Two years ago, Marineland of Canada — a theme park in Niagara Falls that trained beluga whales, dolphins, and other animals to perform acrobatic tricks for entertainment — closed its doors. The decision came after years of financial turmoil, along with journalistic investigations, whistleblower accounts, and government inspections that revealed animal neglect and suffering at the park. Since 2019, 19 beluga whales and one killer whale have died at Marineland.

The closure was a win for animal welfare, but where would its animals go? Marineland’s surviving menagerie included, among other species, four dolphins and 30 beluga whales.

Given that beluga whales and dolphins are highly social animals that live in pods and swim long distances in the wild, animal welfare groups didn’t want to see them transferred to other parks like Marineland, or conventional aquariums, where the exceptionally smart and active animals would continue to suffer in captivity. Instead, they called for some of the 30 belugas to be rehomed to a proposed — though not yet built — 110-acre coastal sanctuary in Nova Scotia, Canada.

That didn’t happen. Instead, this summer, the four dolphins and two of the beluga whales went to an aquarium in Spain, while the other belugas were transferred to two SeaWorld locations — theme parks that are similar to Marineland — and two famous US aquariums: Georgia Aquarium in Atlanta, which received two, and Shedd Aquarium in Chicago, which received 10.

And just as Shedd’s belugas should’ve been adjusting to their new environment, things took a turn for the worse. Over the course of eight days from late August to early September, Peekachu and Rain — two belugas who arrived at Shedd Aquarium in mid-August — and another beluga whale named Beethoven, who had been at Shedd for decades, died.

The three animals’ cause of death at Shedd Aquarium remains unknown as the aquarium awaits necropsy results. 

While the three deaths in quick succession have put a spotlight on Shedd, they have also renewed scrutiny of a deeper problem with aquariums: their intensive confinement of wild animals, which runs throughout their history and goes beyond any one institution or animal.

The limitations of aquarium life

Shedd Aquarium is one of the US’s oldest and most prestigious aquariums, though this isn’t its first beluga whale controversy.

Its first two belugas were taken from the wild — an estuary in Canada — in 1991. The next year, they got four more from the wild and soon after, two of them died from cardiovascular collapse after receiving an anti-parasitic drug. 

“These whales died to serve a tourist attraction,” a spokesperson for the International Wildlife Coalition said at the time. “It’s horrific.”

Since then, Shedd hasn’t directly sourced any beluga whales from the wild, though it’s recorded 15 beluga births in captivity. But whether taken from the wild or born in captivity, some scientists and animal advocates argue the inherent limitations of aquarium life are inhumane. One of the most outspoken among them is neuroscientist Lori Marino, an expert in marine mammal behavior and intelligence and president of the Whale Sanctuary Project, which is building the proposed Nova Scotia sanctuary.

In the wild, beluga whales have far-ranging seasonal migrations, live in complex social groups, hunt for food, and raise juveniles. But Marino says that captive belugas — whether at a park like Marineland or a storied aquarium like Shedd — are in small, artificial, and unchanging environments that deny them the ability to engage in many of their natural behaviors.

“The level of boredom that they experience is really unbelievable,” Marino told Vox. “For an animal like that, with a brain like that, that’s torture.”

A Shedd spokesperson told me that research it participated in — along with other zoological institutions — found that ensuring that animal enclosures are dynamic, well managed, contain enrichment activities, and facilitate strong socialization do more to predict good welfare than the volume of space they’re allotted.

However, such artificial environments can lead to serious welfare problems. It’s not uncommon for marine mammals — and other animals in zoos and aquariums — to display “stereotypic” behavior, or repetitive motions that are indicators of stress. They might endlessly swim in circles or other patterns, continually regurgitate and reingest food, repetitively move their heads, or grate their teeth on hard surfaces. Critics call it “zoochosis.” Some researchers believe captivity may induce depressive-like states in some animals. 

Zoos and aquariums tend to downplay the harms of captivity and, instead, position themselves as stewards of the animals at their facilities and protectors of their counterparts in the wild. Some animal advocates, including Marino, often argue this is largely a facade to justify the continued captivity of the animals. 

Are aquariums for animals, or us?

Known as “the Fish House,” the first modern aquarium opened in 1853 at the London Zoo. At the time, zoos and aquariums were pitched to the public as pure entertainment — places for city dwellers to see exotic animals from far away lands up close. 

But as the modern environmental and animal welfare movements matured in the middle of the 20th century, they began to question the practice of putting wild-caught animals on display in enclosures that amounted to a minuscule fraction of their range in nature. By the 1970s, in response to the criticisms, some aquariums and zoos began to pivot from marketing themselves as entertainment venues to being invested in the conservation of wildlife.

