By KEVIN WALKER
Michigan Correspondent

LANSING, Mich. — Gov. Jennifer Granholm signed legislation last week crafted by animal rights activists and industry groups that said they wanted to avoid an animal rights ballot measure.

Granholm signed House Bill 5127, which is directed at poultry, veal and pork producers and is meant to provide more living space for individual animals. Animal rights group Humane Society of the United States (HSUS), which had threatened to start a farm animal rights ballot drive if industry didn’t go along with the bill, was pleased with the result.

Although industry groups were thought to be against the legislation, representatives of those groups were muted in their criticisms of it. A Michigan Farm Bureau representative, for example, stated that it supported the bill because poultry, pork and veal producers were on board with it.

These groups were on board with it, they said, for reasons that included fear of a ballot drive, the long time period between passage of the bill and implementation and because veal producers are already changing housing arrangements for their animals.

Since Michigan producers had such a large stake in the outcome of the legislation, Farm World spoke with an expert who isn’t directly affected by the situation, for his opinion. Anthony Rust, a chicken producer to the south from Seymour, Ind., has about 21 million laying hens. He is familiar with HSUS – once he debated a HSUS representative in Pennsylvania.

He’s disappointed with the developments in Michigan. “The producers just caved, basically,” Rust said. “Once the industry inside the state got together with the HSUS, there wasn’t anything anybody on the outside could do about it. If you’re 55 you can sell out by 65 and it won’t matter.”

He believes most producers are in their fifties and are calculating that they can get out of the business and retire before they are faced with the cost of changing their systems. He also said most farmers aren’t interested in fighting political battles and that some even think they will profit from what he calls an “enriched cage” system.

“If they go enriched caged, they thought their profit margin would be greater,” he said. “We don’t know if it works better than the cages, but it looks like it might work just as well.”

Rust said that in Europe producers, with support from politicians, are moving toward a modified, or enriched, cage system form of confinement; they have found the open floor system that HSUS wants isn’t viable.

He said an open floor system for chickens doubles the mortality of a cage system because when chickens get scared they pile on top of one another, can smother one another and birds may die as a result. Another factor is poorer food safety because of the contact with the manure by both the chickens and the eggs.

“The animal welfare people don’t understand or don’t want to understand the basics of animal husbandry,” Rust said. “You have the HSUS people coming in misinforming people with all their money. In California, HSUS didn’t win in all areas. In the rural areas they lost, but in the urban areas they won because (the public) didn’t know what was going on.

“We’ll probably gain from it; it’s sad, but true.”