MADRID — Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez has finally done something the far right approves of — calling a snap election on Nov. 29 that the anti-immigrant Vox party is hailing as “Spain’s last chance to be Spain again.”

Polling third in the race, Vox is Spain’s leading nationalist, euroskeptic force and it sees next month’s contest as its prime opportunity to remold the country after eight years of Sánchez’s socialist premiership by getting its people into top ministerial jobs.

Party leader Santiago Abascal greeted Monday’s election announcement as “excellent news.” His delight is hardly surprising given that polls suggest Vox is on track to make the biggest gains of any major party.

While the center-right People’s Party is expected to come first — with about 33% of the vote, according to POLITICO’s Poll of Polls — it will almost certainly have to team up with Vox, which commands support of about 18%, to build a stable coalition.

Abascal will then be able to demand the inclusion of key elements of Vox’s agenda as its price for that partnership. Its goals include deportations of undocumented migrants, a benefits preference for Spaniards over foreign nationals, slashing EU health and safety rules in the farming sector and rolling back support for gender equality and the LGBTQ+ community.

Vox secured 33 of the 350 seats in Congress in 2023, but is now set to double that. Under the PP’s coalition leadership, it should be able to form part of a comfortable majority.

“This time round, Vox is much stronger,” José Antonio Fúster, spokesperson for the party and a member of the Madrid regional parliament, said. “We are going into a very important election, not so much for us, as for Spaniards … This is the last hope for Spain to be Spain again.”

Fúster would not be drawn on which ministries his party has set its sights on, warning against “selling the bearskin before it has been hunted.”

Pointing to talks with the PP in recent months in four regions where the two parties now govern in coalition, he said the shaping of policy was being prioritized ahead of institutional power. “That is the last thing we negotiate because it is the least important,” he said.

Pet portfolios

In August, Vox MEP Jorge Buxadé told POLITICO that forming part of the government was not the only option open to his party, but that in a hypothetical coalition with the PP, his party would seek a number of ministries “in proportion to our vote share.”

That would amount to a significant percentage. If current polls translate into results in November, Vox would be in a position to claim about a third of ministerial posts.

Analysts expect Vox to press for portfolios that focus on its pet policies, such as agriculture, domestic policy, immigration and industry. The culture and education portfolios could also be of interest to the party, given their relevance in the hard right’s campaign against so-called wokeism.

The regions where the PP and Vox currently govern together — Andalusia, Aragón, Castile and León, and Extremadura — offer clues: The government departments that Vox controls are mainly linked to agriculture, welfare benefits and the family.

The party is heading into the election campaign espousing three main ideas: the concept of “national priority” — ensuring that Spaniards have access to public services and benefits ahead of foreign nationals — a clampdown on immigration and broad deregulation.

Although Vox’s rise to prominence was driven by its fierce stance against Catalan nationalism nearly a decade ago, that debate has faded from the political arena. Now, its focus is, like its European far-right counterparts, more firmly on immigration-related matters.

“Before, Vox talked about immigration, but it wasn’t the nuclear issue it has become,” said Guillermo Fernández Vázquez, a political scientist at Carlos III University and author of a book about the European far right. “Now, when Vox talks about social security payments, it talks about immigration; when it talks about the economy, it talks about immigration. Immigration is the issue that dictates everything.”

Vox also subscribes to the “remigration” policy being touted by many far-right parties, under which undocumented migrants and those who commit crimes would be deported. The PP has appeared to respond to Vox’s hard line by toughening its own stance, calling for the expulsion of foreign criminals and opposing a government migrant legalization program.

In each of the regions where the two parties are in coalition, Vox has ensured that its senior partner agreed to formally include the national priority principle in their governing agreement.

“But when it comes to national priority, the PP has added the caveat that it has to be implemented in line with the law,” said Miguel González, a journalist at the El País daily newspaper and author of a book about Vox. Legislation prevents discrimination against foreign nationals when it comes to accessing public benefits and services, meaning the policy is currently little more than symbolic in those regions. 

“In reality, in order to implement this properly, you’d have to change the immigration law,” González added.

Vox is eyeing an overhaul of that legislation to make it a workable policy.

“It’s very possible to change laws that are bad for Spaniards, so we have to roll them back and introduce new laws, making sure that Spaniards are not last in line,” Fúster said.

Deregulation nation

Deregulation also offers a platform from which to attack EU health-and-safety norms that are reviled by the farming sector, one of Vox’s main voter bases.

Fúster accepted that this could lead to clashes with the European Commission, but insisted that pressure from what he described as a rising tide of European parties sharing Vox’s values would “make sure that Brussels returns to the path of common sense.”

PP leader Alberto Núñez Feijóo has criticized phytosanitary restrictions on farmers but has shown little appetite for conflict with European institutions.

