YOUR INPUT NEEDED (AGAIN!) ON NEW JERSEY FARMING STANDARDS:
When the New Jersey legislature enacted a law requiring the state Department of Agriculture to develop standards for the "humane raising, keeping, care, treatment, marketing, and sale of domestic livestock," humane advocates hoped it would help spark the decline of cruel, intensive farming systems in the U.S. Instead, to the dismay of many, the NJ Department of Agriculture (NJDA) drafted standards that fall far short of any reasonable definition of humane (see HUMANElines Issue 248), despite receiving thousands of citizen comments asking for cruel factory farming methods to be prohibited.

The new version of proposed standards issued by the NJDA still endorses some of the very cruelest farming practices: intensive confinement (battery cages, veal crates and gestation crates), mutilations (debeaking, tail docking, ear notching and castration-- all without anesthesia) and starvation (during the 'forced molting' of laying hens). All of these practices are so cruel that they have been outlawed throughout much of Europe, and efforts are underway to adopt similar bans across the U.S. New Jersey's proposed standards, if finalized, would significantly hurt these efforts by setting a terrible precedent for what is legally considered “humane.”
 
WHAT YOU CAN DO:
The NJDA is accepting public comments on its proposed "humane" standards until Friday, August 6. Many of you may have already submitted your comments last year when these proposed standards were still in the drafting stage. Now that they have been drafted, it is critical for the NJDA to hear from concerned citizens that oppose their proposed endorsement of cruel confinement systems and other maltreatment of farmed animals.

 

For more information, including the text of the NJDA's proposed standards, see http://www.njfarms.org/njhs.htm

 

ASK FLORIDA COMMISSION TO RESCIND DEATH SENTENCE FOR DUCKS:
The Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission (FWCC) has begun distributing free permits to citizens allowing each permit holder to kill up to 12,000 mallard ducks per year. The new "Mallard Control Permit" (issued under the new "Rule regarding Possession and Release of Live Mallards: 68A-4.0052") intends to stop domestic, captive-bred mallards from interbreeding with mottled ducks by creating an essentially limitless killing season on mallards.

Aside from the inevitable animal suffering it will engender, the new rule promises to be ineffective in stopping the interbreeding. The rule contains glaring loopholes, and most of all, it does nothing to address the most glaring source of the interbreeding problem: the deliberate, continual release of captive-bred Mallard ducks into Florida's ecosystem by people looking to stock their ponds or hunting preserves with ducks.  These ducks invariably fly from hunting preserves and ponds to other areas of the state, where they interbreed with other duck species.

WHAT YOU CAN DO:
Contact the Chair and Vice-Chair of the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission and ask that the new Mallard Control Permit be rescinded immediately!

 

The Commissioners can be contacted by phone through Executive Director Ken Haddad at (850) 487-3796 or by fax at (850) 921-5786.

 

To receive directly, call 202-955-3668 or email humanelines@hsus.org For more information on legislation, how to find your legislators, or past HUMANElines, go to http://www.hsus.org/ or http://www.fund.org/