The Record (Bergen County, NJ)
July 9, 2001, MONDAY; ALL EDITIONS
SECTION: OPINION; Pg. L7

State Must Act to Prevent Cruelty to Farm Animals
by Gene Bauston

IN 1996, THE STATE OF NEW JERSEY enacted landmark legislation requiring the development of standards for the "humane raising, keeping, care, treatment, marketing, and sale of domestic livestock. "The state is in a position to play a leading role toward improving farmed animal welfare in the United States.

Unfortunately, New Jersey's Secretary of Agriculture, Arthur Brown, has failed to draft the requisite humane standards. It has been five years since these were due, yet no significant action has been taken.

New Jersey's mandated humane standards are desperately needed.

Animals raised for meat, milk, and eggs in the United States are specifically excluded from the federal Animal Welfare Act, and they are not protected under most state anti-cruelty laws. As a result, intolerable animal cruelty is considered legal.

When two live hens were found discarded in a trash can full of dead birds at the ISE egg factory in Broadway, New Jersey, the court concluded that the company was not guilty of animal cruelty. A particularly disturbing aspect of this case is that ISE's lawyer asserted that it is legally acceptable to dispose of live birds as if they were manure. When the judge asked, "Isn't there a big distinction between manure and live animals?" ISE's lawyer responded, "No, your honor."

On modern factory farms, cows, pigs, chickens, and other animals are treated more like inanimate commodities or "production units" than like living, feeling animals. They are packed by the thousands into warehouse-like sheds, and they are confined so severely that they can barely move. Such intensive confinement systems are so cruel that they have been outlawed by countries in Europe. Sadly, they remain common in the United States, despite widespread public opposition to their use.

While factory farming has yet to spread in New Jersey as it has in other parts of the United States, some factory farms have moved into New Jersey, wreaking environmental havoc and causing intolerable animal cruelty.

The ISE egg facility, for example, has been in court for polluting the environment as well as for animal abuse. This one factory farm confines more than a million chickens in battery cages, small wire cages stacked in tiers and lined up in rows in huge warehouses.

In battery cages, chickens are confined so tightly that they cannot stretch their wings or legs. They suffer from severe feather loss, and their bodies are covered with bruises and abrasions from constantly rubbing against the wire cages. After one year in egg production, the hens are classified as spent hens, and they are either slaughtered for meat or force molted to prolong egg production.

When slaughtered, the hens are commonly used in soups, pot pies, or similar low grade chicken meat products where their bodies can be shredded, and the bruises and blemishes hidden from consumers. If they are force molted, the hens are starved for up to 18 days to shock their bodies into another egg laying cycle. During the molt, the birds typically lose more than 25 percent of their body weight, and it is common for between 5 percent and 10 percent to die.

Battery cages are being banned in Europe, along with veal crates for calves and gestation crates for breeding pigs. To produce veal, young calves are tethered by the neck in crates measuring just two feet wide.

They are unable to exercise, turn around, or even lie down comfortably, and they commonly experience leg and joint disorders and an impaired ability to walk. This severe confinement is intended to make the calves meat "tender" since the animals cannot exercise and their muscles cannot develop.

Modern breeding pigs are treated like piglet-making machines, living a 1 continuous cycle of impregnation, birth, and re-impregnation.

They live practically all of their lives in narrow metal crates measuring just two feet wide. Constantly scraping against the bars of their cages, the pigs sustain open sores on their bodies. Meanwhile, the hard slatted flooring and lack of exercise contribute to crippling leg disorders.

Cows, pigs, chickens, and other farm animals should be protected from cruelty, but shockingly, while other civilized countries have passed laws to prevent cruel farming practices, some states here in the United States have actually gone in the opposite direction and enacted laws that exclude farm animals from any legal protection.

It is time to redress this embarrassing trend, and for the United States to follow the humane example of other nations. And this more compassionate approach can start in New Jersey.

Gene Bauston, co-founder and campaign director of Farm Sanctuary, a national farm animal protection organization, holds a masters degree in agricultural economics from Cornell University. For more information visit www.freefarmanimals.org..