In social policy, González said Vox might use the broader notion of deregulation to dismantle funding for gender equality and LGBTQ+ departments and projects, as it has done on a local level. Fúster was reluctant to be drawn on this: “We believe in the equality of Spaniards,” he said. “We don’t believe that anyone should have privileges above others.”

Fernández Vázquez of Carlos III University said that the origins of Vox suggest a bumpy ride for the PP. Vox would be the first far-right party to enter government in half a century since the death of Francisco Franco in 1975 — and there would likely be clashes.

The far-right party formed in 2013 as a breakaway from the conservatives in frustration at what its founders saw as the pusillanimity of the PP in the face of Catalan separatism. 

“I think the relationship between Vox and PP [in government] will be a bad one,” the researcher said. “Abascal and his colleagues are going to enjoy showing up Feijóo whenever they can, portraying him as lukewarm and weak.”

Fúster accepted “it could be a difficult relationship,” adding that the PP “don’t see things the way we do and we don’t share their vision.”

“We’re not willing to make concessions, we’re willing to have a frank, open and reasonable negotiation.”

But for now, the priority is simply to remove the Socialists. In his traditionally combative style, Abascal insisted the election was a chance to hold on to “the peace, prosperity and freedom that a mafioso government wants to snatch from us forever.”

Max Griera contributed to this article.

This story is part of a series supported by Animal Charity Evaluators, which received a grant from EarthShare.

When I was a kid, my family would occasionally go fishing on small row boats on the lakes of Montgomery County, Maryland. The point wasn’t to catch fish to eat — we always released them — but rather to spend time together in nature. And for a while, I looked back on those times fondly. But as I’ve learned more about fish and their apparent capacity to feel pain, I now wonder: Was I just stabbing a bunch of fish in the mouth and throwing them back in the water, injured and vulnerable?

Ted Kerasote, a nature writer and lifelong hunter and angler, asked himself some version of this question decades ago after fighting to reel in a silver salmon in Alaska — the last he ever released. He still occasionally catches trout for dinner, but said that his decision to stop catch and release fishing that day in Alaska came down to looking at the situation critically: “Seeing this fish struggle for its life, for what end? I wasn’t going to eat it. Catch and release regulations were in place there. And so it was simply for my pleasure to fight this fish.”

Each year, tens of millions of people take to America’s lakes, rivers, streams, and coastal waters to catch billions of fish. Many of these fish only exist because US governmental agencies put them there; each year, over 1 billion fish are bred in hatcheries and stocked in water bodies primarily for anglers. And although firm estimates are hard to come by, it’s clear that the majority of fish caught are not kept for dinner, but tossed back in. Many fishing grounds actually require fish to be released (more on that later). 

While anglers report being primarily motivated to get on the water to commune with nature, spend time with friends and family, and relax, the whole endeavor is anything but pleasant for the fishes themselves. After the steel hook pierces their oral tissue — and sometimes their eyes, gills, or esophagus — they’re often yanked around to the point of exhaustion before being reeled in. Then they’re exposed to air while the hook is removed from their body (and sometimes also for a photo opportunity), before the angler puts them back into the water. There, the fish reenters an often-treacherous ecosystem while fatigued and injured. Sometimes, the hook can’t even be removed and likely remains in their mouths for hours or days.

Estimates on what percent of released fish die vary widely. One 2005 literature review landed the average at 18 percent, while a 2026 review put it at 11 percent. But these are by no means definitive, as they each pooled together data from dozens of studies with different methodologies and time observed after catch and release, which limits our understanding of fishes’ survival from these encounters. 

A different 2026 study, though also imperfect, took a more cleanly experimental approach. Researchers line-caught 489 Chinook salmon and then placed them in holding tanks for observation. Eight percent died within two hours of hooking, and about 25 percent died within 10 days. It’s reasonable to assume that the mortality rate would be higher if the fish were placed back into their local waters, with predators and other natural threats lurking.

Even when fish are caught by scientists like in this case, the operation is by no means surgical. In the Chinook study, 90 percent of the fish experienced moderate to severe fin damage, around 45 percent had moderate to severe hook wounds, and 8 percent suffered severe eye damage.

“No fish is better off because we’ve caught it,” Steven Cooke, a biologist and fisheries scientist at Carleton University in Canada — and an avid angler himself — told me. “It is impossible to catch a fish without causing, one, some level of injury, and two, physiological disturbance.” 

In other words, recreational catch and release fishing injures billions of animals (a vast number of whom were bred for this fate) and condemns many of them to a premature death, and likely a more unpleasant one than if they had simply been killed humanely immediately after catch. Which means that what is often portrayed as a peaceful — even benevolent — pastime is, in another light, a more torturous activity. Especially if you think fish might experience pain. 

What does a fish feel? 

