Opinion: Ohio Shows the Way on Humane Farming, Protecting Animals

(Aug. 20) -- Recently, The New York Times reported on the landmark agreement reached in Ohio between farmers and those who care about the humane treatment of animals. Ohioans for Humane Farms, with a huge amount of support by organizations including Farm Sanctuary and the Humane Society of the United States, reached a deal with agriculture interests in Ohio to adopt several measures to protect farm animals from cruel treatment.

It is part of a growing and welcome tide of farm animal-friendly legislation and attitudes.

Though advertising, movies and books might have us think otherwise, the vast majority of farm animals in the U.S. are kept in extremely confined quarters, without the space to spread their wings, lay down or even turn around, let alone feel the earth beneath their feet or the sun on their heads.

Among other things, the agreement in Ohio includes a ban on veal crates and gestation crates. Defined by leading farm animal advocacy and rescue organization Farm Sanctuary, gestation crates are where 80 percent of the more than 6 million pregnant sows in the U.S. are kept on factory farms. The crates (kept indoors) are so confining that the sows do not even have space to turn around.

Veal crates create a similar living situation. Calves raised for veal are usually confined in the 2-foot-wide crates that don't allow them to turn around or lay down comfortably. These calves will not even have the opportunity to run in the grass before they are slaughtered for food.

The Ohio agreement was reached in no small part due to the effort of volunteers walking from house to house in the blazing Ohio sun, collecting signatures for a ballot initiative.

Step by step, the volunteers and paid gatherers collected more than 500,000 signatures, enough to put an anti-factory-farming measure before voters in November. Knowing that it would go before a public moving toward compassion and away from greed, and that the California public had passed a similar measure in 2008, agriculture interests came to a conclusion of compassion over mass production, and an agreement was reached. Love won out over greed.

The 2008 passage of Prop 2 in California, a campaign co-led by Farm Sanctuary, had been a huge victory for farm animals. The ballot measure banned three of the cruelest farming practices by 2015.

For decades, these factory farming practices went generally unnoticed by the public, but lately things have been shifting. It is a shift so big that it seems that the collective subconscious itself is changing. Along with an interest in protecting the environment, practicing yoga and moving toward holistic healing, it seems folks (at least in the U.S.) are moving from a place of greed to a place of peace. And it can now be seen in tangible, legal terms.

It seems like a dreamy, hippie idea to some. But for the animal welfare movement, peace and love are, indeed, the answers.

Maya Gottfried is the author of books about animals, including the children's books "Our Farm: By the Animals of Farm Sanctuary" and "Good Dog." Read her blog on Red Room.