HSUS egg-bills move forward in CA, OH (2 items)‏

Sent: June 24, 2010 2:27:45 PM

Capital Press
Out-of-state egg bill goes to governor
By WES SANDER
June 24, 2010 9:00 AM
http://www.capitalpress.com/california/ws-egg-bill-062510

A bill that would apply California's animal-welfare law to
out-of-state egg producers has gone to Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's
desk without the amendments that producers originally hoped for.

The bill, AB1437, would apply the rules created by Proposition 2 to
producers whose shelled eggs are sold in California. Prop. 2, enacted
by voters in 2008, mandates that food-animal enclosures allow freedom
of movement. It applies mostly to the state's egg production.

California's egg industry saw the bill, by Assemblyman Jared Huffman,
D-San Rafael, as an opportunity to define the cage sizes permissible
under Prop. 2. But the Humane Society of the United States, the
initiative's principal proponent, has argued that there exist no
commercially viable cages that could satisfy the law.

Producers have said they need the cage sizes specified in order to
plan construction of new barns and approach banks for financing. With
Prop. 2 set to take effect in 2015, time is beginning to run short,
said Dennis Albiani, spokesman for the Association of California Egg
Farmers.

"We will continue to pursue that," Albiani said. "We'll work with the
administration, we'll work with the Legislature. We do believe that
ambiguity is difficult to deal with for a producer."

Huffman put his bill on hold last July to allow the sides to settle
the argument. But an unrelated court decision later established that a
ballot initiative cannot be amended by the Legislature.

The state's egg industry has taken a neutral stance on Huffman's bill.
It is divided among members who produce in California only, those who
produce in and out of state and those who purchase outside eggs to
supplement deliveries.

HSUS said it pushed for a "performance-based" standard for the
statute, mandating that animals be allowed to move freely.

An "engineering" standard specifying cage measurements would have
generated resistance for "over-architecting how farmers produce," HSUS
California director Jennifer Fearing said.

Fearing said the standard also leaves the possibility open for future
systems that might comply. Currently, only a cage-free system offers
that possibility, despite farmers' protests that it allows hens to
pile up in corners and results in dirty conditions, Fearing said.

"Good animal welfare is at least possible in a cage-free environment," she said.

Another example of those who know absolutely zero about food production making the rules.
Yea, force our farmers out of business and import all of our food.

and I wonder how long for little profit will we continue to farm... Maybe if we get sick of it they will import food from China, they make all the other imports safely.

Actually they don't want meat raised in China either folks. H$U$ is out to destroy all animal use in one generation. Sadly the politicians and courts are playing right into their hands.

Here's another radical whacko that doesn't have a clue about raising cattle on a large scale. I edited out the first part and cut right to the chase;



.....You may have guessed by now that I'm thinking of criticizing the livestock industry. And you are correct. I've been thinking about cows and sheep for many years. Getting more and more disgusted with the whole business. Western cattlemen are nothing more than welfare parasites. They've been getting a free ride on the public lands for over a century, and I think it's time we phased it out. I'm in favor or putting the public lands livestock grazers out of business.

First of all, we don't need the public lands beef industry. Even beef loves don't need it. According to most government reports (Bureau of Land Management, Forest Service), only about 2 percent of our beef, our red meat, comes from the public lands of the eleven Western states. By those eleven I mean Montana, Nevada, Utah, Colorado, New Mexico, Arizona, Idaho, Wyoming, Oregon, Washington, and California. Most of our beef, aside from imports, comes from the Midwest and the East, especially the Southeast-Georgia, Alabama, Florida- and from other private lands across the nation. More beef cattle are raised in the state of Georgia than in the sagebrush empire of Nevada. And for a very good reason: back East, you can support a cow on maybe half an acre. Out here, it takes anywhere from twenty-five to fifty acres. In the red-rock country of Utah, the rule of thumb is one section-a square mile-per cow.

[Shouts from rear of hall.]

Since such a small percentage of cows are produced on public lands in the West, eliminating that part of the industry should not raise supermarket beef privies very much. Furthermore, we'd save money in the taxes we now pay for various subsidies to these public lands cattlemen. Subsidies for things like "range improvement"-tree chinning, sagebrush clearing, mesquite poisoning, disease control, predator trapping, fencing, wells, stock ponds roads. Then there are the salaries of those who work for government agencies like the BLM and the Forest Service. You could probably also count in a big part of the overpaid professors engaged in range-management research at the Western land-grant colleges.

