Dear Editor:
The state of New Jersey enacted landmark legislation in 1996 requiring the development of standards for the “humane raising, keeping, care, treatment, marketing, and sale of domestic livestock,” and it is in a position to play a leading role toward improving farmed animal welfare in the United States. Unfortunately, more than five years later, the NJ Department of Agriculture has yet to complete the requisite standards, and animals continue to suffer miserably. Animals raised for meat, milk, and eggs in the U.S. are specifically excluded from the federal Animal Welfare Act, and they are not protected under most state anti-cruelty laws. As a result, intolerable animal cruelty is considered legal. For example, when a New Jersey egg factory discarded two live hens in a trash can full of dead birds, the court found the company not guilty of animal cruelty. On modern factory farms, cows, pigs, chickens and other animals are treated more like inanimate production units than like sentient beings. They are packed by the thousands into warehouse-like sheds, and they are confined so severely that they can barely move. Such intensive confinement systems are so cruel that they have been outlawed by countries in Europe, but remain common in the United States, despite widespread public opposition to their use. Cows, pigs, chickens and other farm animals have feelings and should be protected from cruelty and this can start in New Jersey. I urge the New Jersey Department of Agriculture to draft meaningful humane standards which ban inhumane factory farming practices in New Jersey. For more information, please see www.njfarms.org or www.farmsanctuary.org.
Junia Affonseca