For much of recent history, it’s been thought that fish — far from us on the evolutionary tree, living in ecosystems largely foreign to us — don’t feel pain. But in the early 2000s, a group of scientists in the United Kingdom began to conduct experiments on fish that slowly undermined this belief.

A seminal study, published in 2003, found that fish have nociceptors — sensory neurons that identify and respond to threatening stimuli, like predators or, well, metal hooks jabbed in their mouths. But it wasn’t necessarily evidence that fish feel pain in a similar sense to how we and other animals might; for that, a scientist would need to demonstrate that fish are not just reflexively reacting to noxious stimuli but also that their brains perceive it as pain.

Since then, researchers have poked and prodded fish to see if something more is going on than mere threat avoidance. They have, for example, injected acid and bee venom into the lips of rainbow trout, whose respiration rates nearly doubled and who proceeded to rub their lips against rocks or the tank walls — seemingly in an attempt to soothe the injury. 

In another experiment, scientists trained fish to feed in a certain part of their tank, and then subjected them to electric shocks in that area. The fish were less likely to seek out food as the shock intensity increased. 

But Cooke, the angler and fisheries scientist, isn’t convinced. He wants fellow anglers to treat fish better insofar as he wants fish to reproduce, grow, and have a good life, but says he’s a “fish pain skeptic.” 

“The evidence base around fish pain is meager and generally low quality, extremely biased, and unable to tell us whether or not fish have the capacity to feel pain or not,” Cooke told me. (Cooke, for his part, says he is biased too, and has received funding from pro-fishing interests.) 

The core of the skeptics’ argument boils down to the idea that fishes’ brains don’t possess the necessary equipment to experience pain — namely, the neocortex, which plays a major role in our and other mammals’ processing of pain.

Culum Brown, a professor and fish welfare researcher at Macquarie University in Australia, vehemently disagrees. “All [the information] we have to date suggests the behavioral, physiological, and psychological responses [in fish] mimic humans,” Brown told me. “Whatever way you look at it there are far more similarities than differences, which is not surprising given how important pain perception is from an evolutionary standpoint.” (Brown, I should note, has received some funding from animal welfare and ocean protection foundations.)

We know that various species of fish can use tools, recognize themselves in a mirror, build artistic nests, form complex social relationships, distinguish between human faces, and maintain long-term memories, among other abilities. Is it such a stretch, then, to extend them the capacity for pain?

Ultimately, as my colleague Marina Bolotnikova has written, the fish pain debate is partly a scientific one and partly a philosophical one. “The question remains unsettled because pain is a subjective feeling that science cannot prove definitively,” she wrote. One must be conscious to feel pain, and consciousness remains a mystery. With this uncertainty, we can continue to act as if they don’t feel pain, or we could give them the benefit of the doubt. 

Georgia Mason, a behavioral biologist at the University of Guelph in Canada, is, like Cooke, not quite convinced fish feel pain. But she argues that we ought to take a precautionary approach and act as if fish can experience pain until proven otherwise. 

With that in mind, should we be fishing for fun at all? 

Reducing harm in sportfishing — and rethinking it altogether

For his part, even as a fish pain skeptic and angler, Cooke is keen to reduce harm to fish. And the most important way to do that, he says, is to keep fish wet. He’s even on the board of a nonprofit called Keep Fish Wet.   

Why? “Most fish do not do well when exposed to air,” Cooke said. Their gills collapse and/or stick together, making it hard for them to get the oxygen they need.

“A fish should always be dripping wet,” and only out of the water for 10 seconds or less (the average time anglers kept fish in the air, in one study, was 29 seconds). The group Cooke works with also suggests anglers minimize handling time. And Cooke said fish will experience more stress if they’re caught in warm waters, as it holds less of the oxygen they need. 

Brown had a lot more to say. Anglers should avoid “playing” with the fish and bring them in as quickly as possible; use barbless hooks, which makes for an easier release; and when deepsea fishing, bring the fish up slowly to prevent barotrauma. And for those who kill, rather than release the fish they catch, do so quickly, rather than letting fish slowly suffocate or bleed out.

As Kerasote, the nature writer and hunter and angler, pointed out, catch and release as a widespread hobby is a relatively new phenomenon. Only in recent decades have state wildlife agencies made it a rule in many water bodies, in an effort to prevent fish depletion so as to ensure there is enough for wildlife to eat — and also so that there are always plenty of fish for anglers to catch. 

Before this, Kerasote said, “you went out there, you caught your limit and you were done.” But with catch and release, “there was no limit anymore, and that’s what became embedded in the fishing culture.”

To account for this shift, Kerasote wants to see states limit access to fishing in the same way that they hold lotteries to hunt certain mammals, like elk and Bighorn sheep.