Moreover, the cattle have done, and are doing, intolerable damage to our public lands-our national forests, state lands, BLM-administered lands, wildlife preserves, even some of our national parks and monuments. In Utah's Capital Reef National Park, for example, grazings is still allowed. In fact, it's recently been extended for another ten years, and Utah politicians are trying to make the arrangement permanent. They probably won't get away with it. But there we have at least one case where cattle are still tramping about in a national park, transforming soil and grass into dust and weeds.

[Disturbance]

Overgrazing is much too weak a term. Most of the public lands in the West, and especially in the Southwest, are what you might call "cowburnt." Almost anywhere and everywhere you go in the American West you find hordes of these ugly, clumsy, stupid, bawling, stinking, fly-covered, (poop)-smeared, disease-spreading brutes. They are a pest and a plague. They pollute our springs and streams and rivers. They infest our canyons, valleys, meadows, and forests. They graze off the native bluestem and grama and bunch grasses, leaving behind jungles of prickly pear. They trample down the native forbs and shrubs and cacti. They spread the exotic cheatgrass, the Russian thistle, and the crested wheat grass. Weeds.

Even when the cattle are not physically present, you'll see the dung and the flies and the mud and the dust and the general destruction. if you don't see it, you'll smell it. The whole American West stinks of cattle. Along every flowing stream, around every seep and spring and water hole and well, you'll find acres and acres of what range-management specialists call "sacrifice areas"-another understatement. These are places denuded of forage, except for some cactus or a little tumbleweed or maybe a few mutilated trees like mesquite, juniper, or hackberry.

I'm not going to bombard you with graphs and statistics, which don't make much of an impression on intelligent people anyway. Anyone who goes beyond the city limits of almost any Western town can see for himself that the land is overgrazed. There are too many cows and horses and sheep out there. Of course, cattlemen would never publicly confess to overgrazing, any more than Dracula would publicly confess to a fondness for blood. Cattlemen are interested parties. Many of them will not give reliable testimony. Some have too much at stake: their Cadillacs and their airplanes, their ranch resale profits and their capital gains. (I'm talking about the corporation ranchers, the land-and-cattle companies, the investment syndicates.) Others, those ranchers who have only a small base property, flood the public lands with their cows. About 8 percent of federal land permittees have cattle that consume approximately 45 percent of the forage on the government range lands. Beef ranchers like to claim that their cows do not compete with deer. Deer are browsers, cows are grazers. That's true. But when a range is overgrazed, when the grass is gone (as it often is for seasons at a time), then cattle become browsers too, out of necessity (No, that's when cattleman feed cows hay). In the Southwest, cattle commonly feed on mesquite cliff rose, cactus, acacia or any other shrub or tree they find biodegradable. To that extent, they compete with deer. And they tend to drive out other and better wildlife. Like elk, or bighorn sheep, or pronghorn antelope.

[Sneers, jeers, laughter.]

How much damage have cattle done to the Western range lands? Large scale beef ranching has been going on since the 1870s. There's plenty of documentation of the effects of this massive cattle grazing on the erosion of the land, the character of the land, the character of the vegetation. Streams and rivers that used to flow on the surface all year round are now intermittent, or underground, because of overgrazing and rapid runoff.

Our public lands have been overgrazed for a century. The BLM knows it; the Forest Service knows it. The Government Accounting Office knows it. And overgrazing means eventual ruin, just like stripmining or clear-cutting or the damming of rivers. Much of the Southwest already looks like Mexico or southern Italy or North Africa: a cowburnt wasteland. As we destroy our land, we destroy our agricultural economy and thebasis of modern society. If we keep it up, we'll gradually degrade American life to the status of life in places like Mexico or southern Italy or libya or Egypt. In 1984 the Bureau of Land Management, which was required by Congress to report on its stewardship of our rangelands-the property of all Americans, remember-confessed that 31 percent of the land it administered was is "good condition," and 60 percent was in "poor condition." And it reported that only 18 percent of the range lands were improving, while 68 percent were "stable" and 14 percent were getting worse. if the BLM said that, we can safely assume that range conditions are actually much worse.

[Shouts of "bullsnot!"] Edited by Hawkeye

What can we do about this situation? This is the fun part- this is the part I like. It's not easy to argue that we should do away with cattle ranching. The cowboy myth gets in the way. But I do have some solutions to overgrazing.

[A yell: "Cowboys do it better!" Answered by another: "Ask any cow!" Coarse laughter]

I'd begin by reducing the number of cattle on public lands. Not that range managers would go along with it, of course. In their eyes, and in the eyes of the livestock associations they work for, cutting down on the number of cattle is the worst possible solution -an impossible solution. So they propose all kinds of gimmicks. Portable fencing and perpetual movement of cattle. More cross-fencing. More wells and ponds so that more land can be exploited. These proposals are basically a maneuver by the Forest Service and the BLM to appease their critics without offending their real bosses in the beef industry. But a drastic reduction in cattle number is the only true and honest solution.

