Kasey’s Cure

Americans are becoming more aware of how and where food is raised.

With that awareness should come real concern. The mantra of industrial farming has always been efficiency, but efficiency has come to mean a pregnant cow — millions of them — confined in crates barely 2 feet wide and only as long as she is. It means veal-calves rendered virtually immobile in crates barely large enough to contain their bodies. It means endless rows of laying hens kept in battery cages so small that the birds cannot even stretch their wings.

The goal of the California Prevention of Farm Animal Cruelty Act — Proposition 2 on the state’s November ballot would ban the confinement of animals in a way that keeps them from being able to stand, sit, lie down, turn around and extend their limbs. The fact that such fundamental decencies have to be forced upon factory farming says a lot about its horrors.

I urge California voters to pass Proposition 2. I hope Maryland will enact something similar.