The cross-country movement of farmed animals has increased steadily over the past several decades, as animal agriculture has shifted toward large-scale industrial production under the control of fewer companies and relying on separate, specialized facilities...

An AWI report released in December revealed that the US Department of Agriculture’s approach to preventing and responding to the mistreatment of birds in slaughter plants remains largely ineffective. The Welfare of Birds at Slaughter...

More than 486,000 farmed animals suffered horrific deaths in barn fires in 2023 , pushing the death toll over the past decade to more than 6.8 million. As in previous years, birds accounted for the...

Thirty members of Congress sent a bipartisan letter to the US Department of Agriculture in February with pointed questions about the department’s effort to counter the widespread use of ventilation shutdown plus heat (VSD+) to...

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...