Plant-Based & Vegan Active Updated Jul 16, 2026
Public opinion and factory farming keep drifting apart, then back together
Surveys keep finding that most people oppose common factory-farming practices, yet the vast majority of farmed animals are raised on factory farms and meat consumption keeps rising. The arc tracks whether policy and corporate commitments, like cage-free pledges and national farming roadmaps, start closing that gap.
The story so far
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Jul 16, 2026 Latest
Switzerland set a transition period running through full enforcement in 2027 requiring labels on meat, eggs, milk and foie gras, domestic or imported, disclosing painful procedures like debeaking, tail docking and unanesthetized force-feeding, with restaurants and retailers also required to comply. Separately, a Canadian scorecard found 15 major food companies had fully delivered on cage-free egg pledges, a 60 percent jump since 2024, with 11 restaurant chains now sourcing 100 percent cage-free eggs.
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Jul 10, 2026
A survey found fewer than 13 percent of British adults rated common factory-farming practices as acceptable, while the UK government's Farming Roadmap 2050 began encouraging farmers to shift from livestock into crops like lentils. Separately, a Canadian scorecard found McDonald's Canada, A&W, Subway and Boston Pizza had all reached 100 percent cage-free egg sourcing, though Canada as a whole sat at just 21 percent cage-free versus the UK's 82 percent and the US's 47 percent.
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Jun 30, 2021
Answering a petition signed by more than 1.4 million people, the European Commission committed to propose legislation phasing out and finally banning cages for hens, sows, calves, rabbits, and other farmed animals across the bloc. It set its sights on tabling that proposal by the end of 2023, a promise campaigners would later have to keep chasing.
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Nov 6, 2018
Ten years later Californians went further with Proposition 12, again by close to 63 percent, requiring cage-free housing for egg-laying hens and barring the sale in California of eggs, pork, and veal from animals kept in tight confinement anywhere. By tying market access to how animals are treated, it reached well beyond the state's own farms.
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Nov 4, 2008
California voters passed Proposition 2 with about 63 percent in favor, requiring that egg-laying hens, breeding pigs, and calves raised for veal have room to turn around, lie down, stand up, and fully extend their limbs. Few animals in the state were then raised under such rules. The lopsided vote showed how far public feeling ran ahead of common practice.
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Jul 19, 1999
The European Union adopted a directive to phase out the bare battery cage for egg-laying hens, setting minimum welfare standards and banning conventional cages across every member state from 2012. It was one of the first times a major bloc wrote farm animal welfare into binding law. The industry was given more than a decade to adjust.
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