Activism & Animals Active Updated Aug 1, 2026
Factory farms in court
Who gets to see inside factory farms, and what happens to the people who show the public, is being settled case by case: First Amendment challenges to state ag-gag laws, criminal trials of activists who carried out sick animals, and the pork industry's campaign to overturn California's Proposition 12. Since 2015, federal courts have struck down ag-gag laws in five states: Idaho, Utah, Iowa, Kansas and North Carolina. As of July 2026, the sharpest front is Congress, where the House has voted 224 to 200 to nullify Prop 12 and the Senate has yet to follow.
The story so far
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Aug 1, 2026 Latest
A Sentient-commissioned poll found Iowa voters opposed the Save Our Bacon Act 45% to 23%, and 64% said learning of Rep. Ashley Hinson's support for the bill made them view her less favorably. Iowa hog farmer Anna Pesek said pigs, consumers, workers, farmers and communities all deserve better.
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Jul 13, 2026
The US Senate's farm bill counterpart landed as a 902-page draft, Food Safety News reported, with the House-passed Prop 12-nullifying Save Our Bacon Act language still unresolved in the Senate version.
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Apr 30, 2026
The US House passed its farm bill, the Farm, Food, and National Security Act (H.R. 7567), 224 to 200, carrying Section 12006, the Save Our Bacon Act language that would nullify Proposition 12 and stop states from setting welfare-based production standards for farm products sold across state lines. The fight moved to the Senate.
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Apr 30, 2026
California's First District Court of Appeal threw out Wayne Hsiung's felony conspiracy conviction and one trespass count, ruling the trial judge should have let jurors weigh his good-faith belief that the rescues were lawful. One misdemeanor trespass conviction stands, and the panel rejected the argument that necessity justified the actions.
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Jan 8, 2024
The Eighth Circuit upheld Iowa's rewritten ag-gag laws, reversing the rulings that had blocked them. The court called the trespass-by-deception statute 'a permissible restriction on intentionally false speech undertaken to accomplish a legally cognizable harm.' Undercover investigation in the country's biggest pork state got harder again.
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Nov 30, 2023
A Sonoma County judge sentenced Wayne Hsiung to 90 days in jail and two years of probation after a jury convicted him of felony conspiracy and misdemeanor trespass for open rescues of chickens and ducks at Sunrise Farms and Reichardt Duck Farm. Unlike the Utah jury, this one never weighed his necessity argument; he was prevented from discussing farm conditions at trial.
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May 11, 2023
The Supreme Court upheld California's Proposition 12 in National Pork Producers Council v. Ross, rejecting the industry's claim that the sales standard for pork from cruelly confined pigs unconstitutionally burdened interstate commerce. States kept the power to bar the sale of products from extreme confinement, and producers began segregating supply chains to comply.
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Feb 23, 2023
The Fourth Circuit held that North Carolina's Property Protection Act could not be enforced against undercover investigations, agreeing they are newsgathering protected by the First Amendment. The Supreme Court declined the state's appeal that October, leaving the ruling in place across the circuit.
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Oct 8, 2022
A Utah jury acquitted Direct Action Everywhere co-founder Wayne Hsiung and Paul Darwin Picklesimer of burglary and theft for removing two sick piglets, Lily and Lizzie, from a Smithfield Foods facility in 2017. Prosecutors had valued the piglets at $42.20 each; the two men had faced up to five and a half years. It was the first jury acquittal for the group's open rescue strategy.
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Apr 25, 2022
The US Supreme Court declined to review the ruling striking down Kansas's ag-gag law, locking in the coalition victory led by the Animal Legal Defense Fund. Enacted in 1990, the Kansas statute was the oldest in the United States and had deterred undercover investigations at animal facilities for nearly three decades.
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Jan 9, 2019
The US District Court for the Southern District of Iowa struck down Iowa's 2012 ag-gag law, ruling that its ban on undercover investigations at factory farms and slaughterhouses violated the First Amendment. Iowa's legislature answered with new, reworded versions of the law.
Animal Legal Defense Fund
Animal Law Developments (Duane Morris)
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Jul 7, 2017
A federal court struck down Utah's ag-gag law in its entirety on First Amendment grounds. The 2012 statute's first target had been Amy Meyer, charged in 2013 for filming a sick cow being moved by a front loader at a Draper meatpacking plant; she was the first person in the nation prosecuted under an ag-gag law, and the charges were dropped after a public outcry.
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Aug 3, 2015
A federal judge struck down Idaho's ag-gag law, the first ruling of its kind in the country. Chief Judge B. Lynn Winmill wrote that the state's purpose 'was to protect industrial animal agriculture by silencing its critics,' and that audio and visual evidence is 'a uniquely persuasive means of conveying a message.' In 2018 the Ninth Circuit became the first federal appeals court to strike ag-gag provisions, holding the recording ban violated the First Amendment.
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