The future of battery cages

According to a short, vague and all-around badly written announcement on WorldPoultry.net, Unilever and McDonald's have recently stated that they will stop using eggs from battery caged chickens for their products, with Unilever (maker of Hellman's mayo, et al.) beginning with Europe and then moving on to the ''rest of the world''. WorldPoultry.net had been reporting that McDonald's and Unilever were recently given the Compassion in World Farming's Good Egg award. Where are the misinformation police when you need 'em? Their facts about what McDonald's and Unilever are doing are -- er -- a little skewed.

According to a statement by Unilever on the Compassion in World Farming website, ''most Western European countries will be moved to non-caged eggs by 2010 and all countries before 2012, starting with UK in June this year''. I checked the Unilever website and was unable to find any references to this at all. Google News brought up no press releases from Unilever, either. I'm guessing that by ''all countries'', they mean the rest of Europe, since they specify Western Europe for the first phase.The thing is, though, that the EU, the world's second largest producer of eggs, will already be implementing a ban on battery cages by 2012. So short of importing eggs from outside the EU for all of their products sold in the EU, it seems that Unilever is acting out of economic necessity more than anything, but getting a pat on the back for it in the process.

As for McDonald's -- as per a statement by one of their reps on the Compassion in World Farming website, they've already phased out battery cage eggs from 90% of their products sold in the EU. They intend to phase out the remaining 10% sold in the EU by 2010. There's no mention of phasing them out in the rest of the world in their response to receiving the award, plus I couldn't find anything about it on their website. And the way WorldPoultry.net worded it, it sounded as if this was some sort of amazing breaking news on an international scale.

In the end, it sounds like more rhetoric from the pro-''happy meat'' camp that Gary Francione writes about, and that the folks at Vegan Freaks reference frequently during their podcasts. People think that because the chickens will no longer be kept in conventional battery cages, that somehow it becomes more ethically acceptable to eat them or their eggs. Here's the full scoop, though, on what the upcoming EU ban on conventional battery cages really entails.

A sorry day to be a pig

In an effort to keep the Canadian pig industry from collapsing, the federal government has announced that they'll be paying pig farmers $50 million of taxpayers' money to kill off 150,000 pigs over the next six months and to give the bulk of the meat to pet food processors or otherwise dispose of it, but earmarking 'up to 25% of it for food banks. How, do you wonder, will these pigs who are mostly being trashed be killed?

From the Canadian Press:

To ensure that the animals are treated in a humane way, producers are being encouraged to ship their pigs to approved slaughter plants. Producers who live in areas without plants will be asked to ship their animals to a province with such a facility.

But there is nothing to prevent producers from killing the animals on their farms themselves.

"We want to minimize the amount of on-farm euthanizing," Rice said. "Before we would approve that application we would need to know how it was going to be done - that it was going to be done humanely and in an environmentally sound way."

US factory farming to be exempt from Clean Air Standards?

A friend over at a vegetarian forum posted a link to a story on the Organic Consumers' Association (OCA) website that sounds ludicrous enough that it may as well be straight out of The Onion. It seems that the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in the United States is proposing to eliminate the requirement that factory farms report (i.e. to local, state or federal agencies) hazardous substances they are releasing into the atmosphere that come from animal waste, except in emergency situations. Basically, according to the OCA, the government is proposing this because current legislation is a joke. It's seen by the EPA as a ''burden'' on the factory farms, and, it seems that the government isn't really doing anything to violators anyway, so imposing the regulations at all is just a lot of posturing. To quote the EPA, ''these reports are unnecessary because there is no reasonable expectation that Federal, state or local emergency responders would respond to such report(s)''.

The Sierra Club responded to news of this proposal back in December, pointing out the existing public health hazzard posed by factory farms and the toxins they release into the air and how illogical it would be to suddenly exempt them from having to continue to report what it is which they're releasing. According the the Natural Resources Defence Council (NRDC), lack of regulation and enforcement has already proven to be disastrous in terms of what factory farms in the United States are currently permitted to do to the water and to the air.

The US government is accepting public feedback on this until March 27. The general docket info is available here and you can submit comments to them directly here.

The OCA has initiated a letter writing campaign by which they'll also forward your comments to the EPA. Take a few minutes to write in and express why compromising people's health and compromising the environment shouldn't be allowed to happen just because various levels of government are unwilling or unable to enforce existing legislation.

Meet your Meat

This short video, narrated by Alec Baldwin and produced by PeTA, has been circulating for quite a spell. For those of you who aren't strangers to vegetarianism, veganism or animal ethics, you're likely already well aware of Meet Your Meat and may very well have seen it already. Regardless of what they think about PeTA (or of what I think about PeTA, which isn't much), most folks with whom I've spoken who have seen it agree that it's impossible to walk away from it without its somehow impacting your choices as a consumer.

If you've never seen footage before of the conditions in which animals are raised for human consumption, be forewarned that this isn't light viewing. I think, however, that it's necessary viewing if you're interested in living the sort of authentic existence life where you make your decisions as a consumer while keeping your eyes wide open.