This is the specific information I needed to put in my brain today. I will never think of beavers, western expansion, and the Astors the same way again.
I remember reading something last year, some country in Europe was wanting to build a dam and they were spending years studying it, making sure habitats wouldn't be harmed, etc, and in the meantime, beavers came along and built a dam anyway, right in the spot they wanted it. Problem solved!
Animals and history! My two favorite things. Thank you for this essay that gives this overlooked but vital (and cute!!) creature the shoutout it deserves.
Going off on a little (gigantic) tangent here that combines our treatment of animals with the topic of government. I’ve spent a lot of time wondering what a constitutional amendment protecting the dignity of animals would actually look like. My brain automatically goes to: our politics would never allow it. We can barely agree on basic human rights expansions, so why would we extend protections to creatures that can’t vote or lobby? But then again I love a challenge—maybe there is an angle here. There’s something genuinely strange about how Americans relate to animals. We’ll drop thousands on surgery for a chihuahua, and ugly-cry at Sarah McLachlan PSAs. (I have done both!) But swap that doggo for a breeding pig in a gestation crate, or a beloved cat for a veal calf, and suddenly our fierce loyalty just switches off. The animal becomes a commodity, a production unit, something we can confine and kill without much moral weight. It’s not quite hypocrisy… more like we’ve drawn invisible lines in our minds about which animals count and which ones don’t. We didn’t write these rules, we just sorta inherited them by osmosis, seemingly based on economics.
So if we actually got serious about writing animals into our Constitution, into that foundational document we treat as sacred, what would be the maximum respect we could extend? What rights would Americans allow for creatures that can’t speak for themselves but that we absolutely depend on?
One way to think about it might be to acknowledge the three roles animals already play in our lives, but make those roles official and enforceable. Call them “Family,” “Workers,” and “Stewards.” Family animals are the easy ones—our pets we consider members of the household. Most people already agree these deserve strong protections, and in fact we have plenty of anti-cruelty laws that apply to companion animals. Workers would be the animals we use for labor and/or food: cattle, pigs, chickens, race horses. These are the tricky ones because they’re economically vital, but they’re also the ones suffering the most egregious treatment in factory farms. Finally, Stewards would be wild animals and perhaps those we hunt—animals that exist in nature but that we manage or harvest. Each category could have different Constitutional protections calibrated to their role: Family animals get the highest bar, Workers get humane treatment standards that prevent torture while still allowing farming, and Stewards get habitat protection and ethical hunting rules.
We’re already seeing this debate play out at the state level. California voters passed Prop 12 requiring cage-free housing for hens and pigs; Massachusetts banned gestation crates with 78% approval; Florida amended its own state constitution to outlaw certain confinement practices. These are mainstream voter movements saying there’s a floor below which we won’t let animal treatment fall. But they’re also creating a patchwork that the Supreme Court has had to sort out, and industries are constantly fighting back through Congress or by lobbying state legislatures to water down the rules. The public clearly wants better treatment for farm animals, but there’s no consistent federal framework.
Enforcing rules state by state just means the forces of capitalism will relocate the cruelty to states with weaker laws. The suffering doesn’t disappear; it just moves to wherever it’s cheapest to operate. That’s exactly the kind of problem a Constitutional amendment is supposed to solve: when the people have decided on a core value but the political process keeps stalling it.
And for people who aren’t necessarily bleeding hearts about animal welfare: there are legitimate self-interested reasons to care about this. When an animal is so tightly confined its entire life that it needs constant antibiotics to fight off infections from stress and overcrowding, that has real consequences for human health. Those antibiotics end up in the meat we eat. The bacteria develop resistance, creating medical problems for humans, including what could be a horrific future pandemic. We’re essentially choosing cheap production over food safety, and consumers can’t easily tell which meat came from a tortured, antibiotic-soaked animal versus one that was raised humanely. It’d be hard to imagine everyone being able to quickly determine any cruelty behind the cheese and pepperoni every time a pizza makes its way onto our plates. This isn’t just about feeling bad for livestock; it’s about knowing that what you’re feeding your family is actually safe and wasn’t produced in conditions that required pumping animals full of drugs just to keep them alive long enough to slaughter. The Make America Healthy Again crowd should be all over this. If you’re worried about what’s in your food, the animal’s living conditions are part of that equation, and state-by-state rules aren’t very helpful.
So what might a realistic amendment actually say? Probably nothing radical like “animals are persons” or abolishing animal agriculture entirely. Look at what Mexico just did: they amended their constitution to declare that “mistreatment of animals is prohibited” and gave the federal government power to enforce animal welfare. Belgium wrote that the state must “ensure the protection and well-being of animals as sentient beings.”
A U.S. version could take those principles but add a consumer-rights twist: recognize animal sentience, establish that products derived from torture or extreme suffering can’t be sold in interstate commerce, and then give any citizen standing to sue producers, distributors, and retailers who violate those standards. Instead of creating massive federal oversight bureaucracies, what if the amendment empowered consumers to hold companies accountable?
