Alabama joins fight against California’s chicken cage sizesAlabama joins fight against California’s chicken cage sizes

Alabama Attorney General Luther Strange has signed onto a lawsuit to protect states’ rights regarding interstate commerce. The suit aims to stop California from imposing its own standards on cage sizes for laying-hens on other states.

“In Alabama, consumers are free to make their own choice of which eggs to buy at their grocery stores, and it is preposterous and quite simply wrong for California to tell Alabama how we must produce eggs,” Strange said. “This is not an animal welfare issue; it is about California’s attempt to protect its economy from its own job-killing law by extending those laws to everyone else in the country.”

California voters passed a law proposition in 2008 requiring its egg producers to provide free ranges or larger cages for hens. Provisions were added to extend the mandate to any eggs imported from outside states and sold in California.

“The citizens of California made a choice for their own state, and when they realized it would harm their egg producers, they made an unconstitutional decision to spread the damage to other states,” Strange said. “If California can get away with this, it won’t be long before the environmentalists in California tell us how we must build cars, grow crops and raise cattle.”

Strange joins the attorneys general of Kentucky, Missouri, Nebraska and Oklahoma and the Iowa governor in asking the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of California to declare the law invalid and stop its enforcement.

Alabama is one of the top 15 egg producing states in the U.S. According to the USDA, egg farms in the state produced 2.1 million eggs in 2012.

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