Opinion: Two Wings and Two Hooves Up for Proposition 2

This article was originally on a blog post platform and may be missing photos, graphics or links. See About archive blog posts.

I am looking at a Yes-on-Proposition 2 campaign mailer with a picture of a piglet and the line, ‘’you are their only voice.’’

But I am thinking of other piglets, and a hideous story out of an Iowa pig farm, an undercover video of farm hands slamming little pigs down on a concrete floor and beating the piglets’ mothers with iron rods –- abusing pigs, creatures who sometimes live with humans as pets, and who some credit with the intelligence and emotional capacity of a two-year-old human.

There are other hideous stories, some right out of California, like the undercover video of the appalling abuse of sick and lame ‘downer’ cows being shoved and beaten into the butchering maw our food system.... Veal calves being imprisoned in tiny crates for all of their short lives.... California’s egg ‘ranches,’ where four, five, six hens spend their lives crammed in the same small wire cage, their feet never touching ground, the living and the dead sometimes stuffed together, the filth falling on them from the hens in the cages above them. Now multiply this times millions of hens and millions of eggs in the same ‘ranch.’

You really want to eat this? Proposition 2 ...

... could do something about it.

A ‘’yes’’ vote on Proposition 2 would add California to Arizona and Florida as a state requiring more humane treatment of many of the multiple, multiple millions of animals in our state’s food chain.

[Editor’s note: For a reason to vote no on Prop. 2, see the Times’ editorial against it. The editorial board does not share Patt’s view on this one.]

In California, breeding pigs now spend their entire pregnancies standing up, and they do it on concrete. There isn’t even enough room for them to turn all the way around or to completely lie down.

Veal calves don’t live very long before they’re slaughtered for your plate, and for all their brief lives, they’re caged, tied up by the neck. They can’t lie down. They can’t even stretch their legs out, much less walk or gambol – heaven forbid they might toughen their meat.

Our livestock factory farming practices are repugnant. Proposition 2 would do something – not nearly enough, but something – to amend them.

Under Proposition 2, all caged and crated animals would have to be able to stand up, lie down, turn around and extend their limbs. Businesses would have six full years before the rules took full effect, and rodeos, fairs, 4-H programs and a few other purposes would be exempt.

How can we not do this?

Cost? Once California-based poultry economist cited by the Humane Society puts the cost at less than one cent per egg. And there’s profit to be had in humane treatment. Just as ‘organic’ has become a desirable food quality, I think foods labeled ‘cruelty-free’ and ‘California grown: have the same promise to attract consumers. The Humane Society also tells me that some retailers, like Safeway and Burger King, are already going out of their way to ask for humane animal products.

Opponents warn that if Proposition 2 passes, we’ll start importing cheaper food. Oh yeah? From where? China? That’s a swell idea. First China sends us poisoned pet food. Now there’s news that Chinese eggs have also turned up contaminated with the industrial chemical melamine; evidently Chinese hens were ‘doped up’ with it to register higher levels of protein.

And even if you don’t give a hen’s rear end for chicken’s welfare or any other animal’s, what about your own health? Some accounts say that ‘factory farm’ eggs are as much as 20 times likelier to be contaminated by salmonella or other icky bugs.

‘Meghan’ sent a blog comment to my program on KPCC radio that said, ‘My husband and I have a small backyard chicken flock and the chickens are happy, free to roam, eat bugs, and scratch around to their hearts’ content. We have no problems with ... health issues.... Most of the problems that battery, and even cage free, egg operations are a direct result of not allowing chickens to be chickens. As an industry they need to stop treating these animals as egg factories, and eggs as simple units of financial gain.’

My friend, the wonderful actor Henry Gibson, of ‘Nashville’ and ‘Laugh-In’ fame, called me up about Proposition 2, and sent me something he read at a performance at the Hollywood Bowl in 1971. Here’s a relevant part of his re-worked libretto to Saint-Saens’ ‘Carnival of the Animals’:

AP Photo/Marcio Jose Sanchez