Louisa's legacy resonates across Oklahoma

KPG board member Louisa McCune’s work helped animals, art lovers, and all Oklahomans, but she left behind one piece of unfinished business.

August 28, 2024‍

Louisa McCune had so many ideas, it was hard to keep up with them all.

Not just spaghetti ideas (“throw them against a wall and see what sticks”), she had so many really good ideas. They often came in email form, dashed off in a few breathless sentences. “What about …” she’d begin before outlining her latest idea in thoughtful, elegant prose. Louisa’s email often read like polished, publishable editorials, in words so lucid and convincing they seemed effortless.

“What about a lofty piece of legislation that is sort of like a Bill of Rights,” she wrote last year, describing a legislative response to book banning in Oklahoma’s public schools. “A statement for the mere sake of inclusion into our state statutes. Just because. Like Mount Everest, in the words of Sir Edmund Hillary, BECAUSE IT’S THERE.”

Since her death on August 10, 2024, following a long, brave, private battle against cancer, many beautiful tributes have been expressed on her behalf. Family, friends and colleagues talked about her philanthropic efforts as executive director of the Kirkpatrick Foundation, her journalism work at magazines across the country (including Oklahoma Today and ArtDesk, Kirkpatrick Foundation’s contemporary arts publication), her advocacy for helping animals live more humanely, and her support for the arts and art education.

A standard bearer in the world of arts, education, historic preservation, and much more, Louisa inspired others to take up the work she was so passionate about, said Amber Sharples, executive director of the Oklahoma Arts Council. During her tenure at Oklahoma Today, Louisa “pursued new ways for using it as a vehicle for fostering greater appreciation for how the arts could positively shape perspectives of Oklahoma,” Sharples said.

ArtDesk further elevated Oklahoma’s arts scene. “It placed Oklahoma in new territory relative to the surrounding cultural landscape, inserting our state into a much larger national arts dialogue,” said Sharples. “Louisa’s tireless work on behalf of the arts in Oklahoma, as well as a host of other pursuits, went beyond journalistic and literary endeavors.”

As most of Louisa’s causes and passions revolved around each other like so many planets and stars, it will surprise no one to learn she was an astute political thinker. As a volunteer board member for Kirkpatrick Policy Group, her creativity and compassion proved incredibly useful in tackling issues at the Oklahoma State Capitol and beyond. During KPG’s formative years, Louisa led a successful grassroots campaign to include plans for a new animal shelter in Oklahoma City’s MAPS 4 sales tax initiative. “Without Louisa’s advocacy, the city’s new state-of-the-art animal shelter would likely not have made MAPS 4,” said mayor David Holt. “Louisa’s legacy will live on for decades to come.”

We aren’t the first to say this, but we want to amplify it: when completed, Oklahoma City’s new $42 million animal shelter should be named for Louisa.

She was a political bridge builder, or at least she tried to be. Louisa wasn’t universally loved in state politics (who is?), but she had influential political allies such as former governor Frank Keating, former attorney general Drew Edmondson, and Oklahoma House Democratic Leader Cyndi Munson. “Louisa worked tirelessly to advocate for animals and those without a voice to provide a safe, humane future for all living things,” said Munson. “She was notoriously kind and intelligent and will be honored forever for her instrumental work.”

Perhaps her greatest political victory came in 2016, before KPG formed, when Louisa led a non-partisan public education initiative related to State Question 777, “Right to Farm.” The proposed constitutional amendment would have barred the Oklahoma Legislature from passing new laws regulating the state’s agriculture industry. If passed, SQ 777 would have affected every Oklahoman, from the cleanliness of their drinking water and the way meat is produced and sold in our state to how family farmers would be impacted in the face of increasing corporate monopolization of the agriculture industry. In defeating “Right to Harm,” Louisa proved there was more than one set of voices to be heard in Oklahoma politics.

“Louisa was exceptional,” said Wayne Pacelle, founder and president of Animal Wellness Action, a national animal advocacy organization. “She was as much a campaigner as a grant maker, a native Oklahoman fiercely proud of her state but demanding it become better and safer, a first-rate creative mind who had a capacity to turn a passing encounter into an enduring friendship.”

