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Media Newark, NJ Makes Humane Statement
On March 25, Newark's City Council passed a proclamation stating that farm animals are sentient beings. Newark follows the example of other forward-thinking municipalities in the state-including Morristown and Cedar Grove-who adopted similar proclamations earlier in the year. Newark's proclamation explicitly acknowledges our responsibility to treat farm animals with compassion. The Newark proclamation states, "WHEREAS, animals raised on farms are sentient beings and are capable of feeling and suffering; and WHEREAS, human beings have an ethical responsibility to refrain from causing unnecessary pain and suffering to other sentient beings; and WHEREAS animals kept on modern farms may be subjected to conditions which jeopardize their welfare; NOW THEREFORE, BE IT RESOLVED by the Municipal Council of the City of Newark, Essex County, New Jersey, does hereby recognize that farm animals are sentient beings which deserve to be treated with respect and protected from inhumane treatment." Councilman Cory Booker was instrumental in getting the proclamation passed after he was approached by animal activist and local cantor Mark Perman of Temple Beth Shalom in West Essex about the Farm Sanctuary campaign. Not only is Newark the first major city in the nation to recognize farm animals as sentient beings, New Jersey is the first state to require the development of standards for the humane treatment of farm animals. The state is in a unique position to play a leading role toward changing America's shameful neglect of farm animal welfare. In January 1996, the New Jersey legislature charged the state Department of Agriculture with developing "standards for the humane raising, keeping, care and treatment, marketing, and sale of domestic livestock" within six months. Six years later, the standards have not been drafted. But the state still has the remarkable opportunity to improve the lives of millions of animals currently being subjected to cruel and inhumane living conditions in New Jersey. Though farm animals are living beings with as much capacity to feel pain and suffering as cats, dogs, and other animals, they are excluded from animal cruelty laws, and they are commonly treated merely as tools of production by agribusiness. Hundreds of millions of farm animals in the U.S. are confined in cages so cramped they cannot walk, turn around, or even lay down comfortably. Such conditions are so cruel they have been outlawed in Europe, and Farm Sanctuary is urging the New Jersey Department of Agriculture to draft humane standards that outlaw these conditions in New Jersey. For more information about Farm Sanctuary, please visit www.farmsanctuary.org. For more information on the organization's Sentient Beings campaign, which is chaired by Mary Tyler Moore and supported by hundreds of other organizations with combined memberships in the millions, please visit www.sentientbeings.org. For more information on the New Jersey campaign for humane standards, please visit www.njfarms.org. |