Articles About Farmed Animals

The USDA’s Food Safety and Inspection Service announced in September that it had launched a new exploratory sampling program to assess the accuracy of “no antibiotic” marketing claims for beef products. The common practice of...

A recent, first-of-its-kind survey of more than 1,000 US egg consumers showed a high level of interest in a new technology called “in-ovo sexing” that can determine the sex of chicken embryos before they have...

In October, the US Supreme Court denied a petition to review the Fourth Circuit ruling that struck down portions of the Property Protection Act—North Carolina’s latest ag-gag law—on the grounds that recording audio or video...

A recent study published in Cambridge University’s Animal Welfare journal (Mood et al., 2023) estimates the number of farmed fishes slaughtered for food in global aquaculture from 1990 to 2019. The study authors first noted...

In November, the US Department of Agriculture published a final rule establishing animal welfare standards for the millions of animals raised on organic farms. The Organic Livestock and Poultry Standards (OLPS) rule is the result...

Eggs are a staple of the Western diet. In the United States, 94 percent of Americans report consuming them, and annual egg consumption averages around 280 per person. In 2022, around 109.5 billion eggs were...

Since early 2022, countries around the world have felt the impacts of a highly pathogenic avian influenza (HPAI) outbreak that has threatened wild bird populations and decimated domestic poultry flocks on an unprecedented scale. In...

More and more consumers are seeking to avoid products from “factory farms”—where animals are kept in abysmal conditions. Such consumers often look for animal-raising claims on packaging labels that purport to indicate higher-welfare conditions. Unfortunately...

In June, two companies—Upside Foods and Good Meat—were issued groundbreaking grants of inspection by the US Department of Agriculture that cleared the way for “cell-cultivated” (a.k.a. lab-grown) chicken to be produced and sold in the...

In 2018, Proposition 12 passed in California with 63 percent of the vote. It mandated minimum floor space for egg-laying hens, calves raised for veal, and breeding sows and their piglets in California and prohibited...