Ballot Initiatives for Cage-free Hens

About 375 million egg-laying chickens are in the United States, and slightly more than half of them are not in cage free systems. This often means that they are kept in conventional cages, where each bird is afforded less than 90 inches of space (about the size of a sheet of paper).

This prevents hens from engaging in natural behaviours that can bring them happiness, such as dust-bathing, roosting, foraging, or stretching their wings. It also causes physical injuries such as open lesions on their feet that are caused by standing on the wire floor of the cage.

Fortunately, most of the American public is opposed to these practices. Faunalytics published a report called “Public Acceptability Of Standard U.S. Animal Agriculture Practices”, which found that 84.9% of survey respondents found keeping chickens in tiny cages (67–86 square inches) unacceptable. Only 9.2% of survey respondents found this practice to be acceptable.

Unfortunately, the egg farming industry is oftentimes in favour of caging hens, as preventing chickens from moving causes them to burn less calories, which in turn lowers feed costs for the farmers. This industry also lobbies politicians, which can prevent legislative branches of state governments from banning these cruel and unpopular practices.

Here, animal advocates are left with an opportunity: they can bypass the politicians by setting up ballot initiatives that would prohibit keeping egg-laying hens in small cages. The following states 1) have not yet passed legislation banning keeping laying hens in cages, and 2) allow ballot initiatives as a manner of creating new statutes: Alaska, Arkansas, Idaho, Maine, Missouri, Montana, North Dakota, Nebraska, Oklahoma, South Dakota, Wyoming.

However, not all these states have significant egg farming industries. Going off World Population Review’s “Egg Production by State 2026”, out of the aforementioned states only Missouri, Arkansas, Nebraska, and Oklahoma have significant egg production. If we assume 300 eggs per layer hen per year, and use The Humane League’s estimate of 45.7% of laying hens in cage-free systems, we get the following approximate counts of caged hens in each of these states:

1. Missouri: 830,000 caged hens
2. Arkansas: 600,000 caged hens
3. Nebraska: 410,000 caged hens
4. Oklahoma: 80,000 caged hens

Note: These figures are likely underestimated, as we’re assuming they have the national average portion of hens in caged systems, when it’s likely higher as states that have banned cages bring the national average down.

Thus, we have identified 4 states where 1) there are significant numbers of egg-laying hens in caged systems, and 2) allow ballot initiatives. This raises the following question: How likely is it for a ballot initiative to work in these states? Well, using the aforementioned Faunalytics study, we can see that region, race, age, and income have no significant effect on whether someone would support banning these cages. However, we see that men and Republicans are more likely to find keeping egg-laying hens in tiny cages acceptable.

So, for an (unrealistic) worst case scenario, we will assume a voter base composed entirely of male Republicans. We are also going to assume the population of the least populous of the 4 relevant states (Nebraska), with ¼ of the voter turnout they had for the 2024 Presidential Election. The reason for picking the smallest voter base is to maximize the variance at play, which would increase the odds of the less popular side winning.

We are also going to assume that if a voter finds a practice unacceptable, they will vote in favour of banning it, and use the dataset from the aforementioned Faunalytics study to calculate the probability of a male Republican doing so.

So, after simulating this worst-case mock election 100 times (using the NumPy and Pandas Python libraries), all 100 simulations resulted in more votes in favour of banning tiny cages for egg-laying hens than votes against or abstentions.

It would be fair to object that the assumption “if a voter finds a practice unacceptable, they will vote in favour of banning it”, due to the results of the Prop 12 ballot initiative in California. This prohibited small cages for cows, pigs, and chickens, yet only received 63% of the vote (while these practices have >63% disapproval ratings).

This is still enough to pass a ballot initiative though, and we can infer that at least other Democratic states could easily pass such a bill, and speculate that Republican states most likely can as well.

In fact, if we simulate the same voter base as before but using a 63% chance of voting in favour of the ballot initiative, we still get 100 simulations out of 100 resulting in the majority of votes in favour of the cage bans. Further, if we lower the probability to only 51%, we still get a cage ban receiving the majority of the votes in 100 simulations out of 100.

We also need to make sure that the potential ballot initiatives aren’t taking away funds from more cost-effective forms of reducing the number of egg-laying hens in caged systems, such as the corporate lobbying done by The Humane League.

In order to get a conservative cost of obtaining a signature for a pro-animal welfare ballot initiative, we are going to use the total spending of Oregon’s IP28 petitioners (~$310k) and the number of verified signatures they obtained (~104k). We get a cost per signature of about USD$2.98. I believe this is a worst-case estimate as IP28’s suggested changes are very unpopular among the general public, unlike the abolition of caged systems for egg-laying hens.

The following is the minimum number of signatures required to get on a ballot (according to Ballotpedia in 2026) in each of the previously identified states, along with the worst-case cost estimate:

1. Missouri: 106,384 signatures (~$317,000)
2. Oklahoma: 92,263 signatures (~$275,000)
3. Nebraska: 88,938 signatures (~$265,000)
4. Arkansas: 72,563 signatures (~$216,000)

This leaves us with the following estimates of cost effectiveness in chickens removed from caged systems per dollar:

1. Arkansas (2.78 hens per $)
2. Missouri (2.62 hens per $)
3. Nebraska (1.55 hens per $)
4. Oklahoma (0.29 hens per $)

Note: these numbers are not hen life-years, but the number of hens at any given time.

The Humane League’s internal estimate is 2 hens spared from a cage for every dollar. So, we can assume that ballot initiatives to end caged systems for egg production in Arkansas and Missouri are (probably) a more effective use of donations than The Humane League, even assuming the worst-case estimate of cost-effectiveness for the ballot initiatives.