Free the Pigs

One of Louisa’s most audacious and challenging ideas was to end the extreme confinement of farm animals in Oklahoma, especially pregnant sow pigs and egg-laying hens. One of her final projects was a 52-page, magazine-style publication titled The Way Forward: A Report on the Extreme Confinement of Pregnant Pigs in Oklahoma, which laid out in plain yet powerful language the cruel and unnecessary treatment of pregnant sows in industrial animal agriculture. “We present our position on what we believe to be the single most urgent animal-welfare issue in Oklahoma today: the widespread use of gestation crates for pregnant mother pigs in Oklahoma swine production,” Louisa wrote in a letter to state animal advocates. “Gestation crates must go.”

Gestation crates are coffin-sized metal cages that house pregnant pigs for most of their short lives. Without enough room to lie on their sides, extend their limbs, or turn around, the sows carry litter after litter of piglets until, their usefulness exhausted, they are sent to the slaughterhouse to be made into sausage.

These crates are banned in eleven U.S. states and throughout the European Union. Additionally, over sixty of the nation’s top food retailers have pledged to stop sourcing pork from extreme confinement operations. Just as 40 percent of the hens used for egg production in the United States are now cage-free, according to the Humane Society of the United States, the nation’s pork industry is trending toward a crate-free future.

That trend, however, is finding resistance in Oklahoma political circles, Louisa wrote. “Oklahoma’s swine corporate council and agricultural lobby have dug in their heels against basic animal welfare for pregnant pigs. Even the once-resistant Iowa Farm Bureau has dispatched a delegation to learn how its pork producers can become compliant with statutory and corporate policies against gestation crates,” she said. This is despite a prominent Oklahoma State University agriculture economist stating that replacing gestation crates with group pens nationwide would cost only about $.06 per retail pound more to produce.

So far, Louisa’s grand idea has been met with scorn and ridicule among many within the state capitol. During the 59^th Oklahoma Legislature, Louisa championed two bills that would have offered hog farmers economic incentives to transition away from gestation crates. The bills never received a hearing in either the House or Senate agriculture committees.

“They’re the radicals. We are not the radicals!” Louisa would say each time the bills (her idea) failed to advance. She emphasized that treating pigs humanely doesn’t mean we have to stop eating pork, offering more than once to share a plate of bacon with legislators if it would help.

Industrial animal agriculture negatively impacts much more than animal welfare. Concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs) contribute to the pollution of Oklahoma’s waterways and farmland. The desecration of the Illinois River watershed in northeastern Oklahoma by poultry growing operations has been well documented and the subject of a twenty-year federal lawsuit. Improper waste management on swine CAFOs in northwestern Oklahoma has also contributed to groundwater pollution.

The portion of the Ogallala Aquifer that underlies northwest Oklahoma is running dry from overuse by farmers pumping massive amounts of unmetered groundwater to irrigate corn and sorghum fields to feed the state’s two million farmed hogs. The City of Guymon in the Oklahoma Panhandle recently received a $20 million grant from the state to find new water sources for its municipal utility customers, of which Seaboard Foods is the largest.

The U.S. agriculture industry is also increasingly monopolized. The market share controlled by the nation’s top four pork companies is 67 percent, with WH Group (the Chinese corporation that owns Smithfield Foods) topping the list, controlling 25 percent of the nation’s swine market. The top four poultry companies control 60 percent of that industry’s market share, led by Tyson Foods at 25 percent. Tyson also controls 20 – 25 percent of the U.S. beef market. Monopolization means less competition, less consumer choice, less government regulation, fewer agriculture jobs, and higher consumer prices.

Louisa never suggested that all factory farming should cease, only that ending the use of gestation crates to house pregnant sow pigs would be a positive step forward, for the animals, of course, but also for Oklahoma, her home that she loved so dearly.

In a June email ahead of the publication of The Way Forward, Louisa pointed out that more than 40 percent of U.S. hog production has already transitioned away from gestation crates, due to new laws and public demand. “But not in Oklahoma,” she wrote. “It’s time for the foreign and multinational corporations operating in our state to make the change. It’s good for business and good for animals.”

On August 7, just three days before she died, Louisa was still firing off work email, connecting animal advocates to resources that would help continue this vital work. And while she would have appreciated the kind remembrances, she’d have encouraged the moment to be fleeting. During her final days, Louisa sent one message—a call to action—that now resonates profoundly. It emboldens and motivates us to complete her work, a task it will take all Oklahomans to accomplish.

“Free the pigs.”

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