I also suggest that we open a hunting season on range cattle. I realize that beef cattle will not make sporting prey at first. Like all domesticated animals (including most humans), beef cattle are slow, stupid, and awkward. But the breed will improve if hunted regularly. And as the number of cattle is reduced, other and far more useful, beautiful, and interesting animals will return to the range lands and will increase.

Suppose, by some miracle of Hollywood or inheritance or good luck, I should acquire a respectable-sized working cattle outfit. What would I do with it? First I'd get rid of the stinking, filthy cattle. Every single animal. Shoot them all, and stock the place with real animals, real game, real protein: elk, buffalo, pronghorn antelope, bighorn sheep, moose. And some purely decorative animals, like eagles. We need more eagles. And wolves we need more wolves. Mountain lions and bears. Especially, of course, grizzly bears. Down in the desert, I would stock every water tank, every water hole, every stockpond, with alligators. (Do you believe this guy?)

You may not that I have said little about coyotes or deer. Coyotes seem to be doing all right on their own. They're smarter than their enemies. I've never heard of a coyote as dumb as a sheepman (But I've heard a of a lot of coyotes that weren't as smart as a trapper! LOL!). As for deer, especially mule deer, they, too, are survivng-maybe even thriving, as some game and fish departments claim, though nobody claims there are as many deer now as there were before the cattle industry was introduced in the West. In any case, compared to elk the deer is a second-rate game animal, nothing but a giant rodent-a rat with antlers.

[Portions of the audience begin to leave.]

I've suggested that the beef industry's abuse of our Western lands is based on the old mythology of the cowbo as a natural nobleman. I'd like to conclude this diatribe with a few remarks about this most cherished and fanciful of American fairy tales. In truth, the cowboy is only a hired hand. A farm boy in leather britches and a comical hat. A herdsman who gets on a horse to do part of his work. Some ranchers are also cowboys, but most are not. There is a difference.

There are many ranchers out there who are big time farmers of the public lands-our property. As such, they do not merit any special consideration or special privileges. There are only about 31,000 ranchers in the whole American West who use the public lands. That's less than the population of Missoula, Montana. The rancher (with a few honorable exceptions) is a man who strings barbed wire all over the range; drills wells and bulldozes stockponds; drives off elk and antelope and bighorn sheep; poisons coyotes and prairie dogs; shoots eagles, bears and cougars on sight (this guy has a real problem with the truth); supplants the native grasses with tumbleweed, snakeweed, povertyweed, cowshit, anthills, mud, dust, and flies. And then leans back and grins at the TV cameras and talks about how much he loves the American West. Cowboys also are greatly overrated. Consider the nature of their work. Suppose you had to spend most of your working hours sitting on a horse, contemplating the hind end of a cow. How would that affect your imagination? Think what id does to the relatively simple mind of the average peasant boy, raised amid the bawling of calves and cows in the splatter of mud and the stink of (cow poop). (never met a cowboy that was stupid as this guy)

[Shouting. Laughter. Disturbance.]

Do cowboys work hard? Sometimes. But most ranchers don't work very hard (maybe he should try to follow a rancer around for a week). They have a lot of leisure time for politics and bellyaching (which is why most state legislatures in the West are occupied and dominated by cattlemen). Any time you go into a small Western town you'll find them at the nearest drugstore, sitting around all morning drinking coffee, talking about their tax breaks.

Is a cowboy's work socially useful? No. As I've already pointed out, subsidized Western range beef is a trivial item in the national beef economy. If all of our 31,000 Western public-land ranchers quite tomorrow, we'd never even notice. Any public school teacher does harder work, more difficult work, more dangerous work, and far more valuable work than the cowboy or the rancher. The same applies to the registered nurses and nurses' aides, garbage workers, and traffic cops. Harder work, tougher work, more necessary work. We need those people in our complicated society. We do not need cowboys or ranchers. We've carried them on our backs long enough.

[Disturbance in rear of hall.]

"This Abbey," the cowboys and their lovers will say, "this Abbey is a wimp. A chicken-hearted sentimentalist with no feel for the hard realities of practical life." Especially critical of my attitude will be the Easterners and Midwesterners newly arrived here from their Upper West Side apartments, their rustic lodges in upper Michigan. Our nouveau Westerners with their toy ranches, their pickup trucks with the gun racks, their pointy-toed boots with the undershot heels, their gigantic hats. And of course, their pet horses. The instant rednecks.