Zoos and aquariums posit that if we’re to protect wild animals in, well, the wild, it makes sense that helping the public gain an affinity for them in a not-so-wild setting is an important part of the equation. Chicago’s Shedd Aquarium, for example, describes  its mission as “sparking compassion, curiosity and conservation for the aquatic animal world.” 

Aquariums and zoos often say they achieve these goals by raising a lot of money for conservation projects, helping to reintroduce vulnerable species back into the wild, and inspiring visitors to get involved in conservation.

There is some merit to the first claim. In 2022, the 238 zoos and aquariums accredited by the Association of Zoos and Aquariums (AZA) — of which Shedd is a member — spent $252 million on projects to protect and preserve wildlife habitats. It’s a lot of money, though it amounts to about 5 percent of what AZA members had spent on operations and construction. 

The evidence is even thinner on aquariums’ and zoos’ claims around helping to reintroduce endangered species back into the wild, as it’s an incredibly difficult and rare feat, and on motivating attendees to become conservation advocates. 

Some surveys of zoo-goers have found that zoo attendance can modestly improve their conservation knowledge and behavior. But despite some 700 million annual visits, far fewer visitors volunteer or donate to protect animals in the wild.

Despite the heavy conservation messaging, animal advocates argue that entertainment is still the priority for most zoological institutions. According to the AZA, 80 percent of the animals in its member aquariums are taken from the wild, which seems to be in direct conflict with protecting animals in the wild. Shedd Aquarium declined an interview request for this story, and when I asked a spokesperson what percent of its 32,000 animals were taken from the wild, they wouldn’t say. 

“Acquiring animals from the wild is not contrary to conservation goals as long as species are acquired in an ethical and sustainable manner,” an AZA spokesperson said over email. “These are thought-out and strategic actions with sustainability in mind.” However, AZA didn’t define how to ethically and sustainably take animals from the wild. 

And Shedd — like many other aquariums — encourages guests to pay for “encounter” experiences with beluga whales and other wild, non-domesticated species, like penguins, sea lions, and otters, at up to $205 a pop. These often involve the guests having a few minutes to pet the animals and take photographs with them. (The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has temporarily prohibited Shedd and other facilities from using the rehomed belugas in encounter programs.)

A Shedd spokesperson told me the criticism of these encounter programs as inhumane and unethical is “unfounded and indeed contradictory,” citing a study about dolphins that it participated in. The study, however, wasn’t designed to measure how encounter programs affect dolphin welfare, but rather looked at how dolphins use their habitat, with encounter programs as one variable among many. A 2021 literature review on encounter programs found that most research on them lacked rigor and that “the justification for using [encounter programs] within zoos remains questionable.”

As for the belugas at Shedd, Marino told me she hopes that they survive, but says this moment should lead to more honest conversations about the ethics of aquariums.

Institutions like Shedd “are supposed to be the best,” Marino said. “But people need to understand that it’s the best of something that doesn’t work. … It’s not a question of who’s accredited, who’s not. It’s about keeping these animals in tanks for entertainment. That’s the proposition that has to be probed, that has to be questioned. And that’s the one thing they don’t want to do.”

Shedd, for its part, doesn’t seem ready to probe the proposition quite yet. A spokesperson told Vox that it hasn’t ruled out breeding the animals it received from Marineland, which could mean another generation of long-lived belugas in captivity.

Many people, when they learn about the horrors of factory farming, become vegetarian or vegan. I’m one of those people, and it stuck — I haven’t eaten meat in 20 years. For most, it doesn’t stick. But new research highlights how ditching meat isn’t the only option to help animals on factory farms. There’s actually one thing that’s almost as effective and probably way easier for most people: eating fewer small animals. 

The number of animals who suffer to produce food products — and how much they suffer — varies widely. Bigger animals, like cattle raised for beef, are raised in lower numbers and aren’t treated as terribly as smaller animals, like farmed fish and chickens.

And because fish and chickens are so small, far more of them must be farmed to produce the same amount of meat as large animals. A family sitting down for a steak dinner, for example, will probably consume about half a percent of one cow, while a family eating a rotisserie chicken might eat the whole bird. 

Animal advocates call it the “small body problem,” and it’s the subject of a new analysis published by Chris Bryant, an honorary research associate at the University of Bath in the UK, and Faunalytics, an animal welfare research group.

The researchers wanted to answer a simple but consequential question: How much animal suffering is embedded in each bite of meat we eat or egg we consume? 

“We are somewhat used to seeing, especially from the climate movement, data and other kinds of tools that help us think about the carbon footprint of the choices that we make, and we think that’s really important,” Allison Troy, Faunalytics’ research director, told me. “But we felt like there was a gap in terms of thinking about more of a ‘suffering footprint’ when it comes to choosing to purchase animal products.”

