The Biden administration made historic progress to protect producers from meat company abuse. Amid the first meat industry attempt to roll that back, no one knows where Trump’s USDA will stand.
The Animal Welfare Act covers only about 5% of animals used in labs; the remainder are unknown
“If we’re going to gift a dog to these countries, we’ve gotta be sure they’re taken care of.” This is what veterinarian Dr. Karen Iovino told NBC News when she publicly disclosed that some partner countries in the US State Department’s Anti-Terrorism Assistance Program were brutally mistreating explosive detection canines gifted to them from the United States.
Large poultry companies, such as Perdue Farms, pay growers based on a “tournament system.” Farmers who fatten their chickens most efficiently are paid the best. Those who struggle to fatten their birds have their pay docked. But a federal rule finalized this month will provide some financial stability and transparency to thousands of farmers who raise broiler chickens across the state, said Melanie Canales, a project manager for RAFI-USA, a North Carolina-based nonprofit that advocates for farmers.
Contract poultry growers on Tuesday praised the third poultry rule released by Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack earlier in the day, while the National Chicken Council denounced it as one of the last pieces of the Biden-Harris administration’s “anti-business regulatory agenda.”
Mercy for Animals president and CEO Leah Garcés has been an animal rights advocate fighting the factory farming system for more than two decades. But her approach to advocacy changed the day she met Craig Watts.
Several poultry sector lawsuits are underway in the US, including several involving Tyson Foods, the world’s largest producer of chicken products.
He took out a $200,000 bank loan to build four giant chicken houses. But soon the chickens, crammed 25,000 wall-to-wall in the ammonia-laden air, started to become sick or died, and squeezed by Perdue’s profit margins, Watts struggled to pay the bills.
Perdue is suing the U.S. Department of Labor and a Robeson County poultry farmer who filed a whistleblower complaint against Perdue, one of the largest poultry producers in the country, nearly 10 years ago.
Nearly a decade later, Perdue, one of the country’s largest poultry producers, is suing Watts and the DOL. The lawsuit, filed last week in federal court for the Eastern District of North Carolina, challenges the constitutionality of Watts’ case.
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