Animal-rights advocates in Nevada and around the country are sounding the alarm about the living conditions and treatment of turkeys on large factory farms.

This week, the group PETA held a demonstration in Reno to raise awareness of the 46 million turkeys it says are killed each year for the Thanksgiving holiday.

DeLana Barrett, a campaign organizer for PETA, said it's traveling to 30 states to educate folks, at a time when bird flu cases are also on the rise in some parts of the country. Barrett said commercial breeding and raising of animals can create hotspots for disease to spread.

"Animal agriculture, turkeys for instance, they live in filthy, overcrowded factory farms," she said. "That's not healthy for them, it is not healthy for us to consume. Turkeys are slaughtered at just six months of age in factory farming."

In the wild, Barrett said, turkeys can live between three to four years. In neighboring California and Utah, commercial flocks are already being affected by bird flu, which also is spreading among dairy cows in California.

Barrett is encouraging people to consider other food options for their Thanksgiving table. But she knows that'll be a challenge, as about 88% of Americans eat turkey on Thanksgiving, according to the National Turkey Federation.

PETA said three out of every four emerging infectious diseases in humans originate in animals, and Barrett said reliance on animal agriculture only exacerbates this. But she noted that turkey consumption across the United States has decreased in recent years.

"The majority of foods already on grocery store shelves are vegan - from fresh fruit to vegetables, grains, legumes, all of those things are already vegan," she said. "Processed vegan foods are just a small portion of that."

Barrett said animals such as turkeys feel pain and enjoy companionship, and suggested that people make the switch. The United States, however, is the world's largest producer and exporter of turkey products, meaning it's a significant driver of the farm economy.

By Grace Hussain for Sentient.
Broadcast version by Judith Ruiz-Branch for Wisconsin News Connection reporting for the Sentient-Public News Service Collaboration

Lisa Castagnozzi considers herself an engaged community resident. The longtime animal rights activist stays plugged in on local issues, yet even she was surprised to learn a new slaughterhouse was planned in Milwaukee, right up until approval for the development of the land was poised to pass the city council. Castagnozzi wasn’t alone. Most of the community had been left in the dark, it turned out. Once Castagnozzi and the group Slaughter Free Milwaukee found out, they jumped into action to spread word of the planned slaughterhouse — ultimately winning their fight to prevent the plant from being constructed.

Slaughterhouse Owners Try to Keep Zoning Applications Quiet

Though the slaughterhouse was planned for Milwaukee’s Century City Business Park — a district that city officials have struggled to get businesses to move into — numerous residential neighborhoods would be affected. Yet initially, only a few people were there to weigh in on the proposal at the public council committee meeting where the proposal was first addressed.

It was at that meeting that members of the council, including Alderman Robert Bauman, began questioning company representatives, and learned what the company was proposing was a slaughterhouse. The facility would slaughter roughly 500 cattle daily, including animals from Illinois, Montana, Wisconsin and the Dakotas, according to the company’s representative at the meeting.

At a zoning meeting held a week later, Alderman Robert Bauman called these suspiciously quiet efforts a “strange proceeding,” pointing to the lack of briefing by the Department of City Development and the absence of citizens weighing in during the public comment period.

“There was nobody there,” he said during another zoning meeting. “There were no citizens in support and no citizens in opposition.” The effort to keep the new facility proposal quiet was alarming to Castagnozzi, both as an animal rights advocate and a member of the community.

“We didn’t know anything about a slaughterhouse potentially coming into Milwaukee,” she says, calling it “kind of out of the blue.” The fact that the meat processing plant would be constructed in a “city-owned lot” meant the community should have a chance to weigh in, she says.

Alderman Bauman expressed similar concern in his public comments. “Slaughterhouses and…all types of businesses that produce noise and dirt and odor have historically had a stigma in central city communities,” he pointed out in his remarks to the full city council. “Why? Because for whatever reason, those types of negative land uses just seem to always end up in poor neighborhoods — primarily neighborhoods of color.”

Only Days to Inform Their Neighbors

Once Castagnozzi and her small cohort of animal rights activists did learn about the proposed measure, they had just a few days before the next meeting was scheduled to get the word out. With limited time and resources, the group took to online and physical spaces to reach community members, and began to make headway. “We as a group, made flyers, did social media, we physically spread out in the community and went to the coffee shops,” she says.

Some policymakers “don’t care what kind of jobs they are, how much they pay or what the working conditions are like — they’re jobs,” says Robert Grillo, head of Slaughter Free Network. According to government documents, the facility would have paid employees an average of $17 an hour — significantly above the city’s $7.25 minimum wage but well below the salary needed to live comfortably in Milwaukee.

Milwaukee’s residents do care, it turns out. In a matter of days, activists organized dozens of opposition letters and delivered them to council members. “Jobs are not just jobs. Slaughterhouse work is among the most exploitative, dangerous and relatively low paid work in the market,” reads the letter signed and sent by many of the opposing residents.