This gives us a new way to think about how we eat, and how it affects the animals trapped in factory farms. If you don’t want to go fully plant-based, what about cutting back — specifically — on meat from small animals?

Unpacking the small body problem

To quantify the “suffering footprint” of everyday animal products consumers eat, the researchers analyzed data from the US Department of Agriculture, the United Nations, and other sources to determine how much edible meat — or eggs or milk — each type of farmed animal produces throughout a typical lifespan on a farm.

They also incorporated indirect sources of animal suffering in their calculations. For example, some farmed fish species are fed other fish, and these “feeder” fish were factored into the data.

Then the researchers crunched the numbers to figure out two things: how many days of animal suffering are embedded in a pound of various animal products, and how many animal lives are slaughtered per pound for those products.

The analysis found that the vast majority of animal suffering from our diets comes from one tiny animal: shrimp.

That means that a single bite of your shrimp scampi is far more harmful than devouring an entire burger.

But seafood doesn’t account for a large portion of most Americans’ diets, and many of us eat none at all. When seafood is removed from the data, cutting back on poultry products — chicken meat, turkey meat, and eggs — is the most effective way to limit the amount of suffering caused by one’s diet.

This enormous disparity in poultry versus other categories “is driven by the fact that those are smaller-bodied animals — it just takes a larger number of animals to produce consumable products for people,” Troy said. “And I don’t think that that’s often a way that people think about animal products when they’re making these decisions.” 

Chickens and turkeys also tend to be treated worse than cattle and pigs. Chickens raised for meat, for example, have been bred to grow so fast, and so big, that many have difficulty standing and walking, while half of hens raised for eggs in the US are confined in small cages for their entire lives. 

That doesn’t mean pigs and cattle have it easy — far from it. Pork producers, for example, typically castrate and teeth-clip piglets without pain relief, and the pigs spend their lives indoors. Female breeding pigs, like caged hens, are confined in tiny cages. And beef cattle are branded and dehorned, often without pain relief, and spend their final months in feedlots. But because these animals are so much bigger, each produces a lot more meat than smaller animals. 

In other words, their suffering is spread out across many more bites of bacon or burgers. 

Going beyond the numbers

The report wasn’t peer-reviewed, and I reached out to Trevor Woolley — an assistant professor of agricultural and applied economics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison — for his thoughts. Woolley told me over email that it’s “important to recognize that the numbers that are included in their equation are estimates,” and that “the exact numbers should not be taken as precise, but in the right ballpark.”

“Comparing animal products in terms of lives and (especially) days broadly makes sense,” Woolley added. “‘Days’ is a really nice metric because farm animal species have such drastically different lifespans on the farm.”

There is, however, one major limitation to the research: it doesn’t factor in the severity of suffering that different animals experience.

“We made a choice methodologically to define ‘animal suffering’ as days of life [on a farm],” Troy said. “And I think that that’s a useful, albeit simple, metric. But it is not the only one.”

For example, on a day-to-day basis, dairy cows don’t seem to have it as bad as an egg-laying hen in a cage. But dairy cows tend to be farmed for twice as many years as hens. Does that suffering over many years compound in a way that, if we could fully understand it, would change the calculation? This analysis can’t answer nuanced questions like that, though other animal welfare researchers are working to provide a more comprehensive picture.

“If you can stand to think about it long enough, the problem becomes paralyzing,” my colleague Marina Bolotnikova has written about factory farming. “Tens of billions of land animals are slaughtered every year; hundreds of millions every day; thousands in the time it takes to read this sentence. The number grows by billions more every year, into multiples that feel as abysmal as they are mind-numbing.”

It’s enough to cause a lot of people to tune out and ignore the problem altogether. But shrinking these figures down to the impact our own diets have on animals is much more manageable. We can think smaller and maybe, while we’re at it, eat fewer small animals.

Russ Kremer is a longtime hog farmer in the Missouri Ozarks, where his 2,000 pigs have plenty of space to roam on his 150 acres. He doesn’t feed them antibiotics, and you won’t find a single animal in a cage. Kremer is decidedly anti-industrial hog farming.

Whenever he sends his pigs to slaughter, like every hog farmer in the US, he’s legally required to give over a small share of his sales — 35 cents for every $100 — to the National Pork Board.

If you’re not a hog farmer, you might not have heard of the National Pork Board. But you’ve probably seen its ads. Its job is to promote pork to consumers, and it’s the group behind the once ubiquitous slogan “Pork. The Other White Meat.”

