For decades, the meat industry has worked overtime to persuade consumers that the animals who end up on their plates are not the products of factory farming. Its most effective tool in that endeavor is humanewashing: misleading marketing and language, often built around nice-sounding labels that create the impression that the animal lived a better life, without requiring any change in how animals are raised. Few labels are more successful at this than “humanely raised.” The label appears on meat and poultry products at most grocery stores in America.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) has authority over many claims that appear on meat labels. When a package says “humanely raised,” “raised with care,” “no antibiotics ever,” or “all natural,” it is because USDA has approved the use of the claim through an established regulatory framework. For years, USDA set no standards for what meat producers needed to do differently to use the “humanely raised” label.
Then in 2024, after more than a decade of pressure from advocacy groups including Farm Forward, USDA revised its guidelines governing animal-raising claims. At the time, Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack said the update would help level the playing field for producers and ensure consumers could trust these claims when purchasing meat. But the end result was a disappointment: the agency’s updated guidelines continued to allow producers to self-define humane treatment in more or less any way they desire. The updated guidelines also failed to require third-party certification. Most damningly, they never established what even a minimal baseline standard of animal care would look like to qualify as higher welfare.
This is not simply a market failure; rather, it is the predictable result of a regulatory choice. USDA has the authority and the established process to set a real standard for “humanely raised” claims, but has chosen not to. The result is a system in which producers can take advantage of regulatory ambiguity by using vague or unverifiable claims to market products that may be no different from conventional meat. The regulatory structure that permits this outcome has little built-in pressure to change. This matters because the underlying reality has not changed: well over 90 percent of farmed animals are raised on factory farms.
In our web-based convenience sample of more than 60 meat and poultry product lines carrying “humane” claims across beef, pork, poultry, and lamb, we found that the majority (55 percent) did not have an independent, third-party certification on the product label, leaving shoppers with no clear way to verify the “humane” claims being made.
Often, that term wasn’t worth much: many companies in our sample defined “humanely raised” in terms of animal feed, a factor that has nothing to do with confinement, handling, genetics, disease, or anything else that might actually influence the animal’s experience. Others used reassuring-sounding but meaningless language like “stress-free environment,” which is not tied to any verifiable practice or policy.
Only 45 percent of our sample carried a third-party certification that a shopper could observe directly on the package. Although third-party certification can be important, it does not guarantee a humane environment. Among the minority of products that were certified, the most common label was USDA Organic, a program with only modest welfare requirements. Meanwhile, not a single product in our sample carried Animal Welfare Approved (AWA), one of the few certifications on the market with standards meeting or exceeding consumer expectations: it specifically requires that animals live their lives on pasture, with no cages or crates, and no factory farms. The absence of AWA-certified meat in our sample highlights the reality that shoppers simply can’t find animal products at most retailers that meet their ethical standards.
The limits of humane labeling become clearest when labels omit the factors that most shape an animal’s quality of life. This omission is especially consequential for chickens raised for meat, whose growth has been accelerated, whose bodies have been enlarged, and whose susceptibility to disease has increased through decades of selective breeding. More than 95 percent of chicken meat sold at retail, including nearly all carrying a “humane” label, comes from genetically modified birds whose growth rate has increased by more than 400 percent since 1957. These birds are destined to experience higher rates of lameness, cardiovascular distress, early death, and myriad other conditions of suffering and illness.
Genetically healthier birds do exist, but they are exceptionally rare. Whether marketed as conventional, cage-free, organic, or humane, nearly all chickens raised for meat are derived from the same fast-growing genetic lines that make certain forms of suffering an inherent feature of production rather than a consequence of individual farming practices.
The evidence supports the following conclusion: two years after its update, USDA’s labeling framework has done nothing to prevent “humanely raised” from functioning primarily as a misleading marketing claim rather than a substantive welfare standard. Many products carrying the label cannot be verified, and when they can, verification often means little. And when it comes to the most important question that determines whether a chicken’s life is bearable—their genetics—the label has nothing to say.
To address these failures, USDA must establish species-specific minimum standards; it must require, rather than merely encourage, third-party certification for animal claims; and it must ensure that claims of humane treatment address the factors that actually determine an animal’s welfare, including genetics and growth rate.