Among the propositions Californians will decide on Nov. 4, including transportation and same-sex marriage, there is one issue voters rarely see: the treatment of farm animals. But Proposition 2 gives California voters a unique opportunity to weigh in on some of today's most abusive factory farming practices.
Animal agribusiness takes great care to keep its methods, which include confining animals in devices so small they cannot turn around or extend their limbs, hidden from view, to keep consumers in the dark.
This has not prevented animal advocates from exposing how animals are raised and handled in today's corporate farms. Undercover videos released this year by the Humane Society of the United States and Mercy For Animals, for example, graphically demonstrate the callous disregard factory farms have for animals.
Simply put, Proposition 2 will give animals raised for food some room to move. It would prohibit some of the worst abuses in factory farming, including packing egg-laying hens into wire cages and confining pregnant pigs and calves in crates that restrict their movement. This common-sense measure will benefit nearly 20 million animals intensively confined in industrial farms throughout the state.
Under animal agribusiness' current business model, most hens in California's egg industry spend their lives crammed into small "battery cages" with six or more other birds. Trapped inside these wire cages, each hen has less space than a sheet of letter-sized paper on which to live -- not even enough room to spread her wings.
Currently, almost all of California's 19 million egg-laying hens are crowded into battery cages, forced to stand on wire and denied the ability to perch or nest. Yet with 9.5 billion "broiler" chickens raised in cage-free systems every year in this country, we know this type of housing is possible.
Sows used for breeding, meanwhile, are confined for four months in "gestation crates" just two feet wide. Unable to so much as turn around, these pigs are deprived of nearly all their natural instincts. Moreover, sows enclosed in gestation crates stand on concrete amid their own feces and urine or on slatted floors that allow their waste to drop into large pits. Besides physical pain, including leg weakness and broken bones, pigs in such solitary confinement suffer chronic stress and depression.
Not surprisingly, when sows are imprisoned with no environmental stimulation, they develop neurotic coping behaviors, such as bar-biting, head-waving and vacuum-chewing.
Perhaps the best-known animal-confinement device is the notorious veal crate, a barren structure two feet wide in which a newly born male calf is tethered by his neck to constrain his movement and atrophy his muscles. The isolated calf lives inside this crate, devoid of even the barest comfort, for 16 weeks. The close confinement causes chronic stress as the calf's powerful desire to move and exercise -- even to turn around -- is thwarted. No wonder the entire European Union has banned veal crates.
Tightly packing animals together is also bad for human health and the environment, which is why Proposition 2 is endorsed by the Center for Food Safety, the Center for Science in the Public Interest and the prestigious Pew Commission.
Clearly, animal agribusiness doesn't want to acknowledge that many of its practices are out of step with mainstream American values. Most people abhor animal cruelty, and once they learn about it, they agree that encasing animals in cages and crates is inhumane. These animals deserve better, and we have the power to make a difference for them. We can start by voting yes on Proposition 2.
Mark Hawthorne, a Rohnert Park resident, is the author of "Striking at the Roots: A Practical Guide to Animal Activism."
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