Some fish scientists question the practice of catch and release altogether. While addressing an audience full of anglers at a conference, zoologist Eugene K. Balon bravely — or perhaps foolishly — shared a provocative thought experiment to prove his point. 

Imagine there is a recreational activity called “sportbirding,” Balon proposed, in which participants take fishing rods, put earthworms on the hooks, and cast them out into the forest. Then they wait until a bird — a Robin, in his example — falls for the bait and bites down on the hook.

“The shrieking and flopping bird is proudly wheeled toward the hide, the hook removed and the bird drowned in the water,” Balon said to the crowd (the water, in this case, is a parallel to fish exposed to air). “Would any one of you support such recreational activity? How does it differ from the sportfishing you support?”

“Sportbirding” would surely be considered barbaric to many — even many anglers, I imagine — and yet sportfishing enjoys widespread social acceptance, perhaps because of the persisting belief among many that fish don’t experience pain. 

Recreational fishing also has far-ranging impacts on species beyond its direct targets. For example, a study of over 2,500 pelicans taken into wildlife rehabilitation centers in Florida near the longest fishing pier in the world found that more than half of the birds had been injured by fishing hooks and lines — the leading cause of injury. Stocking nonnative fish to local water bodies can also upset natural food chains and ecosystems. And some of the live baitfish used by anglers spread disease to wild fish populations. 

There is also the issue of these “bait” animals themselves. Billions and billions of smaller fish — like minnows and shiners — are reared and sold each year in the US only to themselves be stabbed through with a fishing barb and intentionally kept alive and thrashing to entice a larger fish to chomp down on them. This is an additional, yet largely hidden, layer of suffering in the recreational fishing industry.

“I think fishing is worse than hunting,” Brown told me. “At least you know what you are targeting when hunting. And hunters pride themselves on a clean kill. It is a very different ethic,” than fishing, he said. That’s evident particularly in the world of competitive sportfishing, where marathon “fights” to reel in enormous fish are glorified.

For Cooke, many survey respondents, and even for me years ago, fishing is often about spending time with family outdoors, away from technology, while marveling at fish. But couldn’t that all be more or less achieved by taking a hike in the woods, snorkeling, boating, scuba diving, catching fish in nets, or even “hookless” fishing, which is practiced by a tiny contingent of anglers?

Not necessarily. Anglers, he said, are also motivated by the “thrill of the chase.” The uncertainty of what type of fish they will catch, and whether they catch any fish at all, keeps drawing anglers back to the water. Cooke said plenty of people who fish might also be driven by the “human domination of nature.”

Humans, like all creatures, are hardwired for survival. And for the vast majority of our history, that entailed catching and killing fish for sustenance. But now, most fishing is done for fun, or for those other pursuits: relaxation, thrills, the domination of nature. But the fun comes with an enormous moral cost that most anglers, it appears, would rather not confront. Because as our understanding of fish and their capacities evolves, our ideas about fishing might need to evolve, too.

My favorite restaurant, here in Madison, Wisconsin, closed this week. 

It was not my favorite because it had the greatest food I’d ever had, nor the most memorable ambiance. But I loved the Mad Rabbit Cafe because it had become my anchor in the neighborhood — it felt like home to me and a core group of friends as surely as the century-old houses lining the surrounding city blocks. Most importantly, it was entirely vegan — a rarity in this city, which, despite its ultra-progressive politics, embraces Wisconsin’s identity as “America’s Dairyland.” It was a refuge where my most closely held values found expression.

That closure is part of a national trend. US plant-based restaurants appear to be going through a contraction, amid the tumultuous aftermath of the Covid-19 pandemic and, perhaps, an anti-plant-based cultural vibe shift.

VegNews magazine reported that data from HappyCow, an app that lists vegan and vegetarian restaurants, finds the number of vegan restaurants in three of the country’s top destinations for vegan dining — New York City, Los Angeles, and Portland, Oregon — decreased by between 21 and 25 percent from 2022 to late 2024. Those cities alone make up a significant share of America’s vegan restaurants. Then, in 2025 and 2026, some of the country’s most renowned, long-running plant-based restaurants also announced that they’d shut down: Modern Love and Candle in New York City, the Vegan Joint in LA, Millennium in Oakland, a more than three-decade-old institution (though it later reopened as a leaner operation), among many others. 

According to a Vegan Society report, in October 2025, HappyCow (which is like Yelp but for plant-based dining) listed 1,717 all-vegan restaurants in the US. As of this writing, HappyCow lists 1,509.

Madison has never had anything like the vegan riches of New York or San Francisco, but even we are having our own vegan recession. When Mad Rabbit opened in early 2024, the city had four fully vegan restaurants; now, depending on how you count, one or two remain (and even the one that’s unambiguously vegan is a food-court-style stall). I visited Mad Rabbit at its last Sunday brunch, where it served what many people have described as the best tofu scramble they’ve ever had, and a crowd-pleasing rotation of crepe specials (this month, it was mango lassi). It’s a culinary niche that, once gone, is hard to replace in a mid-tier city like this one. 