The idea behind the National Pork Board — financed with mandatory contributions from Kremer and virtually every other American hog farmer — is that all pork producers should benefit from this kind of prominent marketing to buoy their product. So a dollar or so from each pig should be worth it. 

The group’s funds, by law, are limited to advertising and research. They specifically can’t be used for political lobbying to influence legislation. There’s a good reason for that: While boosting pork consumption should help any pig farmer, when it comes to laws and policies, some benefit certain types of producers over others, such as more industrial producers. And because virtually all farmers have to pay into the fund, it seems only fair to keep it policy-neutral. 

It’s essentially a tax, one that consumers indirectly pay each time they buy any kind of pork, too. “I’m not opposed to paying a tax if the tax does us some good,” Kremer told me. But Kremer and many of his fellow anti-industrial hog farmers believe it is not doing good. That’s because the National Pork Board has moved millions of their dollars to the largest industrial pork lobby in America. 

It’s called the National Pork Producers Council, and over the last 70 years, it has emerged as the loudest advocate for factory-farm style hog production. 

Since 1999, NPPC has spent nearly $45 million on federal lobbying on a variety of issues — including many of the kinds of policies that more humane and sustainable hog farmers like Kremer tend to benefit from, like antibiotic restrictions, pollution regulations, and protections for independent farmers who sometimes get screwed over by big meatpackers. In recent years, the group has also thrown millions of dollars into lobbying for the very unpopular practice of keeping pregnant pigs in tiny crates — a method that big, industrial operations are much more likely to use than smaller farms. 

Kremer, for his part, is the former president of the Missouri Farmers Union — the state chapter of the National Farmers Union, which is a small but mighty counterweight to the Big Ag lobby groups like NPPC.

The two organizations — which are legally required to operate as separate — have a very close relationship that has allowed the National Pork Producers Council to capture tens of millions of dollars from the Pork Board over the past two decades. According to a new, exclusive analysis of public financial transactions gathered by the Accountability Board — a nonprofit that advocates for higher-welfare animal farming — the National Pork Board has paid the National Pork Producers Council $66 million with its farmer contributions since 2004. Of the $66 million, nearly half of these financial transactions have not been previously reported in the news media. 

Critics say the financial transactions between the two organizations have effectively created something of a reverse Robin Hood effect in the pork business, in which an industrial farming lobby group has taken millions of dollars from smaller farmers only to use it against them and their typically more responsible ways of raising animals. 

Or, as Kremer calls it, a “kick in the groin.”

And it amounts to a meaningful chunk of the pork lobby’s overall budget: According to Vox’s review of the financial documents, some 18.5 percent of NPPC’s revenue has come from farmer checkoff dollars since the early 2000s.

The money stems from two sources: highly profitable trademark deals and a sizable real estate arrangement. Over the past 22 years, the pork promotion board has paid a remarkable $59.5 million to own and license a trademark package and another $6.5 million in rent to its landlord, the National Pork Producers Council. Although one of these cash transfers has been the subject of a lawsuit — and the organizations’ intertwined relationship has been repeatedly criticized by opponents of industrial agriculture, lawmakers, federal agencies, and farmers forced to pay the money — the groups’ close relationship has persisted.

The National Pork Producers Council didn’t respond to several detailed questions about the relationship and financial arrangements over email; in a statement, a spokesperson said that the deals between the organizations had been approved by the USDA and a legal challenge to one of the deals had been dismissed in court.

The National Pork Board also didn’t respond to an interview request for this story, or to detailed questions over email. And the US Department of Agriculture, which oversees the National Pork Board and has approved these deals, declined an interview request for this story, and did not respond to detailed questions over email.

The long saga of redirected pork-industry dollars shows how the interests of industrialized farming can find ways to overwhelm the interests and values of smaller-scale producers — and operate with relatively little government scrutiny. It also raises meaningful questions about whether the USDA is protecting the interests of American food consumers and farmers across the country, or just guarding the specific agenda of the largest players in the ag industry.

How Big Pork set up its federal piggy bank

The idea of a marketing fund that farmers pay into wasn’t new in 1985, when Congress created the National Pork Board. The egg industry had one, which had made the famous “Incredible Edible Egg” slogan, while a state-level dairy program later created the “Got Milk?” slogan.

They’re called “checkoff” programs, and with those funds, there were fears from the start that the pot of money that every farmer was required to pay into might be used improperly: “We should protect against making these producers de facto members of any association that they may not wish to be involved with,” Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) warned at the time.

Grassley’s concern was prescient. The National Pork Producers Council had its own voluntary checkoff program, which it set up in the 1960s and aimed to raise a modest $40,000 in its first year. It then successfully lobbied to create a mandatory checkoff program in 1985, and even drafted the regulations for it — which became the National Pork Board, the fund that farmers have to pay into. Turning it from voluntary to mandatory brought in way more money — from $40,000 in 1966 to an estimated $25 million in 1987.

