Loophole on Wheels: Trucks and the 28-Hour Law

©2005	Animals' Angels

By Peter Brandt

A truck is a vehicle—or is it? Not when you're a cow or a pig on a long road trip, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA).

A federal law on the books for more than 132 years generally requires that, for every 28 hours of interstate transport, all animals be provided at least five hours of rest during which they are offloaded and given food and water. Nevertheless, every year in this country truckers transport tens of thousands of animals for exceedingly long periods of time—up to 48 hours—while typically denying them food or water. At fault is a loophole in the USDA's interpretation of the law big enough to drive a truck through—literally.

On October 4, The Humane Society of the United States (HSUS), together with Farm Sanctuary, Compassion Over Killing, and Animals' Angels, filed a legal petition with the USDA asking the agency to close the Twenty-Eight Hour Law loophole in the interest of safeguarding animal welfare and public health.

The Twenty-Eight Hour Law

The original intent of our nation's first federal humane legislation, known as the Twenty-Eight Hour Law, is plain. In 1872, the U.S. Senate debated animal welfare during long-distance journeys, a discussion spurred by public outcry over the deplorable conditions that animals endured during cross-country railway transport.

"I have witnessed with my own eyes the torture of these beasts until I turned away because I could not look at it any longer," confessed one Senator in the public record.

"And when we know what takes place on the great highways of commerce," another Senator declared, "I think it a very provident thing, and one of very high expediency, that the Government of the United States should interpose its authority, and at least in some way give an admonition which shall teach men that even dumb animals have rights which are not to be violated."

The Senate passed the Twenty-Eight Hour Law in 1873 and then-President Ulysses S. Grant signed it into law.

That Was Then...

Animals suffer terribly during modern trips.

A recent investigation by Washington, D.C.-based Compassion Over Killing (COK) documented the inhumane transport of 283 pigs during an approximately 35-hour long trip from Kansas City, Missouri, to Modesto, California. The driver told COK investigators that he would not let the animals out to rest for the entirety of the trip, and investigators reported numerous and customary cruelties, including:

» Dead animals being left for more than 30 hours on a truck still holding live animals

» Animals enduring 95-degree temperatures, and ammonia accumulation causing animals to cough and foam at the mouth

» Animals suffering numerous injuries including scratches, bruises, abrasions, and bleeding lacerations on their bodies, legs, and ears

Another recent investigation by the organization Animals' Angels followed a truck carrying approximately 200 pigs as it traveled for 35 consecutive hours between Lethbridge, Canada and Atwater, California. Investigators observed that during this 35-hour journey, the pigs endured dramatic temperature extremes and truckers deprived them of food, water, and a chance to rest off of the overcrowded truck.

The ammonia that accumulated in the truck during the journey burned the investigators' throats and eyes when they approached the vehicle. When the animals were finally unloaded, several pigs were in obvious pain and suffering severely—one had a broken leg, three were limping badly, and two experienced heart attacks shortly after unloading.

According to the investigators, after only three and a half hours of "resting" in slaughterhouse pens, workers repeatedly shocked the pigs with electric prods to move them up a long chute towards the kill floor.

What about the protection afforded by the Twenty-Eight Hour Law?

Written in 1872, years before the invention of the internal combustion engine, the law spoke of animals carried by rail, steam, sail, or "vessels of any description" and did not specifically mention trucks. The omission, of course, was simply because trucks did not yet exist.

In its current form, the language of the Twenty-Eight Hour Law clearly applies to animal-transporting "vehicle[s]" and not just to railroad cars. Nonetheless, the USDA interprets the Twenty-Eight Hour Law as not applying to trucks, the means by which producers transport 95% of animals in this country. By excluding trucks from the law, the USDA has effectively rendered it meaningless.

Today, farm animals may travel from one U.S. coast to the other. Pigs, for example, are frequently shipped from farrowing operations in North Carolina to finisher facilities in Iowa, then on to slaughter plants in California. These long-distance trips exact a great toll on the animals, commonly causing exhaustion, motion sickness, weight loss, dehydration, crippling injury, and even death.

Not surprisingly, approximately 420,000 pigs are crippled and approximately 170,000 die during transport each year, reported David Meisinger of the National Pork Board in 2002 in National Hog Farmer. These death rates rise with extreme temperatures on hot and humid days and on very cold days when the wind chill can freeze pigs to death on the trucks.

Calling for Common Sense

When The HSUS and its co-petitioners filed their legal petition with the USDA this week, the reasons were manifold. In addition to ensuring the humane treatment of animals, closing the loophole would also address serious public health and safety concerns.

The Twenty-Eight Hour Law mandates that common carriers "may not confine animals in a vehicle or vessel for more than 28 consecutive hours." The HSUS and its co-petitioners are simply asking Secretary of Agriculture Mike Johanns to help protect animals by issuing regulations that will meaningfully apply the law's humane standards to animals suffering in trucks during interstate transport. By doing so, Secretary Johanns will honor the express intent of Congress.

Humane considerations were not the sole reason that Congress passed the Twenty-Eight Hour Law. In 1873, the 42nd Congress also sought to protect consumers from ills associated with slaughtering animals sickened by inhumane shipping practices. This concern is even more relevant today.

Long-distance live animal transport enables diseases to spread quickly and over large areas, circumventing natural barriers that would normally slow the spread of illness and making it more difficult to trace diseases to their source. Never before has long-distance animal transport been such a threat to public health, due to the highly contagious nature of some livestock and poultry diseases and increased susceptibility to infection due to stress-impaired immune function.

In its 2002 report, the European Commission's Scientific Committee on Animal Health and Animal Welfare emphasized, "With increasing duration of journey, the welfare of animals generally gets worse because they become more fatigued, incur a steadily increasing energy deficit, become more susceptible to existing infections, and may become diseased because they encounter new pathogens."

Reviewing the available scientific literature on the public health, animal health, and animal welfare impacts of animal transport, the expert committee concluded, "Journeys should be as short as possible."

Similarly, the Federation of Veterinarians of Europe, fearing that live animal transport can lead to "serious animal and public health problems, such as the rapid spread of diseases," recommended in its 2001 position paper on animal transport that the "[l]ong distance transportation of animals for slaughter should be replaced, as much as possible, by a carcass-only trade."

Because of the grave harm suffered by millions of animals during transport, The HSUS and its co-petitioners urge the USDA to expedite consideration of this legal petition. The legislators who, in the interest of public health and the humane treatment of animals, crafted the Twenty-Eight Hour Law would be shocked to see the USDA gutting the substance of their work by failing to apply the law to 95% of animal transportation in the United States.

What You Can Do

Please call, write, or e-mail Mike Johanns and W. Ron DeHaven at the USDA, and urge them to grant The HSUS's legal petition for rule-making and thereby apply the Twenty-Eight Hour Law to the interstate truck transport of animals.

Please take action at our 28-Hour Law advocacy page, or contact:

Mike Johanns
Secretary of Agriculture
U.S. Department of Agriculture
1400 Independence Ave., S.W.
Washington, D.C. 20250
Phone: 202-720-3631

W. Ron DeHaven
Administrator
Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS)
U.S. Department of Agriculture
1400 Independence Ave., S.W.
Washington, D.C. 20250
Phone: 202-720-3631

Peter Brandt is a Litigation Fellow with the Animal Protection Litigation section of The HSUS.

See the Video

28 Hour Petition

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