Mad Rabbit’s owner, Nate Anger, told me the business hadn’t been in particularly bad financial shape; it was profitable for each of the three years in which it operated, but not profitable enough to justify the punishing time commitment required to run it. Managing it had taken over his life, as it’s wont to do for many people in the food service industry. “I live here. I spend far more time here than anywhere else,” he told me in a recent interview at the restaurant. “I’ve missed my kids’ baseball game and tournaments and school band recitals.” I looked around at the oddball, DIY space he’d conjured — walls covered in houndstooth print, an Alice in Wonderland-like vortex, and art of rabbits in mischievous-looking moods, one brandishing a pair of large knives (the sort of room you wouldn’t want to encounter while stoned). 

The animal rights movement has two very different emotional registers: the grief and terror of looking squarely at factory farming, and the joy of discovering how much creativity, abundance, and pleasure can exist outside it. All-vegan restaurants represent perhaps the fullest embodiment of that second feeling — like “a little heaven,” as Krupa Panchal, co-owner of Bombay Food Junkies, a vegan Indian spot in suburban St. Louis, put it to me. 

Even as vegan businesses struggle to survive, plant-based options at non-vegan restaurants have become far more mainstream than they were a decade or two ago. Set against the stagnating (if not declining) share of Americans who identify as vegan or vegetarian, that raises difficult and even paradoxical questions for the animal movement.

For that reason, the mass die-off of plant-based restaurants has been much dissected and lamented in the vegan community. As I faced losing my own — a possibility I’d always feared and tried to forestall by supporting it as much as possible — the problem became much more visceral for me. I found myself thinking about why it mattered to me so much: What is lost when these places disappear, and what does that tell us about whether the plant-based movement can grow and endure?

What vegan restaurants are for

The vegan restaurant predates the word “vegan” itself — and so, apparently, do questions about whether they can be financially viable. More than a century ago, French anarchist Georges Butaud co-founded the Foyer Végétalien in Paris, writing in a 1923 letter that he was unsure whether it would attract a sufficient “clientèle végétalienne” to sustain itself. Why start such a business at all, when the audience for plant-based food is so vanishingly small? “I already have some positive results. A few people have become vegan since we opened,” Butaud wrote. The restaurant “is a school where we reciprocally teach one another…I have believed in the usefulness of creating it, and I will be happy if, over the months to come, the number of vegans increases.” 

Many vegan restaurant proprietors today still share that ambition — to be good enough to help the movement grow. 

Long before it became routine to find plant-based options on normie restaurant menus (iceberg lettuce leaves don’t count), plant-based restaurants compensated for vegans’ exclusion from mainstream cuisine. But they have also aimed to provide proof of concept of the diverse, surprising possibilities of plant-based food for a larger audience, showing that plant-based food need not be confined to marginalia. 

Today, of course, restaurants are far more central to our daily lives than they were in Butaud’s time. Americans consume about a third of their calories and the majority of their food budgets outside the home, and food-serving businesses are perhaps our most important third spaces. Meanwhile, the problems associated with animal agriculture and overconsumption of animal products grow unabated in America and around the world. The US alone slaughters 10 billion land animals for meat every year, the overwhelming share of them raised in appalling conditions, and those farmed for milk and eggs endure no better. Reciting these grim facts tends not to be a very fruitful path toward making friends or convincing people that veganism can be a positive and enjoyable lifestyle. Plant-based restaurants, on the other hand, make veganism feel less like a prohibition than an invitation; hospitality rather than horror. 

Anyone who has ever gone vegan knows what it’s like to incessantly be asked the well-meaning but bewildering question: “What do you eat?” (And, I get it! It’s confusing for those of us who grew up viewing food free of animal products as side salad or overcooked green beans.) Plant-based businesses have long been laboratories for answering it, developing techniques that draw richness and variety from ingredients not often treated as the main event in Western cuisines.

The more than 50-year-old Moosewood Restaurant (although mostly vegetarian, not fully vegan) was an early conduit between restaurant experimentation and home cooking, its recipes spreading far beyond Ithaca, New York, through its enormously popular cookbooks. Soul Vegetarian in Atlanta, opened in 1979, developed a plant-based soul food repertoire that helped cut a path for dozens of other vegan soul restaurants across the US; the Chicago Diner, in the city long identified with stockyards and slaughterhouses, helped popularize plant-based versions of American diner and deli staples. And chef Miyoko Schinner, at her erstwhile San Francisco restaurant Now & Zen, experimented with plant-based cheeses long before launching Miyoko’s Creamery, one of the most acclaimed and influential vegan dairy companies of the past decade. 

