Missouri Attorney General Sues California over Henhouse Laws

Missouri Attorney General Chris Koster has sued California this week to keep it from enforcing costly new standards for the treatment of egg-laying hens. The cause of action was created because California insists that the rules are not only applicable to California, but also to those out-of-state facilities which ship eggs for sale to California. The new rules are set to come into effect from January 2015.

According to Koster, Missouri hens contribute about 6 percent of eggs sold in California.


Koster said in the suit that farmers from Missouri, "can incur massive capital improvement costs to build larger habitats … or they can walk away from the state whose consumers bought one-third of all eggs produced in Missouri last year."

According to the lawsuit, attempts to comply with the California law would create a price misbalance where shipping the eggs to California would no more be profitable due to the costs of retooling the hen houses.

On the other hand, the situation predicts that if Missouri producers do not comply with California's rules, and bet on whether Koster wins the lawsuit or not, the state could end up with half a billion surplus eggs on its hands creating a huge imbalance in the market and "causing Missouri prices to fall and potentially forcing some Missouri farmers out of business."

However, Humane Society of the United States, which had supported the push for the new California law for better treatment of farm animals, commented in a statement that Koster had filed the lawsuit "to curry favor with Big Agribusiness."

Humane Society officials cite at least 16 studies including one by the European Union to show that eggs laid by caged hens had higher salmonella rates and the extent of room a hen has to move around was at issue. However, Koster says in his lawsuit that "No scientific study conducted to date has found any correlation between cage size … and the incidence of salmonella in egg-laying hens."

According to Koster, current rules in Missouri allow 67 square inches of space to each egg-laying hen. And while the new California law does not specify the amount of room each hen should have, Koster says that animal behavior experts estimate the law may require anything between 87.3 square inches to 403 square inches per bird.