And even though this new pork promotion entity was supposed to be independent, the NPPC essentially ran it. The National Pork Board had eight program areas and $500 million from farmer checkoff funds to use over its first 15 years — but only two employees. So it contracted the NPPC to execute on those programs, along with handling its accounting and operations. The two groups even shared office space in Iowa for their respective headquarters. 

They were, in effect, separate groups in name only.

“It’s very difficult to tell where NPPC ends and the Pork Board begins,” Matt Penzer, chief legal officer of the Accountability Board, who analyzed the pork groups’ financial records, said about the early years of the pork checkoff program. Which was a problem, because farmer checkoff dollars weren’t supposed to be used for political lobbying — yet here was a lobbying group making money by being the Pork Board’s primary contractor.

In the late 1990s, the arrangement drew sharp scrutiny from the Clinton administration’s USDA inspector general — an internal government watchdog — which wrote in a report that the groups “should maintain an arms-length business relationship.” 

And by 2000, hog farmers voted to end the National Pork Board altogether because, according to an organizer at the time, it had “been used to promote the interests of factory farms and corporate meatpackers and hasn’t helped independent producers increase their bottom line.” (According to reporting by the Associated Press, the NPPC had paid a PR firm $48,000 in checkoff dollars in the late 1990s to “monitor” the activities of sustainable agriculture groups that had criticized it.)

The farmers won the vote, but their celebration didn’t last long. The National Pork Producers Council sued the USDA over a procedural technicality, eventually settled the lawsuit, and the Pork Board survived. The settlement, reached in 2001, preserved the farmer checkoff fund but ordered NPPC to, basically, stop running it. It also required that any deals between the two groups be conducted at “fair market value.” 

It seemed that the flow of money from the farmer fund to the pro-industrial National Pork Producers Council might grind to a halt, but instead it just took new forms. Internal emails, obtained by Penzer through separate litigation, reveal how.

The $59.5 million question

After the USDA told the two groups they needed to cut more of their day-to-day ties, they got creative and began moving money through big, expensive trademark deals and a lucrative real estate arrangement.

In 2003, the CEO of the National Pork Board had said in an email that the National Pork Producers Council needed an extra $881,000 per year. The next year, the National Pork Board began paying it more than $800,000 per year to license the “Pork. The Other White Meat” slogan for its advertising (it had previously been licensed for $1 per year). 

Then in 2006, with farmer checkoff dollars, the National Pork Board outright bought the “Pork. The Other White Meat” trademark from the National Pork Producers Council in a $60 million deal, to be paid out at $3 million annually in farmer checkoff funds for 20 years. This $3 million made up around 20 to 25 percent of the NPPC’s annual revenue at the time. 

The deal was questionable on multiple fronts. For one, the council — the lobbying group — should never have owned the trademark in the first place. By law, it was the federal government’s. Second, according to Parke Wilde, a nutrition and food policy professor at Tufts University and former USDA agricultural economist, the value of the slogan had been built with advertising funded by farmer checkoff dollars, so “they’re double paying and they’re not protecting the interests of the farmers who paid in.”

A National Pork Producers Council spokesperson defended the sale, stating it was “fully vetted and approved by USDA.” (The USDA did not respond to Vox’s questions for this story.)

Finally, when the National Pork Board stopped using the slogan in 2011, it continued to pay the annual $3 million to the Pork Producers Council, even though it could have ended the contract with a year’s notice. 

In 2018, a judge ordered an end to the payments, calling them “arbitrary and capricious.” (Penzer worked on the lawsuit against the USDA while working at Humane World for Animals, where I have also worked, but I was not involved with the effort.) A year later, the National Pork Board paid the council $3 million for the termination of the $60 million deal, which hasn’t been reported elsewhere.

But here’s where things get even more unusual. After the annual payments stopped — some 12 years and $36 million into the 20-year, $60 million deal — ownership of the “Pork. The Other White Meat” trademark package, which also included a simple “Pork” logo (that had more value at the time), reverted fully back to the National Pork Producers Council. The group then sold it all back to the National Pork Board in 2020, with the NPPC this time making $17.2 million in additional checkoff dollars from the transaction. 

Penzer said the deal “couldn’t pass a basic intellectual property course.” This deal, surfaced by Penzer after he submitted a public records request and a subsequent lawsuit against the USDA, has not previously been reported.

If, by this point, you’re lost in the minutiae of dealmaking, I don’t blame you. The long and short of it is that, despite the legal requirement that farmers’ checkoff dollars can’t be used for lobbying, the NPPC lobbying group has received over $59 million of checkoff dollars for repeated deals involving the same trademark package. 