During a city council meeting, Alderman Khalif Rainey who at the time represented the neighborhood raised objections to campaign efforts. Rainey argued that the letters were not reflective of the community, and that he had received messages from people out of the state, but barely heard from his own constituents.

Though he voted to send the proposal back to committee for further discussion, Rainey argued that the jobs it would bring would improve the lives of the majority-Black community in which the slaughterhouse would be constructed. “That’s a good, well-paying job,” he said in the council meeting, “so again, it’s crazy how all roads lead back to this one question: do Black lives matter?”

Castagnozzi disagrees. “No one we spoke to was for it,” she says. At one community cafe near the proposed site, Castagnozzi says, none of the customers knew what was planned and, when they found out, they were appalled. “They just couldn’t believe it. Like, ‘what do you mean? Like, that’s the business they’re going to put in our neighborhood’.”

Getting communities to agree, collectively, to oppose a local initiative that offers jobs can be difficult. “People are afraid of retaliation. People are afraid of speaking out or they have certain relationships, and they’re worried about those relationships causing them problems with their work or in their personal life,” says Grillo.

It’s a risk that paid off for the Wisconsin group that have now organized themselves as an official chapter of the larger national organization. Strauss canceled their plans to build a new facility in Milwaukee. Ted Beneski, head of Insight Equity Holdings, LLC, which owns a majority share in Strauss Meats, sent an email from his iPhone to Grillo. The company’s “strategy has changed,” it read, and Strauss is “not planning to build a slaughterhouse [in or near Milwaukee] or anywhere else for that matter.” Earlier that summer, the remaining Strauss Meats slaughterhouse in the Milwaukee area was also shuttered. According to a press release the decision was the result of their recent divestment from the lamb and veal businesses, combined with the relocation of their beef operations to Illinois.

To persuade community residents to speak out, advocates and organizers have to “create a tension,” says Grillo. “It’s a moral crisis,” he adds. “You have to create that to get people to take sides.”


Grace Hussain wrote this article for Sentient.


get more stories like this via email

The U.S. Department of Agriculture has approved field trials for bird flu vaccines among cattle, but one Utah State veterinarian says to his knowledge those trials haven't begun yet.

Dr. Daniel Christensen, state veterinarian for the Utah Department of Agriculture and Food, said the USDA is likely still a long way from having the vaccine developed that would help mitigate the spread of bird flu in livestock.

The initial field study would only involve dairy cows to evaluate the safety of the vaccine. Christensen said H5N1 among cattle isn't a death sentence as it is among birds.

"So, they seem to recover pretty well and return to a decent level of production," said Christensen, "within two to three weeks, something in that range."

But Christensen added that the bird flu can lead to a drop in milk production for a two- to three-week time period while cattle recover.

The current risk level of bird flu in the general public in Utah is low - as there are no human and cattle infections being reported, according to the state's Department of Health and Human Services.

Christensen said as we enter the fall and migratory season, the risk of animals contracting the flu does increase. He said last fall, Utah lost about 140,000 birds.

Christensen said bird flu can pose serious and even lethal health complications for backyard and commercial poultry producers.

The Utah Department of Agriculture and Food encourages folks to practice strong biosecurity measures - such as keeping poultry away from waterfowl, and to be on the lookout for symptoms of bird flu like sudden death, nasal discharge, and decreased appetite or water intake.

"Generally speaking, what we get reported most often is, from our producers, is unexpected mortality," said Christensen, "and can we come down and test to figure out if it is highly pathogenic avian influenza or if it is something else."

Christensen said Utah currently finds itself in a good spot with zero dairy and poultry operations reporting outbreaks, but said that could change as we transition seasons.

By Marlena Williams for Sentient.
Broadcast version by Kathleen Shannon for Greater Dakota News Service reporting for the Sentient-Public News Service Collaboration

On Friday, the Supreme Court handed down their long-awaited opinion in Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo, overruling decades of settled precedent and effectively gutting the power of federal agencies to regulate on behalf of consumers, workers, animals and the environment. Loper Bright threatens a wide range of federal regulations, including policies that govern food safety and water pollution. The decision could undercut the authority of the federal agencies that regulate the meat and dairy industries and protect endangered species, meaning the loss of Chevron could also be a major loss for animals.

The Loper Bright case centered on a 40-year-old administrative law doctrine known as Chevron deference, which requires courts to defer to executive agencies' reasonable interpretations of ambiguous statutes. Under Chevron, agencies like the Environmental Protection Agency, the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Food and Drug Administration had considerable leeway to interpret federal laws and issue regulations based on their specific knowledge and expertise. The Supreme Court's momentous decision on Friday dramatically shifts power away from these federal agencies and towards the increasingly conservative federal courts.

What is Chevron Deference?

