HSUS: "Effect" of California Cage Initiative WOULD End Chicken Cages
I have already heard from the Humane Society of the United States concerning my earlier postings (here and here) about the coming initiative in CA to ban what are called battery cages. (Boy, HSUS is quick and doesn't miss a bet!) The representative, Paul Shapiro, senior director of the HSUS Factory Farm Initiative, was very courteous and professional, telling me the initiative is very "modest." My thought was if it is so modest, why so much effort and investment of resources?
Be that as it may, I asked whether it would ban all chicken cages, and here is Mr. Shapiro's response, published here with his kind permission:
The California initiative is very modest, but unfortunately the confinement typical on today's veal, egg, and breeding pork facilities has become so extreme that just giving these animals sufficient space to engage in basic movement is a very meaningful improvement. In other words, this initiative will significantly improve the welfare of millions of animals in California. To put it in perspective, each egg-laying hen confined in a battery cage has less space on which to live than a letter-sized sheet of paper for more than a year before she's slaughtered. It's hard to imagine a worse fate. You can read about the science demonstrating that this extreme confinement is detrimental to the animals' welfare at http://www.humanecalifornia.org/science/index.php . Also, you can see photos of this confinement at http://www.humanecalifornia.org/gallery/index.phpCage free chickens would seem to increase the price of eggs quite a bit. And the cages mentioned in the egg industry press release, discussed here at SHS, would seem to fill be permitted under the initiative. If so, the economic impact would be less. But I am open to and need more information. As I learn more, I will post it here.
This initiative doesn't explicitly prohibit cages, but it's likely that would be the effect, since the primary reason cages are used to confine laying hens is because it's cheap to do so. When producers have to give their animals more space, cages become less economically attractive, leading producers to switch to cage-free production systems which allow the animals to engage in more of their basic behaviors. But again, all this initiative asks is that the animals be able to stand up, lie down, turn around, and extend their limbs.
Florida was important because it set a precedent that confining breeding pigs in crates barely larger than their bodies for months on end is so cruel and inhumane that it simply ought to be banned. That said, even if we agree to disagree about Florida, I hope we can agree on California!
posted by Wesley J. Smith @ 11:44 AM
10 Comments
10 Comments:
believe that HSUS does a huge injustice by spending so much time and as you said resources making the conditions better for animals when what they are also doing at the same time is making people feel more comfortable about eating and using animals. This will increase the amount of animals raised and killed for food and thus increasing and creating more and more animal suffering.
As I've noticed from you and your readers that the idea of animal suffering means close to nothing when weighed against the price of chicken embryos or the cost of other animal body parts.
However, should the idea of animals suffering on such a wide and unfathomable scale be treated as so meaningless? 25 million...TWENTY FIVE MILLION...chickens are slaughtered everyday in the United States after also living horrible and miserable lives. The majority of those birds will exist in filthy dark warehouses stuffed into cramped cages. That is about 10 billion birds a year in the US. Whether or not you or your readers feel that each and everyone of those animals had a life and the capacity to suffer is one thing but the fact that there is an attitude or if you will a spirit of such detachment and insensitivity to life is strange to me. Why is it so difficult for you to ask yourself what it is we humans are doing? We do not NEED to eat these animals to be healthy so why and what spirit is driving you to not think maybe it's wrong what we humans are doing to show no kindness and to kill so many defenseless animals every year. Over 40 billion chickens will be killed this year...that is about 7 chickens for every human on the planet. And if HSUS thinks that free ranging will make it better they are kidding themselves.
I find it odd that you and your readers just assume that YOUR interests are more important or if it's cheaper or more convenient then that is all that needs to be said. Done! What about the assumption that kindness to animals maybe a possible place to test the human character now and that the human capacity for a tiny bit of empathy and compassion is what is needed here in this place of greed and complete disregard of other living beings.
Forget about giving them a little bit more space to move around so you can eat their flesh or chew up their embryos. It's time to stop bringing them into the world just to suffer and die for your pleasure.
Go vegan and NO BODY gets hurt.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20080409/us_nm/eggs_death_dc;_ylt=Agqa_AByrzB6fxqxmOYNr0Gs0NUE
Yes, well tens of millions of food animals are killed every day by predators throughout the world. I see no reason why we should refrain. Meat is a natural part of our diets and it is not wrong to raise and humanely slaughter food animals, nor drink milk or eat eggs, or wear wool. Blame evolution, or God: Take your pick.
I respect your ethic and would not dream of asking you to eat meat, or wear leather, or take advantage of medical advances in which animal research has been a vital part. Indeed, it is an activity of human exceptionalism wherein you have voluntary ceased a normal and natural activity for ethical reasons. Good for you. Most of us just don't agree with your ethics.
I certainly have no problem with vegans trying to persuade us otherwise, so have at it.
Your perspective is that of Gary Francione. Where I see HSUS and PETA trying to interfere with proper animal husbandry in pursuit of animal rights actions masked as welfare, he sees their cutting at the margins of animal husbandry making the use of domesticated animals more acceptable and respectable. It is an interesting point, I have to admit.
Go vegan and suffer from pernicious anemia as a result of vitamin B12 deficiency. Or take B12 supplements which are derived from animal products, which is ostensibly inconsistent with the vegan ethic. B12 cannot be synthesized in quantities sufficient to provide the needed amount of supplement for human consumption. Sufficient iron and protein you can get in non-animal-product ways, with a fair bit of effort. B12 is a different matter.
