Opinion: The day our “world-leading” animal welfare system died

Marie McAninch is a Senior Scientific Officer at SPCA New Zealand specialising in farmed animal welfare. She has worked in animal welfare science and policy for over a decade and completed her Master’s thesis on the provision of nesting material to farrowing sows on New Zealand farms. References for article available on request.

“This bill aims to provide certainty,” Associate Agriculture Minister Andrew Hoggard promised when introducing the Animal Welfare (Regulations for Management of Pigs) Amendment Bill.

Yesterday, as the bill passed its second and third readings under urgency, that certainty arrived.

It is now certain that New Zealand’s animal welfare legislation has been twisted, behind closed doors, to serve industry rather than animals and public interest. It is certain that independent scientific advice can be discarded- only to be overwritten with the help of the Chief Science Advisor to fit the desired narrative. And it is certain that on the floor of the House this week, New Zealand’s reputation for “world-leading” animal welfare standards was finally put out of its misery.

This Bill locks in place the use of farrowing crates, which the High Court has already ruled unlawful. It reproduces, almost verbatim, the standards requested by New Zealand Pork while ignoring the 89% of submitters who opposed them. And it sidelines the National Animal Welfare Advisory Committee, the body established to, in the Ministry for Primary Industries’ own words, “protect against regulatory capture by any one ideology or perspective.”

SPCA wants to see a thriving local pork sector, and we were prepared to work collaboratively toward a balanced solution for sows, piglets and farmers. Unfortunately, we were not invited to, because the government wanted to run a ‘targeted consultation’ process with those “that regulations in this House will affect the most”.

If that were true, the process would have centred the animals.

As a charity with an international background, we might have advised that this approach is not only bad for animals, it also invites real trade risks. Export markets increasingly scrutinise animal welfare standards, not just ethically but as justification for non-tariff barriers and indicators of regulatory credibility. New Zealand has sent its first clear signal that our animal welfare system is no longer science-led or reliable, and that damage is far harder to undo than any single piece of legislation.

SPCA has worked to protect animals from cruelty and advance animal welfare in New Zealand for over 150 years. Our work enjoys broad consensus across political lines -protecting animals is not a partisan position.

But we have never seen a process like this.

When the High Court ruled previous farrowing crate regulations unlawful in 2020, it stated that the Animal Welfare Act did not allow practicality and economics to override animal welfare by default.

This had implications beyond pig farming. The National Animal Welfare Advisory Committee stood by the Court’s reasoning, raising an uncomfortable question: would the Committee keep recommending reforms other animal farming industries view as “too far”? Perhaps this is why the goal of ‘reforming’ that Committee appeared quietly in the government coalition agreement in 2023.

In the meantime, MPI has attempted to justify farrowing crates despite the Animal Welfare Act’s requirement for people in charge of animals to meet their physical, health, and behavioural needs.

It relies on a qualification in the Act: that those needs are “appropriate to the species, environment, and circumstances of the animal.” In this case, MPI argues, the “circumstance” is farming pigs for pork. This justifies keeping sows in crates.

By that logic, almost any practice becomes defensible.

One might also argue that the species and circumstance of the sow days before birth - intelligent, sentient and heavily pregnant, instinctually driven to move and build a nest- is uniquely incompatible with a cage so small she cannot turn around.

These arguments are exactly the kind that might have been tested in court, had officials not pursued a process seemingly designed to shield the regulations from legal challenge.

In the quest to provide industry with ‘certainty’, they’ve dismissed warnings by the Regulations Review Committee that the types of provisions in the Bill may well “trespass on the role of the courts in interpreting the law.“

A more experienced Minister might have recognised by now that rushing through controversial, evidence-thin policy on the contorted advice of his officials does not in fact create certainty. It projects fragility. Parliament has built the legislative equivalent of a house of straw, which will collapse the moment political pressure blows through.

This process has given SPCA one certainty: we are not backing down. We are more determined than ever to see farmed animals freed from cages, and today marks the beginning of the next phase in that work, not the end.