Word: californiaisms
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Chickens are at the center of an unlikely $15 million electoral battle underway in California, pitting agri-business tycoons against a coalition of environmental, public health, and animal welfare advocates...
...This January, “Sam,” an undercover investigator for the animal protection group Mercy for Animals, visited a Gemperle Enterprises egg farm in Merced County, California. What he saw horrified him–chickens packed six or eight to a single cage, each with less space than an A4 sheet of paper. The cages were stacked several stories high, forcing birds in the lower rungs to live out their lives in the excrement of birds above...
...Samson told me that stricter regulations would simply push egg producers out of state, hurting local business while enlarging the carbon footprint of importing eggs into California...
...most of the $7.5 million behind the ‘no’ campaign has come from out of state egg producers–an unlikely move if these companies were expecting a windfall of egg exports to California. The Proposition gives California’s egg producers until 2015 to go cage-free, and in the meantime the likely beneficiaries are California’s smaller, local, and more sustainable family farms...
...real egg industry fear is not that California will import its eggs, but rather that it will export its higher welfare standards. When asked why out-of-state egg producers oppose the proposition, Samson conceded they fear “longer-term ramifications” against caged production. After similar ballot initiatives against pig and veal calf confinement in Florida and Arizona in 2002 and 2006 respectively, industry took the message. Smithfield Farms, one of the nation’s largest pig producers, announced it would phase out narrow gestation crates, and even Burger King promised to adopt more cage...