Egg prices are soaring all over the nation, driven by avian flu and, some critics say, federal regulations that incentivize the culling of chickens exposed to it. California is also doing its part to contribute to egg scarcity.
On November 6, 2018, California voters approved Proposition 12, the Humane Society–drafted ballot measure that banned the use of cages for some farm animals — including egg-laying hens. Illustrating California’s desire to transform the nation, the law applies to products sold in the state, no matter where they’re produced.
Because it prohibits cages, Proposition 12 makes it more expensive to accommodate laying hens in warm and well-lit shelters. “The new law says that they need at least two feet of room so they can put their wings out and stretch and turn around, and a lot of producers just can’t keep up with that kind of cost,” said Anne Defeyter-Loden, owner of BeeWench Farm, a producer on California’s central coast. Faced with that cost, many California farmers have simply allowed their chickens to roam more freely outside. Others have sold their businesses to bigger corporations.
This act of animal liberation has produced at least two unintended but predictable outcomes.
First, because chickens are sensitive to daylight — hens lay fewer eggs in dark winter months — the egg supply is now subject to seasonal variations for the first time in decades. “We still have eggs,” Defeyter-Loden said. “They just lay maybe once a week instead of once a day.”
Second, allowing chickens to roam more freely increases the likelihood of close encounters between chickens and the wild birds that carry H5N1, the lethal avian flu. There’s some correlative evidence to support that hypothesis: California has culled more birds (23 million) than all other states but Iowa (30 million), the nation’s leading producer of eggs. It’s worth noting that a third of Iowa’s total egg production goes to California; at least some of its producers are therefore complying with Proposition 12.
The unintended but predictable outcome of allowing animal-rights activists to govern farming has been economic hardship for Californians. Egg prices are higher nationally but nowhere as high as in California. In California, the average price per dozen is about twice the price anywhere else in the nation, even in such Democratic-leaning states as New York ($5.37) and Illinois ($4.85). Rising egg prices have ricocheted throughout the California economy. Restaurant menu prices are up, and so is the cost of baking.
All of this was predicted during the 2018 Proposition 12 campaign. Farmers, who know a thing or two about farming, warned voters that banning cages would be a disaster for animals and consumers. Not so, said the animal-rights activists.
“Californians know that locking farm animals in tight cages for the duration of their lives is cruel and compromises food safety,” Wayne Pacelle, then-president and chief executive of the Humane Society, told the Los Angeles Times in 2017. “All animals deserve humane treatment, especially those raised for food.” Activists’ allies in academia dismissed claims that Proposition 12 would injure egg producers — precisely because the state had already beaten the industry into minor-league status.
“A generation ago, California was a big egg state and shipped eggs out,” Daniel Sumner, professor of agricultural and resource economics at UC Davis, told the Los Angeles Times recently. Today, Sumner says, California imports 70 percent of its eggs from other states.
Sumner is right. Like almost all California businesses, ranchers and farmers deal with a smothering economic climate, one the Tax Foundation ranks No. 48 in the nation. But, like a few other California industries — homebuilding, insurance, and oil come to mind — egg producers have had to contend with populist voter outrage. Before 2018’s Proposition 12, egg producers were walloped by 2008’s Proposition 2, which was also backed by the Humane Society and was supposed to increase space for farm animals.
A decade later, the Humane Society was back, with Proposition 12. In that more recent campaign, environmental groups recast their 2008 effort as something of a pretext: It had provided “modest relief from the most extreme forms of confinement” for farm animals, declared the Humane League, but its real success was in laying “the foundations for further protections to come,” protections spelled out in Proposition 12.
In 2018, ignoring farmers and basic economics, the state’s voters proved unable to resist the attractiveness of a proposition that, for ballot purposes, the state’s attorney general had labeled “The Prevention of Cruelty to Farm Animals Act.” They approved Proposition 12 two-to-one. The law was implemented for egg producers 13 months later, on January 1, 2020. (In 2023, the U.S. Supreme Court dismissed a claim by pork farmers that the law violated the federal commerce clause, because “petitioners do not allege the law purposefully discriminates against out-of-state economic interests.”)
Wise observers will recognize a familiar pattern: Californians often surrender government power to extremists. Environmentalists have, for example, leveraged state regulatory power in ways that exacerbate the risk of wildfires and have driven the cost of energy to the highest in the nation. Capping insurance prices, the state’s Soviet-style insurance commission has pushed that market into free fall. Gender-identity radicals use state power to sledgehammer the family and girls’ sports. The state routinely backs the teachers’ unions that have brought down California’s once premier education system. New state laws muzzle employer speech on matters of politics and religion. We could go on, but you get the picture.
You may take some comfort in the fact that it’s Californians who suffer most from their own madness. But remember Iowa: California is merely the place where such damaging ideas are born. Always aspiring to shape global culture, California is taking aim at you, wherever you live.
Reprinted with permission from National review by Will Swaim.
The opinions expressed by columnists are their own and do not necessarily represent the views of AMAC or AMAC Action.
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