The 21st century in particular has seen a flowering of vegan restaurants serving every palate and national cuisine, in every possible aesthetic — punk, hippie, psychedelic, fussy and upscale. They still expand my mind today, showing that a lifetime wouldn’t be enough to discover all the ways we can eat without the exploitation of animals.

The longtime Grasshopper restaurant in Boston, whose pan-Asian fare draws partly from Vietnamese Buddhist temple cuisine, makes mock meats that are worlds away from the rubbery substitutes that many Americans associate with the category (it closed its beloved, homey restaurant space in 2024, later reopening a stall inside a food court). Mad Rabbit changed even this longtime vegan’s idea of what tofu could be. Chicago-based Penelope’s Vegan Taqueria makes, as far as I’m concerned, the most exceptional Mexican food — vegan or not — this side of the Rio Grande. V-Grits, a Southern comfort spot in Louisville, Kentucky (RIP, 2024), provided evidence that some of America’s most exciting plant-based food could be found far from the big coastal cities best known for it. 

So why are so many of these places shuttering now? 

The vegan restaurant death spiral? 

Theories abound about the great dying of vegan restaurants.

Some of the casualties, it must be said, just weren’t very good in the first place. The raw vegan boom of the 2000s and 2010s, for example, produced numerous establishments built around that especially unforgiving constraint — no cooking. The result was often less-than-thrilling food (which isn’t to say it’s never good!), all in service of a restriction with scant evidence of health benefits to support it. Lots of these restaurants have closed in the 2020s, reflecting diminishing demand for that particular variant of vegan food. 

But the 2010s weren’t merely a golden age for zucchini noodles and date-walnut brownies — vegan restaurants of all stripes were multiplying, as was interest in the new generation of plant-based meats (Beyond and Impossible). It really did appear, for a minute there, that the future might be plant-based, vindicating decades of animal advocates’ work to push veganism into the mainstream. 

“I felt like veganism had really hit a big stride” in that period, Anger, the Mad Rabbit founder, said. Everyone was streaming documentaries advocating for plant-based diets — Forks Over Knives, Cowspiracy, What the Health, among others. Some polls suggested the share of Americans who called themselves vegan was growing. Anger said his market research led him to believe that the overall trend line for veganism would continue going up, even a little. Instead, “it just rolled right back over.” His restaurant had a core customer base of committed vegans, but its heavy reliance on regulars also showed how limited its reach was; stagnating interest in veganism may have been putting a ceiling on its growth. Keith Uruski, owner of Nooch, a vegan restaurant in Windsor, Ontario, open since 2018, told me that the business had thrived in its first few years, but has since slowed considerably, and he hasn’t paid himself in three years.  

In the years leading up to the pandemic, the assumption that the audience for vegan food would keep growing shaped much bigger bets than Mad Rabbit. Vegan chain restaurants including Veggie Grill, Native Foods, and Planta had pursued aggressive growth plans in the 2010s and early 2020s but eventually retrenched, closing locations and abandoning the scale they’d once envisioned. (Again, some of this may be merit-based rather than evidence of a broad rejection of veganism — YMMV, but I found Veggie Grill, at least last time I had it pre-Covid, to be mid.) “Most dedicated vegan chains are now in kind of a managed decline,” Lizzy Bartlett, senior director of menu research and insights at Technomic, a food service industry research firm, told me.  

The cultural winds have certainly shifted. The Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) movement has probably contributed to a thermostatic swing away from “unnatural”-seeming diets and simulacra of traditional foods, like plant-based meat and milk. I also think society has deep carnist antibodies that activate whenever meat-eating faces heightened moral scrutiny. In the last few years, that’s taken the form of a protein obsession that has hijacked the minds of otherwise rational people, convincing them tofu and beans lack sufficient protein to build muscle.

But perhaps my favorite explanation was articulated by Financial Times journalist Henry Mance last year: “The decline in idealism,” reflected in the reelection of Donald Trump — the triumph of our collective id.  

There’s a risk of reading too much into all this, however. Many restaurants, vegan or not, suffered during Covid and from prolonged inflation in food and energy prices. This year, consumers are spending less at restaurants because of elevated fuel prices due to the war in Iran. Panchal, of Bombay Food Junkies, said that her sales have been down in 2025 and 2026 compared to the years prior, but she doesn’t believe vegan restaurants have been faring worse than non-vegan ones. Some vegan businesses have recently closed in St. Louis for personal reasons rather than failing in the market, she told me.

This is part of the natural life cycle of independent restaurants — many disappear within a few years, and even highly successful ones eventually run their course. US cities had many vegan restaurants open in the 2000s and 2010s, so we might now be seeing a wave of closures that reflects the aging of that cohort. 