Wilde said that many of the guardrails designed to protect the integrity of the checkoff program are simply not being followed. “And that leaves us with little assurance that the programs serve either the farmers’ interests or the public interest,” he told me.

“The money for advertising is just being used as a cover to transfer wealth to the lobbying entity,” David Muraskin, who’s long tracked checkoff programs and sued the USDA over Montana’s beef checkoff program, told Vox. Muraskin is an agricultural law professor at George Washington University Law School and a lawyer at FarmSTAND, a nonprofit that advocates against industrial agriculture. 

The National Pork Board maintains that it represents all hog farmers. But both the National Pork Board and the National Pork Producers Council work to protect and expand a hyper-industrial vision of American hog farming. The board and staff of both groups, for example, are largely composed of leaders and executives from industrial pig farms, companies, and trade groups. There is also something of a revolving door between the two groups. NPPC’s current CEO, for instance, is a former Pork Board executive, while a past NPPC president held a leadership role at the National Pork Board.

The National Pork Board’s lobbying landlord

The two groups didn’t limit themselves to tossing the “Pork. The Other White Meat” trademark back and forth to each other. They have also maintained a long-term real estate arrangement, the details of which have also not been previously reported. 

Remember that Iowa office they shared? The National Pork Producers Council, the lobbying group, owns it. The property was valued at $2.9 million in 2007 and the Pork Board agreed to a 30-year rental lease, for which it’s now likely to pay more than $13 million (with farmer checkoff funds) by the lease’s end. The NPPC has increased the rent several times. Most of those hikes were modest — though in 2022, it raised the rent by 74 percent, the same year it sharply increased spending and was engaged in two lawsuits to dismantle state animal welfare laws.

Over the course of its lease, the National Pork Board had also spent $6.58 million to improve the NPPC’s building, a detail also not previously covered by the news media.

To understand whether this real estate arrangement is unusual or not, I reached out to nearly 20 real estate brokers, appraisers, and experts, including many in Iowa. No one in Iowa agreed to speak with me at all, let alone comment on the record. One expert told me that, on its face, the lease deal itself didn’t raise any major flags. “It is possible that the initial lease rent was set at a low rate, with a large future increase, which would create a ‘fair market value,’” said Brent Ambrose, a real estate professor at Penn State. “It may be a terrible deal, but…it is possible that the terms reflect current market conditions.”

The National Pork Board didn’t respond to detailed questions about its lease.

“The office rent agreement between NPB and NPPC is reviewed and adjusted on a periodic schedule and is also approved by USDA, along with all other checkoff expenditures and contracts,” a National Pork Producers Council spokesperson told Vox over email. 

In the 2001 settlement in which the two groups agreed to operate independently, a provision specifically allowed the lease to continue.

All of this money ends up going into the budget of the NPPC. And although it’s unknown exactly which dollar goes where, the proceedings of a lawsuit several years ago appeared to confirm exactly what small farmers are worried about: that there’s no clear line preventing their contributions from going to lobbying efforts.

In a 2018 opinion in the Humane World for Animals lawsuit against the USDA for wrongly approving the 2006 trademark deal, a district court judge said that “at least some portion of the money that the Board pays NPPC… ultimately goes to influencing legislation.” But just because money from the trademark deal wound up being used to influence legislation, the judge said, doesn’t mean the deal was made for that purpose. And so, according to the judge, the groups hadn’t technically violated the law.

But Muraskin argues these deals have all added up to a convenient facade to fund a pro-industrial farming lobby group with required dollars from every pig farmer. 

“It seems like they’re paying for a logo that has limited value, if [any] at all, and an office space that they’re paying well in excess of what they should be,” to move money from the National Pork Board to NPPC, which in his view, “is plainly against the statute.”

It’s not a good look for a group that represents Big Pork to be perceived as taking money from small and mid-sized farmers and using it to lobby against those farmers’ interests, and it’s been a source of controversy for decades. So how and why have they managed to continue this arrangement? 

They’re “exploiting a loophole” that the USDA has failed to address, Muraskin said. “I think the entity to blame there is USDA.”

Since 2017, Sens. Mike Lee (R-UT) and Cory Booker (D-NJ) have introduced legislation to reform the checkoff programs by prohibiting them from entering into new contracts with lobbying groups (like the NPPC), among other changes. If it were to pass, the two groups would not be able to, say, engage in a new trademark deal or renew the rental lease when it expires. 

“America’s farmers are being ripped off by federal checkoff programs that take farmers’ money and play favorites with who they serve,” said Lee in a press release last year. The bill lost a floor vote during 2018 Farm Bill negotiations; it’s been reintroduced several times since but hasn’t been taken up for a vote.

