Editorial: Walmart hasn't stopped pork suppliers from confining pregnant sows in cruel cages. Time for shareholders to step up (2024)

For most pregnant pigs on big factory farms in the U.S., each four-month gestation is spent in a tiny crate. The sows can stand up but can’t turn around or take more than a couple of steps. Slats in the flooring allow waste to drop through but that doesn’t stop its ammonia smell from constantly enveloping them.

Sows stuck in these crates sometimes obsessively bite the metal bars and suffer from foot and leg disorders. After their pregnancy, the sows are put in farrowing crates where they nurse piglets for a few weeks. Then it’s back to the gestation crate for artificial insemination, and the whole process starts over again.

Constricting animals in cages is one of the cruelest practices in factory farming, which is also perpetrated on egg-laying hens and veal calves. Over the last 15 years, many of these animals have been freed from their cramped environs by state laws and ballot measures, such as Proposition 12 in California, driven by a growing consumer revulsion for food that comes from badly treated animals.

Since then, dozens of grocery retailers and food companies pledged to get sows out of crates. Nine years ago Walmart joined the chorus, asking its suppliers to get sows out of cramped cages as part of sweeping animal welfare guidelines.

The big box retailer accounts for about a quarter of grocery sales in the U.S. and this would have been a meaningful animal welfare move, but Walmart never mandated these changes or set benchmarks or deadlines for its suppliers. At the time, the editorial board worried that Walmart simply asking wouldn’t be enough to push suppliers to do the necessary retrofitting of farms and barns.

And it doesn’t seem that it was. Walmart will not say how much of the pork it sells comes from operations where pregnant pigs are either completely out of crates or cage-free for most of the gestation period. If it had made significant gains in supplying pork from operations where sows are mostly crate-free, it’s hard to believe Walmart wouldn’t have proudly made that public. Instead the company admits on its website that “progress has been slow” in this area.

Now some Walmart shareholders are pushing a proposal for the annual meeting on June 5 that would require the company to set specific goals and timelines for suppliers to move sows out of cages if they want to do business with Walmart. This reasonable and straightforward request is one of seven various proposals from shareholders, which include a racial equity audit and “a living wage” for workers.

The board of directors is opposed. Walmart says changing housing systems is expensive for suppliers and not everyone agrees on how to do it. On its corporate website, it writes that suppliers and policymakers have “different views regarding optimal housing for animal welfare.”

Yet, some of its biggest competitors — Costco, Kroger, Amazon, Target — report significant progress at getting their suppliers to reduce the time sows spend in the crates or get rid of them altogether. Fast-food companies have also done better than Walmart. Wendy’s, for example, says that all of the pork it uses comes from facilities that don’t put pregnant sows in crates for their entire gestation, and McDonald’s reported in 2022 it was 91% of the way there.

Walmart says it expects its suppliers to adhere to basic welfare principles of protecting animals from hunger, thirst, discomfort, pain, and fear and allow them to express normal behavior. But there is no normal behavior that can be expressed in a gestation crate. The company also says all its pork suppliers abide by the standards of the Pork Quality Assurance Plus Program, which requires quarterly site assessments of facilities and the animals. Fine. But this is a program run by the National Pork Board, which exists to provide consumer information and promote pork. The program does not prohibit gestation crates.

“All we are asking Walmart to do is create benchmarks to get some form of group housing,” says Josh Balk, a former vice president of the Humane Society of the U.S. and co-founder of the Accountability Board, an organization which holds shares in the company and filed the shareholder proposal.

And that is unlikely to happen in the near future unless shareholders adopt the animal welfare measure. It’s difficult to imagine Walmart getting its pork suppliers to voluntarily change their housing setup for pregnant sows in significant numbers unless it insists. The pork industry has fought state-mandated changes to pig farming all the way to the Supreme Court — where it lost its lawsuit against Proposition 12, which prohibited the sale of meat or eggs from pregnant sows, egg-laying hens and veal calves kept in extreme confinement.

It’s been nearly a decade since Walmart introduced standards it hoped suppliers would adopt. No more waiting and hoping. Walmart is the largest grocery retailer in the country and should wield its clout to get more sows out of cages right now.