Anjelica Huston Says California Must Stop Adding Animal Factories

For Immediate Release:
March 30, 2022

Contact:
Robin Goist 202-483-7382

This morning, Oscar winner and longtime PETA ally Anjelica Huston sent a letter to members of California’s Assembly Agriculture Committee, calling intensive animal factory farms “the last thing California needs” and urging lawmakers to adopt a “commonsense approach to reducing environmental devastation” by passing AB 2764, which would prohibit the construction or expansion of factory farms and slaughterhouses in the state.

“Factory farms and slaughterhouses are a significant contributor to California’s carbon footprint and are sucking the state’s water supply dry, so adding more of them to the mix would be disastrous,” Huston wrote on PETA’s behalf. “A moratorium on building such facilities would also help prevent extreme cruelty to animals—and who wouldn’t support that?”

According to the Pacific Institute, 47% of California’s water-use footprint comes from meat and dairy farming. Animal agriculture is responsible for nearly one-fifth of human-induced greenhouse-gas emissions. In addition to harming the planet, the meat, egg, and dairy industries are abysmally cruel to animals, who spend their lives crammed into filthy sheds, compelled to live in their own waste before being trucked in all types of weather to horrible slaughterhouses. Government inspectors report that many animals are fully conscious as their throats are slit.

“This bill would help protect the state from devastating droughts and deadly heat waves,” Huston notes, urging assemblymembers to pass the bill. “[A]s someone who lives in an area vulnerable to wildfires, I take this issue very seriously.”

PETA—whose motto reads, in part, that “animals are not ours to abuse in any way”—opposes speciesism, a human-supremacist worldview. For more information, please visit PETA.org or follow the group on Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram.

Huston’s letter to Assemblymember Robert Rivas and members of the Assembly Agriculture Committee follows.

March 30, 2022

The Honorable Robert Rivas

Assembly Committee on Agriculture

1020 N. St., Rm. 362

Sacramento, CA 95814

Re: Statement in Support of AB 2764 (Nazarian) Animals: commercial animal feeding operations and slaughterhouses: prohibition on new operations

Dear Assemblymember Rivas and Members of the Assembly Agriculture Committee:

I’m writing on behalf of my friends at PETA and as someone who calls California home to urge you to pass AB 2764. The last thing our beautiful state needs is another large, cruel, filthy factory farm.

As you know, this bill would not affect existing factory farms and slaughterhouses or the companies that run them or prevent people from buying meat. It is simply a bare-bones, commonsense approach to reducing environmental devastation in the future, and as someone who lives in an area vulnerable to wildfires, I take this issue very seriously.

This bill would help protect the state from devastating droughts and deadly heat waves. Factory farms and slaughterhouses are a significant contributor to California’s carbon footprint and are sucking the state’s water supply dry, so adding more of them to the mix would be disastrous. A moratorium on building such facilities would also help prevent extreme cruelty to animals—and who wouldn’t support that? Slaughterhouses are also among the most dangerous places on Earth for workers and became even more so when they turned into COVID-19 hotspots due to the unsafe, unsanitary working conditions.

The planet is sounding the alarm for all our sakes, and I hope you’ll help answer the call by passing AB 2764.

Sincerely,

Anjelica Huston