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The Barnyard Strategist - NYTimes.com

Tags: food, vegan, meat, PETA, farm, agriculture, government, regulation, religion, industry, animal on 2008-10-25 -All Annotations (7) -About

in list: religion

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Because California is the largest agriculture state in the country, and often a trend-setter on social issues, the ballot is a bellwether for farm-animal-welfare reform nationwide. Many experts predict that if Proposition 2 becomes law it will create a ripple effect, putting pressure on other states to pass similar reforms and pushing major food corporations to go crate-free and cage-free.
“Nine billion animals are killed for food every year, and most of them are confined in intensive conditions,” he told his staff members not long after he was appointed president of the organization in 2004. “It is the greatest abuse of animals that occurs on this planet.”
The question, as Pacelle sees it, is how to create change when Big Agriculture, with its big money, has made it nearly impossible to get meaningful farm-animal-welfare legislation passed. Here the ballot-initiative process is crucial, since it offers an end run around legislators by taking issues directly to voters. Another key element in Pacelle’s strategy has been to create ballot measures that offer only modest reforms on which both vegans and hamburger lovers (at least many of them) can agree.
“Cruelty is cruelty,” he says, “and it’s been our assumption that if decent people see images of these farm animals suffering, they will have a similar reaction.” And in a generation or two, he argues, we will have made a mental shift. People will look back on these confinement systems and other standardized farm-animal abuses and wonder why we tolerated them for so long.
Framing the animal-welfare movement in terms of compassion and morality has helped cultivate support from a broad spectrum of religious leaders. The campaign has received endorsements from the president of Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena, Calif., and other religious leaders throughout the state. “Most denominations have statements on animals and ethics,” says Christine Gutleben, the director of the Humane Society’s program on animals and religion. “We have a shared agenda here. Religious people are looking for ways to integrate their spiritual life with their daily life. There’s this sense that animals were created and designed by God with wings to fly, feet to walk with, hooves to dig with, and by prohibiting them to engage in these natural behaviors we force them to live in contradiction with what they were born with.”
if you ask some vegan activists who are not endorsing Proposition 2. “We agree with an incremental approach, but if you give animals more space and a little sunshine and you take that to that logical progression, they are still raised for food,” says Alex Hershaft, president of the 27-year-old organization FARM, the Farm Animal Rights Movement. Instead, animal rights groups, he argues, should focus on getting people to incrementally reduce — and eventually eliminate — meat altogether.
Gary L. Francione, a professor at the Rutgers University School of Law and an animal rights scholar, has written that if Proposition 2 passes, “animals will continue to be tortured; the only difference will be that the torture will carry the stamp of approval from the Humane Society, Farm Sanctuary and other animal-welfare corporations that are promoting Proposition 2.” He urges animal rights activists to either abstain from voting or to vote no.