also treated badly)? Honestly, I should, and the fact that I don’t is monstrous in a way. But simply washing my own hands of this crime feels like a pitifully inadequate response. The vegetarian movement has been around in the West for over 150 years, and very little has changed — meat consumption is probably marginally lower than if there were no vegetarians at all, but abusive factory farming practices have only been refined and expanded. Furthermore, vegetarianism, though morally laudable, has an obvious economic limitation — when one person refuses to eat meat, it lowers the price of meat for everyone else, which raises other people’s meat consumption and partially offsets the vegetarian’s action.

On top of the obvious and demonstrated inability of individual action to solve this problem, it’s insufficient even from a moral stance. Suppose that our society farmed human beings for food. Would simply refusing to eat human flesh be enough to absolve me of culpability? I don’t think so. I would still have a responsibility to try to abolish the evil system.

In fact, “abolish the evil system” is exactly what voters in California and some other states are trying to do. In 2018, by an almost 2-to-1 margin, California voters enacted a law called Proposition 12 that heavily restricted the sale of meat from pigs, hens, and calves that weren’t raised with a minimum amount of space. Crucially, the partial prohibition extended to meat from animals raised inhumanely in other states. This followed on the heels of a similar law in Massachusetts two years earlier.

Courts have upheld the law, but Republicans in Congress are trying to undo it from the federal level. In 2025 they proposed the Save Our Bacon Act, which would ban states from enacting animal welfare laws like the ones voters approved in California and Massachusetts. The Save Our Bacon Act failed on its own, but this year it got incorporated into the Farm Bill, which has passed the House and is now being considered in the Senate:

Companies and industry groups have also worked with members of Congress for over a decade to introduce federal legislation to nullify laws like those in California and Massachusetts. The latest iteration is called the Save Our Bacon Act, originally proposed last year…This effort, which for years went nowhere as standalone legislation in Congress, now has a decent chance at becoming law as part of the new Farm Bill…

In late April, the House of Representatives passed its version of the Farm Bill, which included the language from the Save Our Bacon Act…It’s “really a Save Our Crate Act,” Brent Hershey, a hog farmer who opposes it, told me. “A vote for the farm bill,” he said, “is a vote to cage an animal that can’t walk or turn around.”

Lewis Bollard has a good post explaining what’s at stake. In fact, the current Farm Bill wouldn’t just reverse the recent anti-crate laws in California and Massachusetts — it would roll back much of the progress that has been made in farm animal welfare over the decade, as well as preventing any future welfare laws along similar lines:

The [Save Our Bacon] Act would stop any state or locality from regulating the sale of meat based on how it’s produced in another state. This would likely invalidate state and local bans on foie gras, crated veal, and more…It would also halt future legislative progress. Congress hasn’t passed a farm animal welfare law in decades. State laws are where reforms actually happen. The SOB Act would gut them by mandating they contain a giant loophole for out-of-state imports.

Why should Congress prevent the voters of California and Massachusetts from taking a stand against the evils of factory farming? First and foremost, it’s a case of a concentrated interest group — the pig farming lobby — making headway against a diffuse interest (voters with a conscience). In fact, if you believe the polls, a majority of the country — even a majority of those who regularly eat pork — would probably support measures like the ones in California and Massachusetts:

Across different incomes, genders, age or race, many regular pork buying Americans (defined as those who purchase pork at least 2-3 times per month) find the use of gestation crates on pregnant pigs (66%) and the practice of [tail] docking on piglets (53%) objectionable. These findings, and other key sentiments, are from a recent survey of over 2,000 US adults conducted by The Harris Poll…According to the survey, gestation crates are seen as unacceptable by two-thirds of Americans (66%), and a strong majority (73%) are more likely to buy pork products from companies committed to ending their use than from one that is not. Tail docking is also seen as unacceptable by just over half (56%) of Americans, and 62% of Americans think retailers and restaurants have a responsibility to ensure the cutting of piglet tails is not done by their pork producers.

A plurality of Americans want laws against animal cruelty strengthened in general, and in 2022 a poll by Data for Progress found that measures like those of California’s Prop 12 enjoy widespread national support.

There is a financial cost of switching to humane farming methods, but in the grand scheme of things it isn’t that high. After California passed Prop 12, the prices of affected products rose by about 20% relative to products that weren’t covered by the law. 20% is a significant increase; it’s possible that the American public, wearied by several years of inflation, is less inclined to care about pig torture than they were when the polls I cited above were taken.

But it would be a one-time bump in cost, and over the years the price would come back down at least somewhat, as farmers found more efficient ways to farm pigs without torturing them. In addition, California implemented the law in its typical inefficient way, forcing producers of legally compliant pork to jump through massive amounts of regulatory hoops in order to sell their product in the state. Efforts to make it easier to sell humanely produced meat would make it even cheaper to end these terrible practices.

In fact, I suspect that the American public is still in a mood to support animal welfare laws like this. The Save Our Bacon Act failed on its own, and its supporters had to end up sneakily burying it within the much bigger Farm Bill; to me, this suggests that even the SOB Act’s proponents knew how bad it would make them look if people started paying attention.

I also suspect — though I can’t prove — that the proponents of the Save Our Bacon Act care about more than just the support of the farm lobby. I suspect that part of the reason they’re so anxious to preserve abusive farming practices is that doing so affirms their right to abuse animals. The line “The cruelty is the point” probably applies here.

People who feel disempowered tend to take their frustrations out on those with even less power. Conservatives have certainly been feeling disempowered by the progressive drift of elite culture over the past few decades; by rolling back animal rights, perhaps they can demonstrate that at least they still have complete power over the pigs.

This disgusts me. In The Better Angels of Our Nature, Steve Pinker showed how economic development has tended to go hand-in-hand with less tolerance for animal cruelty. By passing a law that expanded the scope for animal cruelty, America would be slipping a little bit back down toward developing-country status. It’s moral degeneration, plain and simple.

I would hope that the advent of AI would give us humans a little bit of self-reflection about how we treat animals. Whether or not you believe that today’s AI represents a true superhuman intelligence, the rapidity with which Claude and GPT have rocketed to their current heights of ability should make even the most hardened skeptics realize that humanity is probably not the eternal pinnacle of power and intelligence in this universe.

And in a universe where humanity is neither the most powerful nor the most intelligent entity, we will desperately need a universal moral code where the strong protect the weak. Vernor Vinge, contemplating the advent of superhuman AI back in 1993, wrote:

[I.J.] Good proposed a “Meta-Golden Rule”, which might be paraphrased as “Treat your inferiors as you would be treated by your superiors.” It’s a wonderful, paradoxical idea (and most of my friends don’t believe it) since the game-theoretic payoff is so hard to articulate. Yet if we were able to follow it, in some sense that might say something about the plausibility of such kindness in this universe.)

The people who wrote the Save Our Bacon Act don’t believe in this Meta-Golden Rule. Instead, they believe that all of the moral value and weight in the Universe lies with them and their friends, and that they should have the right to inflict unimaginable cruelty on any being that doesn’t possess the power to stop them from doing so. I would hope that whatever being ends up judging humanity, be it the God of the Bible or some future superintelligence, doesn’t judge us by our factory farms.

Anyway, if you don’t want your society to torture pigs en masse for a few bucks, call your Senator and tell them not to pass the Farm Bill until the Save Our Bacon Act is stripped out of it.

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1. I actually do believe in God.