The pork lobby is using farmers’ money to try to keep pregnant pigs in tiny cages

If you want a clear idea of why Kremer and other producers are upset about helping subsidize the NPPC, look no further than the biggest, most expensive battle the lobby is currently waging: A fight centered around the publicly unpopular practice of keeping pregnant sows confined to tiny crates for nearly their entire lives. 

Called “gestation crates,” which are so small the pigs can’t even turn around, these enclosures have been widely condemned by animal welfare groups and veterinarians as inhumane, and voters tend to agree. California and Massachusetts have banned — via ballot measures — any pork sold in their states coming from farms that use these crates. (Disclosure: I worked on the Massachusetts initiative.) 

But many industrial-style pork producers are heavily invested in continuing to use the crates because it’s how they’ve bred pigs for decades, and there’s a large upfront cost to switching to a crate-free system. So the National Pork Producers Council has sued both states to overturn the anti-crate laws. One case even went to the US Supreme Court — an extremely costly endeavor — where the industry group lost.

The pork producers group has also intensively lobbied for legislation called the Save Our Bacon Act, which would overturn the state laws. This spring, the act was included in the House’s version of the Farm Bill, the legislative package that covers much of US agricultural policy. But the chance of the act making it into the Senate’s Farm Bill, and thus the finalized bill, appear slim. Senate negotiations are expected to resume this month though, so the pricey fight isn’t over yet for the NPPC. 

Smithfield Foods, the largest US pork producer — which has two seats on the National Pork Producers Council board — has supported this sort of legislation. 

Gestation crate bans help more welfare-minded farmers like Kremer compete against big industrial producers. Crate-free producers have been able to continue to sell their pork into California and Massachusetts, while farms that did use the crates had to spend money to retrofit their barns or lose out on participating in those markets. Some big producers have been going in that direction, too: One of the nation’s largest pork companies, Clemens Foods, strongly opposes the Save Our Bacon Act because the company has already moved away from gestation crates.

Talking to Kremer and other pork producers who long ago abandoned keeping pigs in small cages, I’ve gotten the sense that these dollars moving from their hog sales to the sorts of lobbying efforts behind the Save Our Bacon Act and other pro-industrial policies mean more to them than the actual monetary amount. “They’re going after producers like myself,” Kremer told me of the fight over gestation crates. “And so yes, I feel more betrayed by them than ever.”

Without reforms within USDA or forced by Congress, it’s hard to see a way out for farmers like Kremer who have no option but to continue to give up a small share of their profits to organizations that sometimes actively fight against their interests. 

But that goes for consumers, too: Each piece of bacon, rib, or pork chop purchased indirectly funds an advertising pot encouraging people to buy more pork. 

And as the latest findings on the pork checkoff program reveal, some funds also go into fighting to uphold farming approaches that put profits over animal welfare and continue practices most Americans oppose, and that many have already voted to abolish.

More than 90,000 wild horses and burros make their homes on public lands in the Western US, and each year, the federal government rounds up thousands of them. It typically holds them in large pens or pastures for months or years until they’re adopted or die — on the rationale that their wild population levels are just too high for the land to sustain. 

But not all captured horses share these fates: Some are sold, via a legal loophole, to Canadian slaughterhouses and processed for meat, most of which is exported to European and Asian markets.

It would technically be illegal to slaughter these animals for meat in the US. But according to a recent New York Times investigation, legal workarounds have enabled livestock buyers — who’ve purchased the wild horses for as little as $25 apiece — to funnel them through intermediaries and ship them north where they can sell to slaughter for up to $750 each. 

These sales have been going on for decades, though they’ve accelerated during President Donald Trump’s second term. 

Wild horses, also known as mustangs, are an American icon, and they are squarely in the “not food animals” category for most people in the US. But one food animal industry has been pushing for increasingly intensive roundups — and even slaughter — of these wild horses, and has escaped most popular attention on this issue: the beef industry.

The Western US is a giant cattle ranch — and ranchers say horses are bad for their business 

Ancient horses roamed North America for millions of years before going extinct some 9,000 years ago; the wild horses scattered across the Western US today are the descendants of animals introduced by European colonists in the 1500s. These wild equids now number around 93,000 on public lands and are concentrated in Nevada, Arizona, California, and Wyoming.

The Bureau of Land Management (BLM) determines how many wild horses and burros can live in particular management regions, and when those levels are exceeded, they can remove some of the animals. 

