Humane Society clucking over hens
From cage-free eggs to free-range chickens, it seems that deception is in place with the tacit agreement of all parties involved. And that would be more than top poultry producers, Tyson and Perdue.
While I was in California the past few weeks, an article in the Los Angeles Times by P. J. Huffstutter caught my eye: “Egg-farm video turns up the heat.” Turns out the “undercover” video in question was produced by a volunteer of the Humane Society of the United States, which released footage “shot at two of the nation’s largest egg farms showing workers slamming chickens into metal bins and dead birds littering cages.”
In 2008, the nation’s two largest animal rights groups, HSUS and Farm Sanctuary, co-sponsored Proposition 2, The Prevention of Farm Animal Cruelty Act, a ballot initiative passed by California voters mandating stricter standards for raising meat and dairy animals. Since then, they have campaigned to alter laws in other states.
The Humane Society has also bought stock in publicly traded food companies, in part to introduce shareholder resolutions and influence decisions by company executives. Officials credit this strategy for prompting Wendy’s, IHOP and Applebee’s restaurant chains to use cage-free eggs. Wal-Mart Stores, Inc. claims its store brand eggs are now also cage free.
On the other side of the argument, agribusiness lobbyists and farm groups have launched a letter campaign against the Humane Society, sparking fears among livestock producers that the organizations “seek to remove meat from our dinner tables, leather goods from our closets, animals from zoos and circuses, and, eventually “pets from our families.”
Come on now. PETA, maybe; HSUS, no way. Its directors are more likely to go after abuse at puppy mills in Missouri, where livestock producers are pushing a constitutional amendment to protect their rights to “raise animals in a humane manner . . . without the state imposing an undue economic burden on their owners.”
Across Kansas, Ohio and Iowa, battle lines have been drawn. And both factions have deep pockets and well-organized members willing to fight.
But what is the fight really about? Our food is already biologically engineered in ways Old McDonald never dreamed possible. And the ramifications of the Green Revolution have come home to roost, so to speak. Farmers are being sued for saving or propagating seeds by Monsanto, which owns the patent on many new crops. How these cases will be resolved won’t be known for awhile, because the patent holder has all the money and the farmer can’t afford to have all his assets tied up in court for decades. And that’s not chicken feed.
In “The Omnivore’s Dilemma” Michael Pollan describes his tour of Petaluma Eggs, which has corporate ties to Petaluma Poultry. “After a tour of the fully automated processing facility, which can translate a chicken from a clucking, feathered bird to a shrink-wrapped pack of parts inside of ten minutes, the head of marketing drove me out to meet Rosie preprocessing,” he writes.
“Twenty thousand birds moved away from me as one, like a ground-hugging white cloud, clucking softly. The air was warm and humid and smelled powerfully of ammonia; the fumes caught in my throat.” He was told that compared to conventional chickens, these organic birds have it pretty good. That is they get a few more square inches of living space per bird, though still packed tightly. “And because there are no hormones or antibiotics in their feed to accelerate growth they get to live a few days longer. It’s not clear that longer life is necessarily a boon.”
The joke is that according to federal rules, organic chickens must have access to the outdoors, so each low-slung shed has doors through which they can visit a perfectly manicured patch of lawn. They don’t. “Rosie, the organic free-range chicken, doesn’t really grok the whole free-range conceit,” Pollan writes.
Proposition 2 doesn’t ban confinement per se, only small, confining crates or cages for veal calves, egg-laying hens and pregnant sows. Farmers have until January 2015 to phase out their existing structures and build new facilities. How many will be forced out of business only to grow the already too big producers?
The problem with regulation by voter initiative is that good intentions don’t necessarily make good laws. We have only to look at the unintended consequences of amendments to the Horse Protection Act (which closed equine meat processing plants and made transporting of horses to Canada or Mexico for such purposes a felony).
The result is a dearth of old or lame horses whose owners can neither afford to feed them nor pay a veterinarian to euthanise them, nor pay the collection fee of $250 per animal to one of the few remaining rendering plants. So horses are routinely turned loose on public lands to fend for themselves and inevitably to die an ugly death.
Voters seldom grasp the ramifications of ballot initiatives. So how about saving the money spent by interest groups and politicians? Surely the USDA could write better regulations and enforce them fairly.