Will new bacon law begin? California grocers seek delay

Associated Press ^ | December 12, 2021, | SCOTT McFETRIDGE

[deport]

A coalition of California restaurants and grocery stores has filed a lawsuit to block implementation of a new farm animal welfare law....

Put simply, the law requires that breeding pigs, egg-laying chickens and veal calves be given enough space to stand and turn around. For pigs, that means they no longer can be kept in narrow "gestation crates" and must have 24 square feet (2.23 square meters) of usable space.

[Jonny7797]

Several years ago, CA required farmers to raise chickens with lots of room around them and the price of eggs skyrocketed as a result.

[AlaskaErik]

More bacon for the rest of us!

[Buffalo Bob]

Some verses to consider on this topic...

Isaiah 32:20
Happy are you who sow beside all waters, who let the feet of the ox and the donkey range free.

Proverbs 12:10 ESV
Whoever is righteous has regard for the life of his beast, but the mercy of the wicked is cruel.

Ecclesiastes 3:19 ESV
For what happens to the children of man and what happens to the beasts is the same; as one dies, so dies the other. They all have the same breath, and man has no advantage over the beasts, for all is vanity.

Proverbs 27:23 ESV
Know well the condition of your flocks, and give attention to your herds

[Mr. Lucky]

It would be nice if you were to describe those options. Farrowing crates always worked for me.

[Freedom4US]

California legislature is free to pass laws that govern their state.

What they are doing here is dictating how other states run their agriculture. They will not allow eggs from Iowa, say, to be sold in their state unless Iowa egg producer facilities comport with California state law.

Regardless of whether you think Cattle should get massages and be serenaded with Vivaldi, the courts have long held that isn’t how this works. That isn’t how any of this works.

This needs to be shut down.

[Leaning Right]

Good post. Lots of food for thought there.

[bassmaner]

Can we turn the Wokes into bacon?

"Stamped human bacon
By some butchery tools"

[crz]

Faorrowing Crates have been in use for years.

Even loose, most of the litter will get crushed if the Sow is left to run free with them.

[Ronaldus Magnus]

As most farmers and real outdoors-men know, domestic animals generally have a higher quality of life and longer life expediencies than their wild counterparts. The norm in nature is death in infancy by starvation or illness. No one is crueler than Mother Nature.

[V K Lee]

Q: “Can we turn the Wokes into bacon?”

---

A: Only after we “cure” them.

[Pollard]

I can understand this. Reasoning is that the beast of a momma obtained through selective breeding will crush the piglets. They bred the intelligence and natural mothering instincts out of them.

Same deal as the Cornish Cross meat bird who can't walk after 42 days. Personally, I think they got a little carried away with selective breeding. My neighbor has had 4-5 cows die because the calves from a huge black angus bull were too big. He shares the pasture and the bull belonged to the other guy. He finally got one a little smaller but up to this point, my neighbor hasn't made a dime on beef cattle in 10 years and hasn't been able to increase the size of his herd.

This, I really see no reason for aside from $$$ saved by sq ft saved.

Seems like that's just going to cause disease but hey, we have antibiotics for that. Of course that's why antibiotics aren't as effective these days and they have to invent new ones.

Veggie and grain farming isn't any better. Bare soil is a bad thing and partially caused the dust bowl of the 30s. That's just starting to change. There's a guy named Gabe Brown in ND that's planting right into a cover crop. He runs a roller/crimper on the front of the tractor and planter on the back. He has earthworms and all sorts of microscopic soil life now. It's gone from pale brown and dry to rich, black and moist. He used to get a couple of inches of rain infiltration and the rest would run off taking top soil with it. Now he's up over 12 inches of infiltration per hour.

We need more small/medium sized farms and more local distribution and sales. I found a farm near me that sells direct to the consumer. They have a state inspected slaughter facility. The beef has so much more flavor and is more tender than anything in the grocery store and the cattle never go to a nasty feed lot to stand in their own manure all day. About the same prices as the grocery store too. A big plus is that no fedgov agency is involved.

[9YearLurker]

We’d have a sow in a square pen with plenty of room for mom and kiddos to move around, which was the better part of it, but also a small wooden railing that stuck out a few inches along the pen walls just a little higher up than the standing piglets, so they could easily scoot or snooze or whatever underneath it.

[9YearLurker]

So animal cruelty is a-okay by you?

[9YearLurker]

Also, animals might tend to have longer lifespans in zoos than in nature, but that is often not so on modern farms. Meanwhile, the conditions that many farm animals are kept in for their there-short lives don’t provide nearly the quality of life their forebears would have had in nature.

[willk]

Many years ago I saw veal calves at a Jr.College ag building. They were covered in flies and unable to move so they could shake the flies off. Sick. Never ate veal again.

[napscoordinator]

Oh definitely. In 20 years, eating steak will look like a person smoking a cigarette today. Might not even be 20 years.

[SunkenCiv]

...the law requires that breeding pigs, egg-laying chickens and veal calves be given enough space to stand and turn around. For pigs, that means they no longer can be kept in narrow "gestation crates" and must have 24 square feet (2.23 square meters) of usable space.

IOW, Sacramento wants more pork, chicken, egg, and veal imports. That'll be good for farming in the rest of America. The next step of of the Single Party Golden State will be to try to impose the same requirements on food sourced in other states.

[Iowa Slim]

Farmers make their living by bringing healthy livestock to market. But they also defeat themselves by subjecting the same animals to daily horrific torture. After they finish torturing the animals, they probably pour sand in the crankcases of their tractors and shoot out the tires.

I grew up in farm country with farmers in the family before I tried living in California in the mid-1980s. I heard the same kind of gullible balding hippies spouting this nonsense every time I turned around back then. These people are hopeless, muddled-up children. They are already outlawing motor freight in their state. Let them price food out of the reach of ordinary people, too. If you have loved ones there, help them get out. The rest of them can serve as a grim example.

[frank ballenger]

Good line from Greg Gutfeld a while ago:
I want chickens to be listening to calming Enya songs right up to the moment someone working for the poultry company comes in to slash them to death.

[frank ballenger]

People are not going to like seeing spongey white tofu on their breakfast plate.

Great line from the baseball manager Phil Garner (Brewers, Tigers and Astros), whose nickname was Scrap-iron:

No matter how big the hog is,
you’d better bring home the bacon.