“Before I get into the specifics of the law, I think it’s important to think about what happens to these chickens in industrial egg production, what their daily lives are like, and why having cage-free laws like this are so important. In conventional egg production, egg-laying hens are confined to a battery cage, barren wire cages where the birds will spend their entire lives. They are so small that the birds can’t even flap their wings. They’re crammed in there with several other birds. They have the same amount of space as an iPad to spend their entire life. They’re denied nearly everything that’s natural to them.” –Kate Brindle, Lunch + Legislation, January 6, 2025
We welcomed Kate Brindle, Program Manager, Public and Corporate Policy, Farm Animal Protection, HSUS. The law that requires all eggs sold in Michigan to come from hens who are raised in a cage-free environment finally went into effect in Michigan on December 31, 2014. It had been on the books since 2009, when an earlier version of the law was signed.
Kate gave a succinct and clear history of that 15 year gap, explaining why it took so long. We also learned about California’s somewhat parallel effort to impose standards on confinement of animals raised for food. This campaign has reached the U.S. Supreme Court which in 2023 decided that California’s Prop. 12 does not violate the constitution when it regulates out-of-state producers selling in California.
Conditions in which animals raised for food are kept, particularly by industrial agriculture operations, and the nature and scope of regulation is a hot-button issue that’s relevant today. As we enter a new session of Congress this month, the EATS Act looms as a threat to state and local efforts to improve animal welfare. This bill, if enacted into law, would roll back state regulation of agriculture, including animal welfare measures, and is being put forward by big industrial agriculture concerns.
As the quote at the beginning of this post indicates, Kate never loses site of the main goal of the cage-free law: to improve the lives of 10.000,000 chickens annually in the state. Nor does she want us to forget, and she urges us to keep advocating.
Additional Resources:
- View the full interview here (Editor’s note, the number referenced at 8:44 of the interview should be 10,000,000)
- Cage-Free Egg Law FAQs (from the Michigan Department of Agriculture and Rural Development)
- Protect State Laws | HSLF (what you can do to defeat EATS)
- Detroit News article