Meat lobby groups fought a “hard and dirty” war against a planned EU ban on caged hens and pigs that has now been shelved, the Guardian can reveal. In 2021 EU politicians took the radical step of agreeing to phase out the use of cages for rearing farmed animals, including hens, broilers, pigs, calves, rabbits and quails, after receiving a petition signed by more than a million people. The measures, which were supposed to go through by the end of 2023, have the support of 89% of European citizens, according to an EU survey released last week. But a ferocious pushback from powerful farming lobbies, details of which have been seen by an investigation by the Guardian and a media consortium led by Lighthouse Reports, means that the legislation now appears to be on hold. Industry groups levelled backstage accusations of bias against the EU’s food safety watchdog, and pushed for a corporate expert to be brought in to rewrite the ban, according to an EU official. Anja Hazekamp, the vice-chair of the European parliament’s environment committee, said: “Industry fought really hard and dirty on this file. They tried everything they could think of because they know we desperately need animal welfare legislation to make our food system more sustainable and humane, and this was their last chance. They don’t want to change, but see that change is inevitable so they’re getting desperate. They will do anything to save their skins.” One EU official close to the issue told the Guardian that agribusiness lobbying had put “really aggressive pressure” on the commission that “enabled” the delay. “There was a strong presence of the industry on this file at different levels,” the official said. “There was a stream of negativity [from them]. All the dissuading arguments at a political level were built step-by-step by a set of very negative letters and positions and information that [industry] produced.” Lobbyists “targeted senior levels in the commission” at strategic moments in the legislative process “using privileged channels”, the insider said. After this, high-level attitudes towards the legislation became “extremely negative”, the official added. The lobbyists may have been pushing at an open door, according to a second EU official, who said that the EU’s agriculture directorate viewed environmental and welfare laws as “things to be resisted. That is just the psychology of the directorate. It’s like: ‘Fortress Agri must defend itself from all the people who want to change things.’” At one point a number of groups submitted a 60-page analysis arguing that a positive European Food Safety Authority (Efsa) assessment of the planned package was not “impartial” and contained “serious scientific errors”. “This type of pressure on Efsa over a scientific outcome is always troubling,” the official said. The 60-page analysis was aimed at “discrediting the work of the commission – the scientific work in particular – and complaining about a lack of transparency in the work done on economics and competitiveness”, the official said. Lobbyists argued to EU officials that the ban would effectively destroy the EU’s farming sector, according to minutes of the meeting released under freedom of information laws: “If the [animal welfare] bar will be raised very high, production will disappear from Europe.” This gloomy line was reinforced by another letter to the commission from the muscular EU farm union Copa-Cogeca, which said that Efsa’s opinion would “lead to the loss of most of the European poultry sector, meat and eggs combined”. One group “even proposed an expert [to rewrite] the commission’s impact assessment who was actually a senior researcher from a top American [poultry] producer,” the first official said. “It was amazing.” One new lobby group – European Livestock Voice (ELV) – was notably active, two EU officials said. ELV was set up as an activist-style network, using tactics borrowed from NGOs such as flashmobs, Twitter campaigns and social media organising. Speaking at a conference in the US earlier this year ELV’s frontman in Brussels, Andrea Bertaglio, told the audience: “We are all focused in Brussels at least, on the revision of the animal welfare legislation.” Bertaglio told the Guardian that he wanted to avoid a polarised US-style culture war over meat-eating but “we are speaking about culture a lot when we speak about livestock”, he said. “Culture in terms of our behaviour, our habits, it’s a very cultural, sociological and philosophical subject in terms of our approach.” Bertaglio, who was formerly an environmental journalist – and still calls himself one – also spoke out against what he called a constant “propaganda which is connecting … meat consumption and climate and environment in a way that makes children feel constantly guilty and uncomfortable”. ELV is not listed in the EU’s transparency registry and the group declined to answer questions about its funding, how it was set up, or its lobbying on the animal welfare package. The 2023 deadline for the EU’s animal welfare legislation has now been missed and the law was dropped from the commission’s work programme for 2024. A commission spokesperson, who asked not to be named, said the commission was “reflecting on and carefully assessing important aspects, including the related costs and the appropriate length of the transition period” for its animal welfare legislation. “It is important to have the support of all involved to make these proposals a success,” the official added.