Gestation Crates Have No Place in U.S. Food Production (Op-Ed)

Wayne Pacelle is the president and chief executive officer of The Humane Society of the United States (HSUS). This Op-Ed is adapted from a post on the blog A Humane Nation, where the content ran before appearing in LiveScience's Expert Voices: Op-Ed & Insights.

It's been a remarkable 18-month period when it comes to the movement to combat the intensive confinement of animals on factory farms.

The public, major food retailers, numerous producers and so many lawmakers have turned against the idea of allowing immobilization of animals as a customary animal-production practice.

Recently, USA Today not only condemned the farm bill amendmentintroduced by Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa) — which seeks to nullify state laws banning extreme confinement of animals and standards on food safety and animal welfare — but also affirmed its support for federal legislation to ban the extreme confinement of laying hens in barren battery cages.

But perhaps the biggest story of the period has been the repudiation of gestation crates — confinement cages for breeding sows in the pig industry — by the nation's major food sellers. After McDonald'sannounced its plan to phase out the crates in February 2012, Burger King, Safeway, Costco, Cracker Barrel, Sodexo and about 50 other major food retailers followed suit.

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McDonald's Seeks Pampered Pigs

Pigging out at McDonald's will be better in the future, now that America's top fast food chain has demanded that farmers let their pigs out of gestation crates by 2022.

McDonald's joined Wendy's, Hormel Foods Corps., and other pork power-brokers in demanding that their pork suppliers phase out gestation crates, which are 7-foot by 2-foot cages that hold pregnant sows before they give birth. In 2007, the largest U.S. pork producer, Smithfield Foods, announced that they would phase out gestation crates because of public opinion that the crates were inhumane, reported the Washington Post.

The goal of the cages is to prevent the animals from fighting with each other, but animal rights groups have noted that the cages don't allow the pigs room to move around and subject them to torturous amounts of boredom.

“Simply because animals may be raised for food is no reason to abuse them mercilessly,” wrote Paul Shapiro of the Human Society of the United States, in the Globe Gazette. “And while most factory farm cruelty is hidden from the public, when Americans find out about routine abuses farm animals endure, they are appalled.”


Pressure from an appalled public helped push McDonald's to make their decision, just as public opinion kept the golden arches from buying genetically engineered potatoes. In 2000, McDonald's petitioned their potato peddlers to stop using transgenic spuds as did Frito-Lay and others, reported the Wall Street Journal.


Read on:  http://www.livescience.com/20845-mcdonald-seeks-pampered-pigs.html