The Adobe Flash Player is required to view this multimedia interactive. Get it here.

Humane Society, farmers spar over livestock cages

Poultry, hog industries  brace for animal activism

Proton cancer therapy is promising, but pricey
11/7/09
Proposed Miami Twp. proton center offers new kind of cancer treatment
11/7/09
Aviation Hall of Fame director loses job
11/6/09
Body shop owner is building 2 Bat car replicas
11/6/09
Proton Therapy confirms talks to build center in Miami Twp.
11/6/09
> More headlines

By Ben Sutherly, Staff Writer 12:44 AM Sunday, May 3, 2009

In February, Humane Society of the United States officials met with several Ohio farm groups to discuss their goals to change how the state’s hens and hogs are housed.

“It was a very cordial meeting,” said Dean Vickers, HSUS’ Ohio state director.

HSUS wants egg-laying hens to have more than 67 square inches of cage space, the industry norm. It wants pregnant pigs to be able to turn in their pens.

To achieve those goals, it wants to either work with farm groups to craft legislation that would phase out intensive confinement of livestock and poultry, or let voters decide, perhaps in 2010.

Ohio’s animal agriculture groups said they’re still deciding how to respond. But they haven’t warmed to HSUS, billed as the world’s largest animal welfare group with a $130 million annual budget.

“Their ultimate goal is to take meat off our plate,” said Joe Cornely, spokesman for the Ohio Farm Bureau Federation, the state’s largest farm organization with 235,000 members, 60,000 of whom farm. “It’s our contention that people who produce food know a lot more about it than Washington/Hollywood activists.”

But the HSUS claims its views of animal welfare are in keeping with the public’s. “These are very modest reforms that are supported by both meat eaters and vegetarians alike,” said Paul Shapiro, senior director of the HSUS’ factory farming campaign.

Farm advocates said consumers would pay more for pork and eggs if hen and hog housing is changed.

Consumers already can choose among cage-free, organic and more conventionally produced eggs, said Jim Chakeres of the Ohio Poultry Association.

“To me, it’s consumer choice,” Chakeres said. “We are producing eggs that the consumer wants.”

Farm groups say farmers already act in their animals’ best interest, saying it’s good business sense.

By mid-summer, 50 percent of Ohio’s hogs will be housed on farms that have undergone a third-party review of how the farms care for animals, said Dick Isler of the Ohio Pork Producers Council.

Advocates for Ohio’s animal agriculture said a ban on confinement housing would put farmers at a competitive disadvantage.

“Some Ohio producers would look at putting hogs in farms in neighboring states,” Isler said.

Shapiro said the HSUS is interested in a federal ban on intensive confinement on farms that would level the playing field among producers in different states, but he said Congress has been slow to act.

In 2008, the Pew Commission on Industrial Farm Animal Production acknowledged physical health of animals may be enhanced through confinement, as measured by the absence of some diseases or predation. Still, it concluded, intensive confinement increases the likelihood that animals suffer severe distress.

Animal welfare, the report said, “is an ethical dilemma that transcends objective scientific measures, and incorporates value-based concerns.”