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Millions of people voted for these animal welfare laws. Congress is trying to overturn them.

How the new Farm Bill could keep millions of pigs locked in tiny cages.

Most of America’s 6 million female breeding pigs are confined in gestation crates — tiny enclosures that prevent them from even turning around. It’s considered to be one of the cruelest farming practices.

Voters in California and Massachusetts have voted to prohibit the use of the crates, and prohibit the sale of pork from farms that use the crates.

The pork industry has sued California and Massachusetts numerous times in a longrunning effort to repeal the laws, and have failed in each court case.

The industry has also lobbied Congress to pass legislation that would nullify the laws, and they just had a partial victory, with their desired legislation added into the House Farm Bill.

The fight is now in the US Senate, which is drafting its own Farm Bill.

Last year, nearly 130 million pigs were raised for meat in the US, but they didn’t come out of nowhere; they had parents. Or as pork producers call them, “breeder pigs.”

Since the 1970s, producers have been keeping most of the breeding females — known as sows — in tiny enclosures called gestation crates. It’s a way for producers to more closely monitor the pigs’ pregnancies and control their feeding, but in doing so, they’ve created one of the worst forms of widespread animal abuse.

The crates are so small that the pigs — who are highly social and intelligent — cannot walk or even turn around, and it causes many to bite the bars of their crate and engage in other repetitive behaviors that are signs of chronic stress. They’re confined in the crates for virtually their entire life, until they themselves are shipped off for slaughter when their reproductivity wanes at around five years old.

The animal welfare scientist Temple Grandin has likened gestation crates to forcing a human to live in an airline seat.

If the use of these crates disturbs you, you’re not alone. In 2002, Floridians — via a ballot measure — voted to require pregnant pigs to have at least enough room to turn around and extend their limbs, effectively banning the use of gestation crates in the state. Four years later, Arizona voters did the same. Later, seven other states followed suit.

As important as these laws are, they weren’t that effective in actually getting many pregnant pigs out of gestation crates because most of those states host little of the country’s pork production. But everything changed in 2016, when Massachusetts put a measure on the ballot to not only prohibit the use of gestation crates in the state, but to also prohibit the sale of pork from farms that use such confining crates, whether the farm is in Massachusetts or not. (Disclosure: I worked on this campaign during my time at the nonprofit Humane World for Animals.)

It passed overwhelmingly, with 78 percent of voters in support. And two years later, 63 percent of California voters supported a nearly identical law. All of a sudden, pork producers around the country had to stop using gestation crates if they wanted to sell meat into these two states that, combined, contained almost 15 percent of the US population.

But now, these overwhelmingly popular laws have a chance of being upended — and gestation crates being used to confine more pigs in the future — if a provision in the new Farm Bill, now being hashed out in Congress, becomes law.

The fight over caging pigs is falling across unexpected lines

Not everyone has embraced freeing the sows from their intense confinements.

Several meat trade groups, along with Triumph Foods — one of America’s largest pork companies — have sued California and Massachusetts numerous........

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