That way it isn’t about the USDA inspecting every farm. It’s about forcing companies to enact their own policies to avoid lawsuits, to be transparent about where their ingredients come from, to ensure their supply chains aren’t relying on the torture of sentient creatures. If a consumer can prove that the bacon they bought came from a pig that spent its life unable to turn around, they can sue the retailer, who will turn around and demand accountability from their distributor, who will demand it from the producer. The market would enforce itself through liability. Companies would have every incentive to clean up their supply chains and prove they’re meeting humane standards. You could even build in transition funding to help farmers upgrade facilities so food prices don’t spike, and maybe ban the absolute worst practices—the kind where an animal literally can’t turn around or lie down—as a constitutional floor that even the most permissive state can’t undercut.
This would appeal to people across the spectrum: the animal welfare advocates get enforcement with teeth, the food safety crowd gets transparency about what’s in their meat, and the free-market types get a solution that doesn’t require massive government expansion.
This all forces us to actually reckon with the contradiction between our claimed values and our daily choices. We say we’re a humane society, but we tolerate industrial practices that most people would find horrifying if they saw them up close. A Constitutional amendment wouldn’t solve everything, but it would do something powerful: it would put animal welfare alongside the other rights we’ve decided are so fundamental that shifting political winds can’t touch them. And by creating a mechanism where consumers can demand accountability, it turns the market itself into an enforcement tool. Companies would have to compete on transparency and humane treatment, not just price.
Whether Americans are ready for that is the real question, and I’m curious what others think. Do you believe a constitutional amendment protecting animals could ever be realistic? If you could write one, what would you want it to accomplish—would you go with the three-tier system (Family, Worker, Stewards) with different protections for each, or would you focus on consumer empowerment and supply chain transparency, or something else? Would it be limited to farm animals, or would it extend to research animals, wildlife, entertainment? And could it actually thread the needle between animal welfare advocates and the Make America Healthy Again crowd, between progressive voters and conservative farmers?
Musing about potential constitutional amendments is basically my life right now, and I love talking about it. This one—animal dignity and protection—feels like it has more potential than people assume because it touches so many different concerns: ethics, health, transparency, federalism. I might write a full essay about it soon that digs even deeper into the mechanisms and the political coalitions that could support it. But for now, the state ballot measures and polling suggest we might be closer to something real than the political establishment thinks. Maybe the maximum respect we’d allow isn’t as minimal as our current laws suggest. Maybe, if we were forced to write it down in the Constitution, we’d surprise ourselves with how much we actually care.
This is the specific information I needed to put in my brain today. I will never think of beavers, western expansion, and the Astors the same way again.
I remember reading something last year, some country in Europe was wanting to build a dam and they were spending years studying it, making sure habitats wouldn't be harmed, etc, and in the meantime, beavers came along and built a dam anyway, right in the spot they wanted it. Problem solved!
Animals and history! My two favorite things. Thank you for this essay that gives this overlooked but vital (and cute!!) creature the shoutout it deserves.
Going off on a little (gigantic) tangent here that combines our treatment of animals with the topic of government. I’ve spent a lot of time wondering what a constitutional amendment protecting the dignity of animals would actually look like. My brain automatically goes to: our politics would never allow it. We can barely agree on basic human rights expansions, so why would we extend protections to creatures that can’t vote or lobby? But then again I love a challenge—maybe there is an angle here. There’s something genuinely strange about how Americans relate to animals. We’ll drop thousands on surgery for a chihuahua, and ugly-cry at Sarah McLachlan PSAs. (I have done both!) But swap that doggo for a breeding pig in a gestation crate, or a beloved cat for a veal calf, and suddenly our fierce loyalty just switches off. The animal becomes a commodity, a production unit, something we can confine and kill without much moral weight. It’s not quite hypocrisy… more like we’ve drawn invisible lines in our minds about which animals count and which ones don’t. We didn’t write these rules, we just sorta inherited them by osmosis, seemingly based on economics.
So if we actually got serious about writing animals into our Constitution, into that foundational document we treat as sacred, what would be the maximum respect we could extend? What rights would Americans allow for creatures that can’t speak for themselves but that we absolutely depend on?
One way to think about it might be to acknowledge the three roles animals already play in our lives, but make those roles official and enforceable. Call them “Family,” “Workers,” and “Stewards.” Family animals are the easy ones—our pets we consider members of the household. Most people already agree these deserve strong protections, and in fact we have plenty of anti-cruelty laws that apply to companion animals. Workers would be the animals we use for labor and/or food: cattle, pigs, chickens, race horses. These are the tricky ones because they’re economically vital, but they’re also the ones suffering the most egregious treatment in factory farms. Finally, Stewards would be wild animals and perhaps those we hunt—animals that exist in nature but that we manage or harvest. Each category could have different Constitutional protections calibrated to their role: Family animals get the highest bar, Workers get humane treatment standards that prevent torture while still allowing farming, and Stewards get habitat protection and ethical hunting rules.