Lydia, there are, indeed, vegan B-12 supplements:
http://smallplanethealth.com/veglife-b-12-vegan-lozenge
And, Philip, most store-bought chicken eggs are unfertilized, meaning there isn't an actual embryo (which would essentially be a chicken abortion). As it stands now, a chicken egg is, one might say, a contracepted chicken, which to me is nasty enough. Plus, remember where it comes from!
My understanding from a quick reading of this article (as from other reading I've done in the past on the subject), is that if true B12 (as opposed to B12-like substances that do not actually have the needed nutritional effect) is not derived from animal products it needs to be derived from human feces, directly or indirectly.
http://www.ajcn.org/cgi/reprint/48/3/852.pdf
I notice that your vegan-labeled B12 supplement does say that it contains cyanocobalamin, which will be synthesized by a normal body to remove the cyanide and have the needed B12 effect. It doesn't say where it is derived, though. I had assumed that vegans would not want to be taking human-feces-derived B12 supplements, and hence didn't mention that possible source. But perhaps I am wrong. It would be rather interesting if "exploiting" animals for their eggs as a product, even when the animals are treated well and free-range, were regarded as wrong but taking human feces as a product or deliberately contaminating vegetables with it in order to get needed B12 were considered moral, not to mention safe.
Lydia,
Your B12 scare tactics won't work here. I've been vegan for over 18 years now and well I'm still here and proof that your myth is not accurate.
Why is it that vegetarians live 7 years longer (see CNN SPECIAL report) and vegans 8 to 10 years longer (see Cornell University study) than meat eaters? I've been vegan for over 18 years a vegetarian for years before that and I'm in better health than pretty much any one of my friends who are my age.
I'm a vegan for ethical reasons so again your B-12 fear mongering doesn't work for me. Btw...more Americans die everyday from clogged arteries and heart disease due to eating all the dead animals they put through their bodies please check the leading causes of illness and death in the US.... I don't know any vegans who are as sick as the rest of America.
I also find it interesting that my comment was about the ethical and moral aspects of killing billions and billions of animals for food when even the main stream health community now even recognizes that being a vegan is a healthier choice than the average American diet. You made no mention of the brutal violence that exists in killing so many animals for such trivial reasons as the taste of their flesh. So that said your health scare works against you.
Lydia I welcome you here. http://www.meat.org
Cheers.
Wesley,
The millions of predators around the world do not have the choice in what they will choose as a meal. We humans do have a choice. There is NOTHING natural what so ever about the way modern humans obtain dead animal flesh today. You can also say to me that many of the horrendous and cruel practices that humans have participated and perpetuated throughout the past is NATURAL also or that even what humans still do now that is despicable (genocide in Darfur or the Sunni vs Shiite violence) as natural. However, that does not mean it is morally justifiable. Our natural diet is much closer to the great apes of this planet (who are almost all vegan) yet we humans eat as if we were vultures. So I guess you see that being a scavenger (eating the dead body parts of animals killed by someone something else) is natural for humans. I disagree.
Fine, Philip. You're taking supplements, I take it, from your advertising them. That's why you're okay. The question is just where the stuff in the supplements comes from. Everything I've been able to find out indicates that it's either coming from animal products anyway--which would be a violation of your principles--or from human fecal matter. Vegetables don't naturally contain it. You can find that out by researching it yourself. It's agreed all around, as far as I know. The only vegetables that have it on them or in them do so because they have been contaminated by being grown in waste products that contain it. And it looks to me like the supplments simply don't say where it comes from, just labeling them "vegan," thus giving the impression that the active ingredient comes from plant matter per se. But that just isn't true. You're welcome to check it out for yourself.
Nobody has the duty either to die or to eat products derived from human waste products in order to survive. Hence nobody has the duty to be a totally uncompromising vegan. The human physical need for a product most obviously and cleanly obtained from some sort of animal products--milk, eggs, cheese, or meat--supports Wesley's contention that eating animal products of some sort is natural for man.
You'd be on stronger ground if you were a vegetarian eating eggs, cheese, and milk, instead of a vegan. But then you wouldn't be commenting so passionately in this particular thread, which is about eggs.
Lydia, your comments about "vegan" B-12 supplements coming from human fecal matter raise the question, where does the B-12 in the fecal matter come from? Not being a nutritionist, my inexpert guess would be that it comes from the meat consumed by the majority of the population that does eat meat. If so it would certainly put another chink in the armor of vegan purity.
No, actually Padraig, my understanding is that bacteria in the human large intestine directly synthesize B12 substance, one that works to correct a B12 deficiency if extracted and fed to vegans. (This was actually done in a study discussed in the article I linked.) The thing is though that humans do not _absorb_ the B12 generated by the bacteria in their own large intestines. It's just synthesized by the bacteria and then is given off as part of the waste product and lost. So presumably vegans' own large intestines do contain B12, generated by the bacteria in their own bodies, but it is not usable in that form; it is not absorbed. B12 has to be absorbed at an earlier point in the digestive process. So it has to be taken in as part of one's diet to do its job.
I'm not actually claiming that the vegan vitamin supplements come from human fecal matter. I'm claiming that they apparently do not _say_, but that the evidence I have indicates that they must come either from an animal source or from human fecal matter, either of which would seem to be problematic, though for different reasons.
Thanks for saving me the research, Lydia.
I suppose I could still argue that vegan B-12 supplements are an "animal product," similar to dairy, but then I'd be getting nearly as far-fetched as they do.
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