To those who might accuse me of wimpery and sentimentality, I'd like to say this in reply. I respect real men. I admire true manliness. But I despise arrogance and brutality and bullies (I'll bet he mouthed off to the wrong cowboy and got the hog snot beat out of him). So let me close with some nice remarks about cowboys and cattle ranchers. They are a mixed lot, like the rest of us. As individuals, they range from the bad to the ordinary to the good. A rancher, after all, is only a farmer, cropping the public range lands with his four-legged lawnmowers, stashing our grass into his bank account. A cowboy is a hired hand trying to make an honest living. Nothin special. I have no quarrel with these people as fellow human. All I want to do is get their cows off our property. Let those cowboys andranchers find some harder way to make a living, like the rest of us have to do. There's no good reason why we should subsidize them forever. They've had their free ride. It's time they learned to support themselves. In the meantime, I'm going to say good-bye to all you cowboys and cowgirls. I love the legend too-but keep your sacred cows and your dead horses out of my elk pastures.

This is messed up, My computer screen isn't wide enough to handle this thread.

I'm going to put this on a different thread, since somebody messed this one up.

Bottom line is this guy hates Cattle because men make a living from selling their flesh. He would have been real ticked off to see the 60 million buffalo that used to travel the bread basket of the world 200 years ago . Strangely all those free roaming ungulates had made the soil of North America the richest healthiest in the world. Strangely enough the loon also missed the truth that the fields of crops are much more intrusive & capitalistically driven then just the meat industry. Sadly the person who hates cattle that much is a parisite on this planet himself but lacks the courage to acknowledge that point.

Ecology is not your strong point. It was the grass that made the soil, not the critters that ate the grass.

The critters help to REFERTILIZE the soil and increase nutrient levels. Grass ungrazed is less likely to be as robust in regrowth then that which is grazzed by animals which refertilize the soil. BTW grass does not make soil. Nuturients live in earth particles and the more varied the nutrients the more rich/robust the soil becomes. Large hoofed animals also help to airate and break up such earth which also is helpful in increasing doil productivity. Saying ecology is not my strong point is rather disingenuous of you. I have lived the life of a conservationist for 60 years July 7th of this year. In fact I am suire my mom & dad were preparing me for that life before I was born.

http://www.agriculture.gov.sk.ca/Default.aspx?DN=9bc86e01-8155-4302-ac5d-30c00fa977f9

Rest Requirements

There is a saying "Forage plants cannot be overgrazed, they can only be under-rested". Plants can tolerate a one-time high utilization, provided they are given adequate time to recover. When a hay field is cut in mid summer, most of the plant top growth is removed. To compensate for the high utilization, the plants are given a 364 day recovery period to ensure a good hay crop the next year.

Forage plants are generally adapted to grazing. However, they do not tolerate repeated and continuous grazing with little rest to recover from the previous grazing event. This practice will weaken and eventually kill the plants.

There is a balance between animal production and range health. On native range, the general rule is to graze once per year and leave 50 per cent carryover. Seeded pastures can normally be grazed twice/year, leaving 30 per cent carryover to maintain a healthy stand. If utilization rates are higher, the plants will need added rest the following year.

Worms do more for araeting soil, and digesting dead plant material than any ungulate. And while your general rules of grazing are true, but are not followed on the range lands in the western USA. That land is truly abused by the cattlemen and shepards while being subsidized by the US taxpayer. They put there herds out on the land, say they are in an area where its 160 acres to a cow/calf. You have 100 scare miles, hence theoritcal room for 400 cows with calves. The cows won't travel too far from water, so now you have 400 cow/calf pairs grazing on only 25 square miles. The land is overgrazed and abused. Having worked for the Forest Service out west, I spent many long hours building fences so that cattle can be rotated and/or fenced out of special places. Not one rancher so much as bought me a beer or paid any more of my salary than some guy in a penthouse in New York City.

Both worms and fertilizing cattle ,sheep or any other ungulate increase the variety of soil nutrients and microscopic organisms. In fact that variety allows for better soil conditions. As a trapper I have often had farmers offer me a beer in their homes or at public functions but maybe it is because they know I don't drink. Bottom line is a farmer or rancher that wants weight gain must have grazing land to get those gains. It is Stupid to put animals on over grazed land. That point is obvious and the person who hates cattle so badly has no understanding of how world food production can not be best served without domesticated animals such as sheep & cattle.

On FOX News they said Obummer won't allow other countries boats to skim oil in the gulf because of the labor unions. They must own that crooked socialist. The labor unions are trying to legalize the communist teachers and their teachings.