Chevron deference has been law since 1984, when the Supreme Court decided the landmark case Chevron U.S.A., Inc. v. Natural Resources Defense Council. In the decades after the case was decided, Chevron became shorthand for the idea that courts should defer to federal agencies when they are interpreting and applying ambiguous parts of federal statutes. As long as an agency's interpretation of a statute was reasonable, a court could not substitute its own interpretation of a law for that of an agency.

As a result, Chevron deference gave executive agencies wide latitude to fill in the gaps Congress left in sprawling, complex pieces of federal legislation. Federal agencies were able to issue regulations based on their specific expertise and respond to developing situations and needs, including climate change and the Covid pandemic.

Loper Bright and its companion case, Relentless, Inc. v. Department of Commerce, take that power away from expert agencies and give judges the massive authority to make complicated, often highly technical or scientific policy decisions about everything from dangerous pollutants to life-saving medications, as well as the meat and dairy industries.

The twin cases were brought by Atlantic herring fisherman who challenged a National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) policy that required them to pay out-of-pocket for federal monitors onboard their ships to enforce limits designed to prevent overfishing. But the fishermen's victory at the Supreme Court was also a win for major corporations, conservative politicians and even several members of the current Supreme Court who have long been hostile to Chevron deference and the power it granted federal agencies.

In January, The New York Times reported that the two cases were bankrolled by the conservative Koch Network, founded by the petrochemical giants Charles and David Koch. Overruling Chevron culminates a decades-long conservative project to roll back federal regulations and eviscerate what some call "the administrative state."

A Closer Look At the Opinion

In the 35-page opinion issued on June 28, just days before the belated end of the Supreme Court's latest controversial term, Chief Justice John Roberts outlined the Court's reasoning for overturning Chevron. The Court described the Chevron decision as a misguided and inconsistently applied "fiction" riddled with a "byzantine set of preconditions and exceptions" that have led some lower courts to ignore the doctrine altogether.

Relying on a novel interpretation of the Administrative Procedure Act, as well as timeworn constitutional arguments about the separation of powers, the Court asserted that it is the job of the neutral judicial system, not the executive branch, to decide complicated legal and statutory questions. While it appears that courts may still consult agency expertise for guidance, under Loper Bright, they are no longer required to give agencies deference as required by Chevron. The Court also seemed to suggest that Congress can, under certain circumstances, confer discretionary authority to an agency, but such authority will no longer be presumed.

In a forceful dissent joined by the court's three liberal justices, Justice Elena Kagan criticizes the majority for ignoring precedent, dismissing the value of agency expertise and dismantling what has become a cornerstone of modern law and governance.

"In one fell swoop, the majority today gives itself exclusive power over every open issue - no matter how expertise-driven or policy-laden - involving the meaning of regulatory law," wrote Justice Kagan. "As if it did not have enough on its plate, the majority turns itself into the country's administrative czar."

What Overruling Chevron Means for Animals and the Environment

Since the Court handed down its ruling on Friday, many groups have voiced their opposition to the decision, including the Sierra Club, the Natural Resource Defense Council, and the Southern Environmental Law Center. Environmental groups worry that the decision could have profound consequences for the agencies tasked with keeping our land, water and air healthy and clean. Without Chevron, it may be easier for polluting industries or other actors to challenge the actions of agencies like the Environmental Protection Agency or the Department of the Interior, in turn imperling regulations meant to curb pollution, protect the environment and slow the progress of climate change.

Earlier this year, Sentient reported on how overruling Chevron could impact farmed animals and wildlife. Many federal agencies - including the United States Department of Agriculture, the Food and Drug Administration and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service - play crucial roles in regulating animal industries and protecting wildlife. Animal advocates worry that losing Chevron will make it easier for courts to overturn regulations that directly or indirectly benefit animals.

For example, the end of Chevron may threaten pending emissions limitations for slaughterhouses and rendering plants and potentially undo new animal welfare standards rolled out by the USDA.

Overruling Chevron may also undermine the power of the Endangered Species Act, which is administered by two federal agencies: the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Courts have often deferred to these agencies' interpretations of the Endangered Species Act in litigation involving endangered wildlife, but the ruling in Loper Bright could make endangered animals even more vulnerable by making courts less deferential to the agencies tasked with protecting them.

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service recently issued finalized rules designed to revise habitat and species classifications and help the ESA to respond more readily to the effects of climate change on wildlife. Without Chevron deference, any challenge to these new rules is more likely to prevail.

However, some animal lawyers and advocates think overturning Chevron will ultimately have little impact on farmed animals, and may even benefit them. Without Chevron, judges might have room to look more critically at actions by agencies like the USDA or the EPA that have negative impacts on animals and rule in favor of advocates seeking more protections.

An Uncertain Future

Future litigation will likely be necessary before we understand the true contours of the new legal landscape the Supreme Court created last week. But it is clear that Loper Bright and Relentless signal a definitive turn towards deregulation, one that will make it even harder for agencies to regulate on the behalf of people, animals and the environment.


Marlena Williams wrote this article for Sentient.


get more stories like this via email