There are, of course, other animals grazing these same public lands: several million privately owned cattle. About 250 million acres of BLM and National Forest Service land — 13 percent of all of the contiguous US — is made available to ranchers to graze their cattle on natural forage. This often puts cows in direct competition with wild horses and burros, whose populations can grow quickly — and damage vegetation and water bodies (as cattle do, too). So BLM determines how many of these wild animals can live in a management region based on how much forage is available to support them, other wildlife, cattle, and to preserve the land. 

Wild horse advocates argue that the way BLM determines “appropriate” horse population levels is designed to heavily favor cattle ranchers, ensuring there’s plenty of forage for their livestock. These ranchers lease grazing rights from BLM at the dirt-cheap rate of just $1.69 per animal per month, which some critics say makes public lands essentially a massive subsidy for these ranchers, providing cheap land and food for their cattle. 

The US’s largest cattle industry group, the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association, and its public lands sister organization, the Public Lands Council, advocate for more aggressive wild horse and burro management.

The groups call for legalizing horse slaughter in the US and increasing BLM and Forest Service budgets specifically so the agencies can continue their, as the cattle industry organization describes it, “aggressive” wild horse removal schedule.  The National Cattlemen’s Beef Association didn’t respond to a request for comment for this story, and neither did the Public Lands Council.

On average, since the mid-1990s, the BLM has captured around 8,800 wild horses and burros on public land per year. It’s usually done this by baiting the animals with food and trapping them, or flying helicopters over herds and driving them into chutes to be trapped. Some die during the roundup process, or later from injuries they incur during roundups. 

After that, the animals are housed in pens or pastures until they’re adopted, sold, or die of old age, injury, or disease. There are currently about 58,000 wild horses and burros held, which costs taxpayers $100 million to manage annually.

But the number of wild horses sold — rather than adopted out or held — has been ticking up; in 2013, it was as few as 65. In 2024, some 1,500. And last year, it was more than 3,700. It’s unknown just how many of these purchased animals, in any year, wound up in slaughter plants. Other sold animals are often used for activities like trail riding, ranch work, and equine competitions.  

In an email to Vox, a spokesperson with the Bureau of Land Management denied the slaughter allegations: The BLM, a spokesperson told me, “does not send wild horses or burros to slaughter. No loophole exists that would allow people who adopt or buy wild horses to ever sell animals directly or to middlemen for slaughter.”

A common-ground solution: Put more wild horses on birth control

Some conservation nonprofits — along with former BLM employees — allege that BLM has been overly deferential to cattle groups and the ranchers they represent at the expense of wildlife. Sometimes there are even clear conflicts of interest within the Bureau. For example, earlier this year, a top Trump appointee within the Department of the Interior — which the BLM sits under — said at a congressional event that she has been involved in discussions to ease grazing limits and habitat protections; she and her husband own companies that graze cattle on about 250,000 acres of public land managed by the BLM. 

Wild horses and burros aren’t the only species in the crosshairs of the cattle industry and the federal government. Some cattle groups, for example, want to restrict bison grazing around Yellowstone National Park — out of fear they’d spread a bacterial disease to nearby cattle, which has never been documented to occur — and support stripping gray wolves’ Endangered Species Act protections because they (very occasionally) kill grazing cattle. 

And as I’ve previously reported, the US Department of Agriculture kills about 2 million wild animals — including over a million starlings and nearly 60,000 coyotes — a year, primarily in the name of protecting livestock and the crops fed to cattle, chickens, and pigs. 

Perhaps the most promising route to reducing the number of horses rounded up, housed, and potentially sold to slaughter lies in reducing the number of wild horses and burros born in the first place. For that, Patricia Miller, executive director of the nonprofit American Wild Horse Conservation, told Vox that she’d like to see BLM prioritize birth control for wild horses as a more humane alternative. Cattle groups support increased birth control, too.

In 2019, a coalition of cattle industry and animal welfare groups — which AWHC didn’t join — agreed on a proposed compromise plan, called the “Path Forward,” to increase BLM funding to both aggressively increase wild horse roundups and deploy more wild horse birth control. The following year, Congress increased BLM’s wild horse and burro management budget by $21 million and has steadily increased it since. Subsequently, BLM has ramped up fertility control actions, which are both time and resource intensive, but it’s accelerated wild horse roundups at a much faster clip. Miller says BLM could spend up to $11 million on fertility control this year but isn’t mandated to; she and her group are lobbying to make it so. In 2024, BLM spent around $5 million on fertility control.

“We use fertility control wherever it can work,” a BLM spokesperson said over email.

Doubling down on fertility control would go a long way to improving wild horse and burro management in the West, and it could reduce the number held in indefinite captivity or sent to slaughter. But it also leaves open larger questions about how public lands are managed in the US. 

A version of this story originally appeared in the Future Perfect newsletter. Sign up here!