Cage-free hens: Just the beginning for CA animals

California voters in November will be given the chance to utter these inspirational words:

“Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses of caged breeding animals yearning to breathe free.”

Nine years after voters passed Prop. 2, which enhanced the standards for raising hens and other animals by ensuring they have more space to move around, Californians will now have the opportunity to expand that effort, requiring egg-laying hens to be cage free. Under Prop. 2, the California Department of Food and Agriculture set a rule that each laying hen had to be given 116 square inches of space. Farmers, though, were able to do a workaround and continue to keep hens caged by putting fewer birds in each cage. The result: about one in three egglaying birds are still confined in cages in California.

If voters pass the cage-free ballot measure this fall, those same birds will get 144 square inches, or one square foot, and activists consider that space to be cage free.

Plus, there's good news for other animals: by 2020, breeding pigs and calves that are used for veal will have to be actually cage free and allowed to roam inside barns.

As you might imagine, many residents of this environmentally attuned, Pc-crazed, animal-loving Golden State are going gaga over the possibility of becoming completely cage free. The hens, pigs and calves are undoubtedly stoked as well, even though many of the farmers who might actually have to ”set them free” aren't crazy about the initiative.

Here are some things to know:

Secretary of State Alex Padilla says an initiative setting standards for confining calves, pigs and hens is eligible for the ballot;

Its backers say extreme animal confinement is cruel and could increase the risk of food-borne illnesses; “Californians know that locking farm animals in tight cages for the duration of their lives is cruel and compromises food safety,” said the Humane Society's former CEO Wayne Pacelle. “All animals deserve humane treatment, especially those raised for food;”

Opponents include the National Pork Producers Council, whose spokesman Jim Monroe, said “Livestock production practices should be left to those who are most informed about animal care — farmers — and not animal rights activists. Additionally, changes in housing systems, which come with significant costs that increase food prices, should be driven by consumer purchasing decisions, not the agenda of any activist group;”

The cage-free hen requirement would take effect in 2021, meaning animals would roam freely in a space that would include “enrichments” such as perches and scratch areas;

Get ready to pay more at the store for eggs: one study commissioned by the egg industry for a similar ballot measure in Massachusetts figured that switching to cage-free farming would add one or two cents to the price consumers pay for each egg produced by a cage-free hen;

Sponsors needed to collect 365,880 signatures to put the measure on the ballot – they got 660,000;

Egg production is a $1-billion industry in California, with some 15.5 million egg-laying hens producing nearly 5 billion eggs annually, mostly on familyowned farms;

The initiative would also require, starting in 2020, that a calf confined for veal production must have at least 43 square feet of usable floor space, while each pig would have to be given 24 square feet of floor space starting in 2022;

Major corporations like Mcdonald's, Taco Bell, Safeway and Walmart have committed to buying cage-free eggs, and more are following suit;

Meanwhile, over in the world of social media, we have this outpouring, both for and against, over the prospect of a cage-free world:

And, finally, this . . .