Think back to the last time you were cramped in a middle seat on an airplane. You are uncomfortable and you fidget throughout the flight because the passengers next to you are much too close for comfort. Now imagine your plane is landing early so it is forced to sit twenty extra minutes on the tarmac waiting for the gate to open. You are sweating and have been crowded for hours. You are hot, sticky and your body aches; all you can think about is how badly you want to get up and stretch your legs.
Now imagine that you are never allowed to get up out of that seat. This is where you will eat, sleep, breathe, and go to the bathroom for the entirety of your life.
This is the sad existence of millions of farm animals in California. Instead of an airplane seat, an egg-laying hen is crammed into a tiny metal cage. She knows no grassy pastures or sunny days. A thick puddle of urine and feces builds below her torture chamber creating an overpowering stench. She struggles to move, shoving against her fellow cage mates in an effort to move forward or back. After months of this, her feathers begin to fall out. Struggling to get to the side of the cage where she can stick her head through the wire is the most free she’ll ever be. After a year or more of this, she is shoved onto a transport truck, where her calcium deficient bones break, and then her throat is slit after she is hung upside down in shackles. She can never get up and walk away. Minute after minute, hour after hour, day after day. This is life for nearly nineteen million egg-laying hens every year in California.
“Would you like to sign a petition to help animals?” I must have asked that question thousands of times during the signature-gathering campaign for the Prevention of Farm Animal Cruelty Act—a statewide ballot initiative, which, when passed, will ban the cruelest cages on factory farms that confine egg-laying hens, veal calves, and breeding pigs in conditions so restrictive, they can barely move for nearly their entire lives. An elderly man looked at me, face contorted, obviously confused. “So, you’re trying to protect the animals that we eat?” he asked, baffled that I would volunteer my time to help these animals. I nodded and explained that the happy barnyard images of animals of the past are all but obsolete—that in California, factory farms cram nearly nineteen million creatures into tiny cages and crates. I told him that this petition is a basic step toward allowing these animals simply enough space to turn around and extend their limbs. “I can see you care a lot about this, so I’ll help you out,” he said as he signed my petition.
Ninety nine percent of our job was simply getting people to stop because once they looked at the photos of factory farms attached to our clipboards, they were glad to help us put a stop to the cruelty and mistreatment. Many people who originally walked past me did a double take and came back to sign when they overheard me explaining the issue. Most were visibly shocked by the photos documenting egg-laying hens unable to spread their wings, skin rubbed raw of feathers, because of the tiny battery cages where they are confined. “Why do they keep the chickens like that?” one woman asked. I explained to her that on factory farms, animal welfare is always last on the list of priorities, which emphasize economic efficiency over all else. “Thank you for being out here doing this,” many people said.
As the Southern California Coordinator of the campaign, life was hectic. I worked long hours, organizing volunteers and constantly fretting over the number of signatures that had come in for the week. But the energy of the campaign was intoxicating. I felt humbled and excited to see a movement coming to life due to the hard work of the most compassionate people I’d ever met. I remember one Monday toward the end of the campaign, when I returned to the office, tired after having spent much of the weekend working. Waiting for me was an exhausted volunteer smiling with his hand outstretched to give me the over-three hundred signatures he had spent sixteen hours gathering at the swap meet. This type of dedication was not born overnight, but it was contagious.
I watched as the campaign awakened people’s courage and passion. One long-time activist told me that before the campaign she had felt “burned out,” believing that her hard work in the past had not seemed to amount to any real change. With odds stacked against us activists, it had been easy for her and others to feel powerless in the face of the injustices we saw. But, for the first time in a long time, she felt like her actions mattered. She was unified with other volunteers in a joined sense of purpose, which for too long had been lacking in the fight against factory farming. Together we possessed a tangible power to make big changes.
In the end, nearly 800,000 Californians signed in support of placing the initiative on November’s ballot—nearly twice the number of signatures required by the state. This November, voters in California will have a rare opportunity to right some of the wrongs occurring on a massive, unimaginable scale behind closed doors. The Prevention of Farm Animal Cruelty Act is an important, yet basic, step to lessen the suffering on factory farms. It is sad that we even need a law for something that seems so obvious. But, despite the modesty of the law, it will have a monumental impact for nearly 19,000,000 animals every year in California.
The agribusiness industry is a powerful lobbying force that unabashedly supports the abhorrent practices I have described. Two years ago, I testified before the Chicago City Council in support of a ban on “foie gras” (liver from force-fed ducks or geese), which is now the law in Chicago. I showed footage of extreme abuses to ducks and geese in the production of this cruelly rendered appetizer, the production and sale of which will be illegal in California starting in 2012. An agribusiness representative showed up to defend force-feeding and he stated that the Farm Bureau opposes granting any legal protection from cruelty to farm animals at all. I realized that this was where the basic disconnect was occurring. Powerful interests will lobby heavily against common sense protection for farm animals. They continue to cause untold suffering, environmental destruction and threats to human health—and these facts are almost entirely hidden from public view.
Responding to the failure of politicians to address these basic problems, voters in Arizona passed a similar initiative last year to require that pregnant pigs and veal calves be given enough space to turn around and extend their limbs for the majority of each day. Florida voters did the same for pregnant pigs in 2002, creating the first precedent in the U.S. A bill proposed in the California Legislature to provide this most basic protection failed to even make it to a vote in committee, showing the power these industries wield in Sacramento. Yet, a recent independent Zogby poll sponsored by the Animal Protection and Rescue League found that 86% of San Diegans support an outright ban on veal after learning how it is produced. Politicians are simply out of touch.
Voters will now get the chance to have their voices heard directly in November, and the stakes could not be higher. By providing the most basic protection to egg-laying hens, pregnant pigs and veal calves, the California initiative will affect tens of millions of farm animals rather than just a few thousand (as in Arizona and Florida). Even though the egg industry’s own economists predict this new law will only cost consumers less than one penny per egg, the industry is spending millions to try to defeat it. In the world of corporate profitability, economic efficiency must be maximized at the expense of all else.
Getting information out about cruelty to farm animals is one essential aspect of solving the problem because each consumer has vast power. Every time we shop, we are voting with our dollars. By choosing to boycott products of cruelty and destruction, we will start to see changes in the way our food is made. It is vital that consumers become aware of their power to create a more humane world through their food choices (see HumaneSociety.org/recipes for cruelty-free recipes and information).
Factory farming has dire consequences–not just for the animals, but for the environment and human health. Agricultural run-off streaming into waterways are our leading cause of water pollution in the United States. Hundreds of thousands of animals are often crammed into one facility, creating the waste equivalent of a decent sized city, with no sewage treatment. These giant warehouses are also breeding grounds for diseases, as viruses can mutate rapidly with so many hosts, leading to risks such as avian influenza which could become transmissible to humans. Rather than provide more humane conditions, the industry feeds the animals antibiotics, which then end up in the food supply, helping to breed antibiotic-resistant germs.
Agribusiness has all but abandoned basic humane practices toward the animals from whom we take so much. The cause of eliminating horrendous cruelty and destruction on factory farms is one of the most important moral obligations of our time. The public overwhelmingly supports legislation to protect farm animals, and a major part of fixing this problem is educating people. If more consumers knew that their eggs came from chickens who spent their lives in agony, we would see some serious changes.
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