We’re already seeing this debate play out at the state level. California voters passed Prop 12 requiring cage-free housing for hens and pigs; Massachusetts banned gestation crates with 78% approval; Florida amended its own state constitution to outlaw certain confinement practices. These are mainstream voter movements saying there’s a floor below which we won’t let animal treatment fall. But they’re also creating a patchwork that the Supreme Court has had to sort out, and industries are constantly fighting back through Congress or by lobbying state legislatures to water down the rules. The public clearly wants better treatment for farm animals, but there’s no consistent federal framework.
Enforcing rules state by state just means the forces of capitalism will relocate the cruelty to states with weaker laws. The suffering doesn’t disappear; it just moves to wherever it’s cheapest to operate. That’s exactly the kind of problem a Constitutional amendment is supposed to solve: when the people have decided on a core value but the political process keeps stalling it.
And for people who aren’t necessarily bleeding hearts about animal welfare: there are legitimate self-interested reasons to care about this. When an animal is so tightly confined its entire life that it needs constant antibiotics to fight off infections from stress and overcrowding, that has real consequences for human health. Those antibiotics end up in the meat we eat. The bacteria develop resistance, creating medical problems for humans, including what could be a horrific future pandemic. We’re essentially choosing cheap production over food safety, and consumers can’t easily tell which meat came from a tortured, antibiotic-soaked animal versus one that was raised humanely. It’d be hard to imagine everyone being able to quickly determine any cruelty behind the cheese and pepperoni every time a pizza makes its way onto our plates. This isn’t just about feeling bad for livestock; it’s about knowing that what you’re feeding your family is actually safe and wasn’t produced in conditions that required pumping animals full of drugs just to keep them alive long enough to slaughter. The Make America Healthy Again crowd should be all over this. If you’re worried about what’s in your food, the animal’s living conditions are part of that equation, and state-by-state rules aren’t very helpful.
So what might a realistic amendment actually say? Probably nothing radical like “animals are persons” or abolishing animal agriculture entirely. Look at what Mexico just did: they amended their constitution to declare that “mistreatment of animals is prohibited” and gave the federal government power to enforce animal welfare. Belgium wrote that the state must “ensure the protection and well-being of animals as sentient beings.”
A U.S. version could take those principles but add a consumer-rights twist: recognize animal sentience, establish that products derived from torture or extreme suffering can’t be sold in interstate commerce, and then give any citizen standing to sue producers, distributors, and retailers who violate those standards. Instead of creating massive federal oversight bureaucracies, what if the amendment empowered consumers to hold companies accountable?
That way it isn’t about the USDA inspecting every farm. It’s about forcing companies to enact their own policies to avoid lawsuits, to be transparent about where their ingredients come from, to ensure their supply chains aren’t relying on the torture of sentient creatures. If a consumer can prove that the bacon they bought came from a pig that spent its life unable to turn around, they can sue the retailer, who will turn around and demand accountability from their distributor, who will demand it from the producer. The market would enforce itself through liability. Companies would have every incentive to clean up their supply chains and prove they’re meeting humane standards. You could even build in transition funding to help farmers upgrade facilities so food prices don’t spike, and maybe ban the absolute worst practices—the kind where an animal literally can’t turn around or lie down—as a constitutional floor that even the most permissive state can’t undercut.
This would appeal to people across the spectrum: the animal welfare advocates get enforcement with teeth, the food safety crowd gets transparency about what’s in their meat, and the free-market types get a solution that doesn’t require massive government expansion.
This all forces us to actually reckon with the contradiction between our claimed values and our daily choices. We say we’re a humane society, but we tolerate industrial practices that most people would find horrifying if they saw them up close. A Constitutional amendment wouldn’t solve everything, but it would do something powerful: it would put animal welfare alongside the other rights we’ve decided are so fundamental that shifting political winds can’t touch them. And by creating a mechanism where consumers can demand accountability, it turns the market itself into an enforcement tool. Companies would have to compete on transparency and humane treatment, not just price.
Whether Americans are ready for that is the real question, and I’m curious what others think. Do you believe a constitutional amendment protecting animals could ever be realistic? If you could write one, what would you want it to accomplish—would you go with the three-tier system (Family, Worker, Stewards) with different protections for each, or would you focus on consumer empowerment and supply chain transparency, or something else? Would it be limited to farm animals, or would it extend to research animals, wildlife, entertainment? And could it actually thread the needle between animal welfare advocates and the Make America Healthy Again crowd, between progressive voters and conservative farmers?
Musing about potential constitutional amendments is basically my life right now, and I love talking about it. This one—animal dignity and protection—feels like it has more potential than people assume because it touches so many different concerns: ethics, health, transparency, federalism. I might write a full essay about it soon that digs even deeper into the mechanisms and the political coalitions that could support it. But for now, the state ballot measures and polling suggest we might be closer to something real than the political establishment thinks. Maybe the maximum respect we’d allow isn’t as minimal as our current laws suggest. Maybe, if we were forced to write it down in the Constitution, we’d surprise ourselves with how much we actually care.