About $121,000 dollars, or more, depending on which ethics your selling and whose buying.

The real question is, would letting chickens get a little more stretching room make my fried chicken tastier? If so, I'm all for it.

Well... it does rather seem like whoever wrote the Proposition messed up. Surely it's clucking obvious that it needed to apply to eggs sold as well as eggs produced?

Imagine that the California statues on car pollution only applied to cars built in CA...

This, the LA Times agrees, is wrong. But voters should reject Proposition 2, because even slightly more humane standards might drive producers from the state, depriving it of business.

You have the cause and effect wrong. The slightly more humane standards would drive the cost of production up, and therefore increase the cost to consumers.
Eggs produced in other states would cost less than CA eggs, so invariably consumers will purchase out of state eggs.
Loss of business will then drive producers from the state.

I think the problem with making those requirements universal disregarding source is that would be regulating 'interstate commerce' and therefore could be thrown out by courts or regulators at the federal level - saying that only Congress and federal regulators can make such a law/rule.

Federalism does have real problems and constraints. As I understand things, once Congress has spoken on some issue/matter, then Federal law prevails. There is some argument, still evolving, about whether states can have stricter standards (as is the case with autos), but they can't have lesser standards.

The US regulatory agencies under Bush have been pushing hard that stricter standards are to be interpreted by the regulators as unlawful also. That's the briar patch that the CA prop 2 would likely fall into.

The animals are cruelly and brutally mistreated because it is cheaper for the farmers to do so. This, the LA Times agrees, is wrong. But voters should reject Proposition 2, because even slightly more humane standards might drive producers from the state, depriving it of business

And resulting in no net improvement for any of the animals, and perhaps a reduction in well-being as additional shipping costs require a further (insofar as that's possible) reduction in the cost of raising these animals.

There's an argument to be made that one shouldn't participate in the cruelty of factory meat farming, and so a yes vote is the right thing to do regardless of whether it results in a net improvement of animal welfare (I'd agree), but an argument that's based on the idea that Prop. 2 will result in a net improvement in animal welfare is subject to just the sort of analysis that the LA Times does.

kaybeel, there are two ways to apply the neoclassical micro you learned in Econ 101: as an element of faith, or as a testable hypothesis. Me, I prefer the latter. What makes you think Prop-2 costs outweight transit costs from out-of-state?

I honestly don't know, but the absence of out-of-state eggs in an already-high-cost state makes me suspicious.

What makes you think Prop-2 costs outweight transit costs from out-of-state?

I honestly don't know, but the absence of out-of-state eggs in an already-high-cost state makes me suspicious.

Is there an absence of out of state eggs? I just looked in my refrigerator. My eggs were distributed by a company in Pleasanton, CA. The eggs are only specified to be a product of the USA, so I'm not certain they are from CA at all, but let's assume they are from the city listed on the carton.
Pleasanton is 349 Miles away from my CA kitchen.
By contrast, Nevada is less than 300 miles away, and Mexico is less than 200 miles away.

A lot of the proposal is crap. For starters, there is no veal production in California and damn little pig. It's really all about egg production. They just threw in the veal and pig to make you angrier. It's great being manipulated, eh?

Truth be known, I live animals and would like to help correct the abuses. I just can's stomach PETA and their wacko ways.

There must be some organizations that are more moderate, but I haven't found 'em.

I am very, very, very anti-CAFO and think the way that food is produced in the US is something far beyond a national disgrace, but I suspect Prop 2 is a shortcut into the land of unintended consequences. I think it clearly creates incentives to move animals out-of-state, increasing all the crap associated with shipping while not improving the quality-of-life of the animals.

In addition to what the LA Times examined there's an additional problem. Existing CA law allows "humane societies" to appoint any person to investigate the treatment of animals, including requiring local law enforcement to issue search warrants. Unfortunately the animal welfare movement has a number of wackos heavily involved and if this passes and turns into a circus it creates additional incentives for producers to just move out-of-state. It might help if California rescinded those particular provisions, although that wouldn't change the basic problem of adjacent states (and a country) with far more lax animal husbandry requirements.

