New briefs on Prop 12… 🧾

It’s been some time since we last spoke of Prop 12… You weren’t missing that, were you? Well, at any rate, here’s an update on it. Two new legal briefs were filed in the lawsuit against Proposition 12, and they’ll go before the US Supreme Court on October 11.

• If you haven’t caught any details of the California Proposition, here’s what’s important: it establishes standards that all pork sold within California must abide by, no matter where it’s produced. The opposition argues that it harms the industry and that the state law is overstepping its jurisdiction, while supporters claim that costs are actually reasonable and improvements in animal welfare compensate.

There’s been a great deal of fuss over it during the last month, and these are the two new briefs, which support the proposition:

• The Socially Responsible Agriculture Project (SRAP), a group that claims to fight against the damages caused by industrial livestock operations, says Prop 12 benefits independent and sustainable US farmers. According to them, many of the multinational corporations that enjoy record profits are foreign-owned, while small farmers struggle. However, Prop 12 allegedly recognizes the increasing demand for sustainably raised pork and fosters healthy competition and economic opportunities for independent producers.
• The second brief was by Harvard Law School’s Animal Law & Policy Clinic, which acted on behalf of a coalition of animal protection organizations and law professors.