Preliminary results shared with Vox from a 2026 survey of the global vegan restaurant industry, by the nonprofit Vegan Hospitality, also complicate the idea that plant-based restaurants are being killed off because of waning demand for vegan food. In responses from about 59 vegan restaurants (a self-selected group, to be sure), mostly in the US and Mexico, roughly four in five said they’d still choose to be fully vegan if they were opening today. Of 13 businesses that were closing or had been sold, six said that being vegan actually helped them, and four said it made no meaningful difference.

And there’s some tension between the “death of veganism” hypothesis and what may be one of the biggest forces now disadvantaging dedicated vegan restaurants: the widespread adoption of plant-based options on omnivorous restaurant menus. That it’s now easier to be vegan at mainstream establishments is “unquestionable,” Anger said. He viewed Mad Rabbit’s competitors as not just fully plant-based businesses, but any restaurant that offers “more than two or three” vegan options; it was located just a block away from one of Madison’s best-regarded restaurants, a Laotian place with several very good plant-based offerings.

Likewise, Michael Fifelski, general manager of Red Sushi in downtown Madison, which has a solid list of vegan options, told me, “Our vegetarian and vegan rolls actually are quite popular” — a foundational part of the menu. There can be a real advantage to simply letting vegan food blend in — Amanda Byrd, the manager of Everly, an eclectic, globally inspired restaurant in Madison, told me that its top dish, a butternut squash and forbidden rice curry, is incidentally plant-based. In many cases, “if you de-emphasize the vegan statement, but the dish happens to be vegan,” it will sell better, Claire Conaghan of the food industry research firm Datassential said.

Though nothing compares, for me, to the feeling of total alignment that comes with dining at an all-vegan restaurant, there is also something affirming about seeing plant-based food finally taken seriously by the wider culture — and vegan dishes surviving on their own merits alongside everything else on the menu.

Do vegan restaurants still matter?

In a world where you can find a satisfying vegan entrée at Chipotle or Taco Bell or your local brewpub, are fully vegan restaurants still needed? What purpose do they serve?

The most fundamental problem beneath the downturn in vegan businesses is simply that the vegan population does not seem to be growing much at all. Polling on the question is messy and often inconsistent, but according to Gallup’s 2026 survey, 2 percent of Americans call themselves vegan, the same figure as in 2012, when the firm first started asking the question. If expanding the number of people who abstain from animal products remains an important goal (a point debated within the animal movement, though I think dietary change still matters a great deal), then which is more likely to move that objective forward: vegan restaurants, or an abundance of vegan options at omnivorous ones? Which does more to increase the number of plant-based meals consumed rather than animal-based ones and generate excitement about vegan food?  

I put those questions to Seth Ariel Green, a research scientist at Stanford’s Humane and Sustainable Food Lab, who writes the Substack “Regression to the Meat.” He’s one of the most intellectually honest researchers anywhere on meat reduction. His answer, via email, is that we don’t really know: “I have no idea how to weigh the pros and cons of, when I’m choosing between meals, 1) signaling to the world that vegan businesses are viable or 2) signaling to a particular business that their vegan options are viable. That’s a hard problem!” (It might be “a microeconomic structural equation modeling paper waiting to be written,” he added.)

Reducing prevailing levels of meat consumption even a tiny bit, much less convincing people to become vegan, is really, maddeningly hard, as Green has written. One frequently cited obstacle to growing the animal rights movement — its “central unsolved problem,” as one movement leader recently put it — is that it lacks much in the way of an in-person social world and sense of community. Vegan restaurants alone can’t fix that, of course, but they are among the few physical institutions the movement has. At their best, they provide a space where a private dietary choice can be reinforced by a shared sense of identity — a place to run into someone you already know or meet someone new, at a speaker event or social mixer. These spontaneous, embodied connections made Mad Rabbit such a warm presence in my life, and its final days all the more melancholy.

That function may be especially useful when plant-based restaurants are rooted in traditions people already belong to — cultural, religious, or otherwise — and help them view veganism as continuous with an identity they already have rather than as something alien to it. As Green has suggested, “let’s tap into pre-existing identities, explain how plant-based diets are consistent with them, and then take folks somewhere to enjoy convenient, delicious plant-based food together.” 

On the other hand, plant-based options at omnivorous establishments matter for almost the opposite reason. People often struggle to stay vegan because eating differently isolates them from non-vegan friends and family; restaurants that can accommodate mixed-diet social groups help remove that social penalty. These options also need a customer base — if no one orders them, they’re unlikely to remain on menus. 

I’m enough of a weirdo that I try to almost exclusively support plant-based restaurants whenever I eat out. I desperately want them to survive, and at the end of the day, no one is more invested in advancing the craft of plant-based cooking than vegan restaurants themselves.

