Names can be deceiving. In Communist countries, “the people’s party” is really the dictators’ party. A “pre-owned” car can be a lemon. And in the Bay State, the so-called Prevention of Farm Animal Cruelty Act is less about helping animals and more about a fringe agenda to bankrupt farmers.
The Act would ban modern farm housing systems that were developed to better protect animals, such as maternity pens, which are used for pregnant pigs. Let’s be clear that these systems, which animal liberation activists claim are inhumane, are supported by veterinary science.
Comments
Paid Agribusiness shill Rick Berman thinks he knows better than Commonwealthers what passes for acceptable farming practices.
Sadly for him, we are savvy to the game of astroturfing, his racket of choice. And what doesn’t fly in our state is Factory Farm propaganda, such as calling gestation crates “maternity pens,” or that they are “modern farm housing systems that were developed to better protect animals.” Gestation crates are tiny cages, barely larger than a sow’s body, that confine pregnant sows for the duration of their pregnancy and serve no productive purpose other than maximizing the number of animals in minimal space to increase profits. Investigations have shown these intensive confinement systems not only create unimaginable suffering, but also less healthy animals.
Battery cages for egg laying chickens are another intensive animal warehouse system causing extreme suffering. They are small wire cages where about 95 percent of laying hens spend their entire lives; each hen is given about 67-76 square inches of space (a standard sheet of paper measures 94 square inches). They have been outlawed in the EU and several states.
Neither battery cages, nor gestation crates have any place in “modern” farming, and most definitely not in the state of Massachusetts where we don’t allow corporations to run amok at all costs to human and animal suffering.