Eggs are amazingly easy to produce. For those of you that have never seen it done, a few hens hang around the coop, eat dirt rocks and some chicken feed, nap alot, and produce more eggs than you can possibly use.
The idea that a company has to stack ten thousand hens on top of each other to eek out a profit is ridiculous.
If you have to buy eggs, buy them at your local farmer's market from someone who knows how to raise chickens. They don't cost any more than supermarket eggs, they totally taste better, and you help out a local businessman.

Here's a scary thing. If I get reincarnated as a chicken, I want to be a hen in Laos. At least I'll get to wander around. Of course it would be cooler to be a red jungle fowl in the Himalayas. But one can only dream....

And everyone who supports this brutality to animals will regret it. Choose ethics -- chose vegetarian!

El V,

Heard of the ASPCA?

You heard a lot of the same nonsense during Apartheid. Yes, it's an immoral system--but if we divest, then it'll just make the lives of ordinary Africans worse off! Missing the point that you can't make any change at all by just sticking with the status quo, even if you make sure to talk about how terrible it is.

Heard of the ASPCA?

Oh, yeah. I already have them ding my debit card each month for $20

I'd be more interested in hearing from the Anti-Prop2 folks if they put forth reasonable alternatives instead of just scary hypotheticals.

I don't care what the LA Times says. I'm voting for Prop. 2 and will pay more for eggs if need be. It's a crime to treat animals the way commercial farms treat treat them.

Why not some sort of mandatory label system? All eggs for sale in CA must bear either a happy-chicken "This product meets CA anti-cruelty standards" or unhappy-chicken "This product does NOT meet CA anti-crutelty standard" sticker, displayed prominently. It needn't be discriminatory against out-of-state producers if there were a mechanism whereby those producers could get the right to use happy-chicken stickers on showing that their facilities are in compliance.

A labelling system would also give consumers like El V and Fiona the opportunity to express their preference. Additionally, it would it make it clear to others that they are saving .20 cents at the cost of animal suffering.

Restaurants could get into the act too, if the state set up a standard for menu declarations ala "All meat products used comply with CA anti-cruelty standards."

Certainly, it's more productive than this sort of unstoppable race-to-the-bottom handwringing that the LA Times substitutes for reasoning.

That's my brother's photo -- it was weird to see his name at the bottom of the post. I had to double check to make sure I was reading the right feed.

I think the labeling suggestion is deeply excellent. There's entrenched resistance in the ag industry and, probably more significantly, in the USDA and other federal regulatory bodies to labeling programs, but I have high hopes that that will change with a change of administrations.

Fiona, I think that if you want to change things you have to think carefully about the incentives driving current behavior and the way that changing the incentives modifies that behavior. Obviously you want to feel good about your own choices but I don't quite see how you can feel good about changing your behavior in a way that doesn't actually improve the underlying problem. In the best of all possible worlds humane food production will be more profitable than inhumane food production. Right now it's not. There are two basic ways to effect it - make inhumane food production less profitable and make humane food production more profitable. Just shifting the problem around doesn't really help.

Why not some sort of mandatory label system?

How about stopping tacit subsidies to the most intensive production methods? The California WIC guide explicitly excludes "Specialty eggs such as: cage free, stress free, vitamin enriched, organic".

"Specialty" here means "laid by hens that aren't confined to an area the size of a sheet of paper". Yeah, that's special.

I think the mandatory labeling idea is an excellent idea, too.

Also, I don't think anyone explicitly mentioned the following argument in favor of Prop 2, which is that if it passes in California it will serve as moral example for other states to follow (it would not be the first time that California "led the way" on a state issue). Then if a similar law got passed in lots of states, you'd have the support to start talking about federal standards that could finally, actually end the practice nation-wide.

It seems like supporters are saying you should vote yes as a kind of moral imperative even though it won't actually help any animals, but I think there's a good reason from a tactics standpoint to vote yes on this.

El Viajero - also try the Humane Society.