Not everyone needs to be like me — in a world where almost all people still eat animal products, a healthy ecosystem needs both places built entirely around veganism and those where plant-based food is woven into broader food culture. It needs, most of all, excellent vegan food, wherever it might be found. And now that veganism has made at least a small breach into mainstream dining, vegan restaurants still offer something their meat-serving counterparts cannot. They’re like miniature utopias where the normal order of things is inverted and, for the length of a meal, we can see what a future without animal exploitation would look like. 

This story appeared in Today, Explained, a daily newsletter that helps you understand the most compelling news and stories of the day. Subscribe here.

Four beluga whales have died in a month at one of America’s top-rated aquariums — a tragic development and, arguably, a reason to revisit the ethics of zoos. (More on that in just a minute.)

The latest cetacean casualty, a 26-year-old female named Osiris, died at Chicago’s Shedd Aquarium yesterday. She follows 34-year-old Beethoven, a longtime resident of the aquarium, as well as 20-year-old Rain and 23-year-old Peekachu, who died in late August and early September.   

Osiris, Rain and Peekachu were all part of the Marineland diaspora: a group of four dolphins and 30 beluga whales that rescuers have worked to relocate since the 2024 closure of a scandal-plagued theme park in Niagara Falls, Canada. This summer, the animals were successfully transferred to aquariums and marine parks in the US and Spain. That was a frankly incredible undertaking involving padded shipping containers, a police-escorted convoy and a chartered plane. 

But in some regards, the international flight wasn’t even the hardest part of the whales’ journeys. Some of the animals have struggled to thrive in their new environments — even when those environments are state-of-the-art, like Shedd. 

In a blog post announcing Osiris’s death, the aquarium noted that its rescued whales had been under 24-hour supervision and receiving intensive, specialized care. The aquarium is still investigating the cause of death for all four whales. 

Go a little deeper

Believe me when I tell you that it gives me no pleasure to write the following paragraphs. I really love aquariums. In fact, as a kid, I grew up visiting the now-shuttered and much-maligned Marineland. 

But incidents like these back-to-back deaths should prompt us all to ask ourselves who aquariums and zoos are actually for. And the answer, I regret to tell you, is frequently not “the animals” — though zoos and aquariums have, since the mid-20th century, marketed themselves as both tourist attractions and important players in wildlife education and conservation.  

As my colleague Kenny Torrella writes, these institutions and their defenders argue they protect animals in three ways: first, by raising money for wildlife conservation projects; second, by helping to reintroduce vulnerable species back into the wild; and third, by inspiring visitors to take an interest in the environment. The Shedd Aquarium’s motto, for instance, is “For Love of Waterkind.” 

It’s worth scrutinizing those purported virtues, however — even when prestigious and reputable institutions like Shedd are making them. On one hand, there is merit to the claim that zoos and aquariums fundraise for wildlife conservation: In 2022, the latest year for which data is available, one group of accredited zoos and aquariums spent more than a quarter of a billion dollars on habitat projects. 

The evidence is thinner on the other points, though. It’s incredibly rare for aquariums and zoos to reintroduce endangered species back into the wild — that’s very difficult to do. And surveys of zoo and aquarium visitors show that merely seeing a wild animal in a tourist setting doesn’t generally galvanize people on matters of welfare or stewardship. Living in captivity in that tourist setting, however, can be stressful (or worse) for the animals themselves. 

But what would a humane alternative look like? Even if zoos and aquariums stopped catching animals in the wild, that would still leave many thousands who are injured, orphaned, born in captivity, or otherwise accustomed to human care. 

When it comes to whales, one nonprofit advocacy organization is already working on an alternative: a 110-acre coastal sanctuary for “retired” whales. That project, however, is still a long way from completion. And in the meantime, it’s up to consumers to decide whether the stated benefits of zoos and aquariums outweigh the potential harms to the animals they exhibit.

One link for later

➨ Beware the trap of “moral perfection.” We should all endeavor to live lives that embody our values, sure. But if you never board a plane because you care about the climate, or you never take your kid to zoos because you read the arguments above, then you might end up with a smaller, less-lived life. And that’s no good, either. 

Before you go…

• Did you know…that there have been “revolutionary” advancements in Alzheimer’s treatments in just the past five years? Two new drugs both markedly slow the progress of dementia.
• Today’s trivia: Geography time! What country is bordered by Chad to the east and Mali to the west? Hint: It is the second-largest landlocked African nation. (You can find this and other brain puzzles in Vox’s daily crossword. Look for the answer in tomorrow’s edition.)
• Yesterday’s trivia: Yesterday we asked you for the classic Broadway star who first sang hits, including “There’s No Business Like Show Business.” That would be Ethel Merman, whom one biographer dubbed “the most successful musical comedy performer of her generation.” 

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!