Actions that have a large impact sometimes don't feel like much. To counteract that bias, I'm sharing arguably the best use of two minutes this month for those in the U.S.
Background
In May, the US Supreme Court upheld the ability of US states to require certain standards for animal products sold within their borders, e.g. California's Prop 12, which banned the sale of animal products that involve certain intensive confinement practices.
It was a huge victory! But after their defeat in the Supreme Court, the animal farming industry has turned to Congress, pushing the EATS Act.
The proposed legislation would take away state power to regulate the kind of agricultural products that enter their borders. Essentially, if any one state permits the production or sale of a particular agricultural product, every other state could have to do so as well, regardless of how dangerous or unethical the product is and regardless of existing state legislation.
Just a small sample of laws that could be subverted by the EATS Act include those governing:
- Chemicals in baby food containers
- Harmful pesticides in communities and applying them directly to crops for human consumption
- Arsenic in feed for animals slaughtered for food and other poison control
- Child labor
- Puppy mills
- Wildlife protection
- Pollutant and emissions standards, e.g., bans on spraying sewage on crops directly before they are sold to people
- Fire hazards
- Drugs that contain opioid properties and alcohol and tobacco sales to minors
And, of course, legislation like Proposition 12 that improves animal welfare requirements and has been a dominant focus of the pro-animal movement.
2 Minutes of Action
10 seconds: Send a written message to your legislators
~1.5 minutes: Call your legislators
- Find them
- Call your one U.S. representative and two U.S. senators (found in the federal section), ideally during business hours
- Read a script like this one:
As your constituent, I urge you to oppose the Exposing Agricultural Trade Suppression' (EATS) Act (S. 2619/HR 4999). This is a dangerous, regressive bill that will undo decades of protections for farmed animals and cause them to endure even more suffering for the profits of animal agricultural interests. It would also have devastating consequences for humans and the environment.”
*Note that there is another bill known as the EATS Act of 2023, which is Enhance Access To SNAP. Please be specific that you are asking them to oppose the Exposing Agricultural Trade Suppression Act.
This seems like a reasonable ask, good luck with it! I can't help myself, unfortunately.
However, I did bounce off the clickbaity title of this post. I wouldn't like an EA forum where I had to open each link to work out whether it was worth reading or taking action on. I much prefer posts which try to make transparent what the ask is. In this case, I think "Call on U.S. legislators to protect farmed animal welfare" would've been more transparent and possibly even more attractive to some.
I totally agree and almost didn't proceed with this title. However, I would like to see more posts like this that present short, actionable ways to have an impact outside of donations and in a way that was a primary point of the post. How cool would it be if we had ten more posts like this? I'd happily spend that 20+ minutes each month completing the full list. Also, I'm unsure if there's evidence of this but I have a general assumption people are more willing to take action for a cause area they don't prioritize if they've already loosely committed to taking an action, such that not IDing the cause in the title might lead to more action. But very happy to be proven wrong on that!
FYI, Manifold now has a market on the likelihood of the act becoming law:
FYI in the future I think it's probably a good idea to link readers to the bill in question (here, I believe) in addition to secondary sources.
Could you explain how it could affect these rules? By my reading the bill is solely about agricultural pre-harvest standards, and would not affect packaging or fire hazards, which are typically post-harvest. Similarly, I would assume most rules about alcohol and tobacco are about how they can be sold or consumed, not how they can be produced (and are often federal anyway) so it's a bit surprising to me that they might be materially affected by this bill.
For reference here is what I think is the relevant section of the text:
Looks like that list of possible things that could be impacted was copied from this source:
https://www.exploreveg.org/2023/06/26/urgent-alert-animal-welfare-and-state-rights-under-threat-from-eats-act/
GPT4 says it's unlikely that those would be impacted by the bill: https://chat.openai.com/share/49d449b2-c753-4fc3-bee3-61179832fa5d
This seems more accurate in terms of discussion of what laws may be impacted:
https://sentientmedia.org/8-key-laws-threatened-by-eats-act/
Thanks!
Yeah, clicking through one of the examples of a bill that would supposedly be impacted I don't see the relevance of pre-harvesting regulation.
I've done this!
Me too
Done, thanks for the nudge.
Thank you for sharing Rocky -- very easy and I will re-post this to the New Roots Institute summer fellows to take this action today!