The Daily Record
Feb. 27, 2002

Morristown has feel for animals
by Jon Zlock

MORRISTOWN — Back off, Berkeley. Move over, Marin County. Morristown has become the first municipality in the nation to officially declare that farm animals have feelings.

The town council adopted earlier this month a proclamation that livestock are "sentient beings … capable of feeling and suffering." The proclamation was drafted by a nonprofit animal rights group called Farm Sanctuary, which is lobbying to improve conditions for tens of millions of cows, pigs, chickens, turkeys and other farm livestock.

Never mind that Morristown has no farms.

"It’s not like we don’t know what farms are," said Mayor John "Jay" DeLaney Jr. "Basically, (the administration) thought it was an appropriate thing to do. We thought it was something that made sense."

The proclamation has no force of law. Still, declaring that humans "have an ethical responsibility to refrain from causing unnecessary pain and suffering to other sentient beings" is doubtless easier in urban New Jersey than it would be in cow-crowded Texas or hog-heavy Iowa.

Even in New Jersey, the agricultural industry is quick to question the motives behind Farm Sanctuary’s campaign. The group promotes a vegan lifestyle — including a vegetarian diet without eggs or dairy products — and avoidance of animal-derived products such as leather.

"My gut is (the Farm Sanctuary effort) is a loaded gun," said Kurt Alstede, owner of Alstede Farms, a 600-acre entity in Chester Township.

Although Alstede’s chief source of income is fruits and vegetables rather than livestock, he says the issue is a critical one to the agriculture industry, because it could lead to major changes in production methods.

"What they’re doing is seeking to garner support for a huge issue to American agriculture," he said. The president of Farm Sanctuary, Gene Bauston, said the group isn’t trying to force a decision on whether slaughtering itself is inhumane.

"We would ideally like to draw the line against killing animals," Bauston acknowledged, but he added that, "Whether or not an animal is eaten is a societal choice."

What his group is focusing on, he said, is the treatment of living animals. In recent years, some modern agricultural enterprises have come under fire for practices that animal rights groups say would be considered cruelty to animals if they were done to wildlife or pets instead of farm animals.

Many animals are raised in confinement buildings with little space and no access to fresh air as a way of increasing efficiency in food production, for example.

On its Web site, www.farmsanctuary.com, Farm Sanctuary gives credit to New Jersey for being "the first state to require the development of standards for the humane treatment of farm animals."

But Ernest Zirkle, head of the state Department of Agriculture Division of Animal Health, said funding has fallen through for the effort, which began in 1996.

The department continues to seek a definition, he said. "We don’t argue that there shouldn’t be some uniform standards out there to use as guidelines," Zirkle said. The Farm Sanctuary group, founded in 1986, has 90,000 members nationwide and offices in New York and California, according to its Web site. The group’s honorary chairwoman is actress Mary Tyler Moore, who issued a statement calling farm animals "intelligent, social, and affectionate creatures with individual personalities."

In a letter last month to DeLaney, Farm Sanctuary said it hoped that other cities in New Jersey and the state itself would follow Morristown’s lead in adopting the "sentient being" proclamation.

To date, Morristown is alone.

Town officials downplay the notion that the proclamation puts Morristown in the lead of an animal rights movement.

Councilman Richard Tighe called the proclamation "interesting, but irrelevant in this town. We haven’t had a barn yard here in 100 years."