ASPCA Condemns Long-Awaited USDA Guidelines that Fail to Meaningfully Improve Oversight of Animal Welfare Label Claims

WASHINGTON, DC – Today, more than two years after the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) first announced its intention to strengthen verification requirements for animal raising claims, including “free-range” and “humanely raised,” the agency released revised labeling guidance. Effective immediately, the guidelines recommend—but do not require—third-party certifications to back up animal raising claims, despite the agency’s well-established authority to implement clear requirements for the use of certain food labels. The USDA also does not adequately define what constitutes a meaningful third-party certification, ultimately failing to effectively rein in the misleading use of animal welfare labels. In addition to duping well-intentioned customers looking for higher-welfare products, these deceptively labeled products unfairly compete with and disadvantage truly higher-welfare farmers legitimately using the same claims.

In response, the ASPCA^® (The American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals^®) issued the following statement:

“The USDA’s revised guidelines acknowledge the prevalence of—and harm done by—misleading animal welfare labels, yet the agency continues to shirk its responsibility to fix this problem, offering toothless guidelines that give industrial animal agriculture more cover to deceive consumers, undercut responsible farmers, and continue to raise billions of animals in inhumane conditions,” said Kara Shannon, director of farm animal welfare policy for the ASPCA. “One troubling example provided in the USDA’s guidance would allow producers to label a product as "humanely raised" based solely on a statement that the animal was fed a vegetarian diet. This guidance is not a meaningful assurance of good welfare, and comes nowhere close to consumer expectations of what these types of holistic animal raising claims mean. To match consumer expectations and give genuinely higher-welfare farmers who are providing animals with better lives a fighting chance, the agency should require—not just recommend—that claims of better practices are backed by meaningful animal welfare certification programs.”

For more information about the ASPCA’s work to reform misleading labels and educate consumers on how to make sense of confusing label claims to align their purchases with their preferences for higher-welfare products, please visit www.aspca.org/farmsurveys.