How much cruelty is a pork chop worth?

“Out of sight, out of mind” has served humans well in the modern meat market, where neatly packaged animal parts protect us from the inhumane realities of industrialized animal “production.”

Once seen, the methods of procurement cannot be unseen, and we’re forced to make a choice: Do we shrug and buy meat that has been created inhumanely, or do we demand that industry adapt a means of production to reflect a moral people?

This is essentially the question the Supreme Court must entertain in a case filed by the National Pork Producers Council and the American Farm Bureau Federation in response to a 2018 California law banning the sale of meat and eggs within the state from animals raised in extreme confinement.

The pork lobby claims that because it buys most of its pork from other states, the industry would have to reinvent itself just for California. Nice try. I’d think most Americans everywhere would be relieved to know such practices were discontinued. Besides, the Center for a Humane Economy reports that about 34% of pork farmers already don’t use gestation crates.

Let me explain what the rest of the pork industry is trying to protect: 500pound pregnant sows are confined in a metal crate sized to fit their bodies.

For 16 weeks of gestation, the sows can’t turn move. When they’re ready to give birth, the pigs are taken to the “farrowing barn” for about 10 days, where they deliver their progeny. They scramble through another confined space to suckle their mothers, who are returned to the “gestation barn” for another 16 weeks of torture. And so it goes for about eight litters, if the sow makes it that long, after which her miserable life on Earth is put to an end. Is a pork chop worth all that?

The summary above comes from Matthew

Scully, a speechwriter for President George W. Bush whose 2002 book, “Dominion: The Power of Man, the Suffering of Animals and the Call to Mercy,” documented the plight of gestating sows and foreshadowed the argument in an amicus brief in the Supreme Court case that will be argued next week. Such practices, sadly, continue. In addition to Scully, the brief is co-written with two conservative thinkers — Notre Dame law professor O. Carter Snead, and journalist Mary Eberstadt, a senior research fellow at the Faith & Reason Institute.

These three public thinkers’ premise — and conclusion — is that man’s dominion over animals is precisely why we owe them protection from cruelty and suffering. The pork industry has its own slate of powerful friends, including the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the pharmaceutical industry and producers of foie gras — goose or duck liver cruelly created by force-feeding the animals to fatten their livers.

Their argument focuses on what’s known as the “dormant commerce clause,” or the implied prohibition in the Constitution’s commerce clause against states passing laws that excessively interferes with interstate commerce. Thus, the arguments by Scully, Snead and Eberstadt could be pivotal. As they made clear, there is centuries-old moral precedent that people should shield animals from suffering.

Thus, the justices’ conservative majority have a rare opportunity to align themselves not only with their liberal counterparts but with some of history’s greatest ethicists and philosophers. The law provides a way to end a ruthless means of food production. In the process, they would help create a humane economy while also reminding us that our human — and humane — bonds are stronger than financial incentives or arguments of inconvenience.