Instead of squealing like a stuck hog ....

My dad favored Hampshire hogs --- for reasons I've long forgotten after many years off the farm; in modest numbers as was the case in most of Lucas County at the time. There were two smallish farms and a mix of cattle (dairy and beef), sheep, hogs and poultry with carefully maintained and rotated fields of row crops, lots of hay and plenty of pasture.

The hogs led rather pleasant lives with plenty of opportunities to display their sometimes annoying personalities as those inevitable appointments with culinary destiny approached.

Dad followed the pasture plan and sows roamed free until giving birth in the small red-painted frame duplexes on skids that were a feature in season in the south pasture, neatly arranged in the lane connecting that pasture to the barnyard when not in use.

Now, of course, grocery-store pork --- and I prefer pork to beef or poultry --- originates for the most part in massive confinement operations where sows are imprisoned during their productive years in crates so narrow they can't turn around, pumped full of food, water and semen to generate a steady stream of piglets kept always beyond their reach before being turned into sausage themselves after about two years.

Combine this with the filth generated by thousands of confined hogs in the form of slurry and it's enough to cause one to consider becoming a vegetarian --- and I would, were I not so lazy. Besides, I really enjoy well-cured bacon and other pork products.

Anyhow, back in 2018 Californians --- among the major consumers of Iowa pork --- passed the Farm Animal Confinement Initiative, also known as Proposition 12 --- legislation that would establish minimum space requirements for all farmed animals and ban the sale of pork from hogs kept in gestation crates altogether.

During October of 2022, the hog industry --- National Pork Producers Council, Farm Bureau Federation, etc. --- challenged Proposition 12 in front of the U.S. Supreme Court. Earlier this week, the court rejected that challenge.

Now representatives of the pork industry, including Iowa's U.S. Sen. Chuck Grassley, are squealing like stuck hogs. Grassley has proposed, I see, that the feds move to overturn the California law.

Here's another approach, proposed by Art Cullen, editor and publisher of The Storm Lake Pilot Tribune, who reminds pork producers that "Those Californians are your customers."