Veil Crates Battery Cages and Sow Crates. Whats your opinion?

I personally think that groups like HSUS and PETA should not be regulating standards for farm animals when their goal is to end all animal agriculture and liberate animals. They do not live on farms and farmers are not going to do anything to harm the animals that make them money. I have to do a paper for college and wanted your opinion. Thanks.

I don't know what battery cages are, and I assume that you are wanting to know about veal cages for veal calves, which I have never been around either, but I do have an opinion about sow crates. Unless someone has been around a lot of hogs in various environments, they cannot make an educated statement as to what is best or most comfortable for the livestock. I have worked with hogs in a total outdoor environment, open pen confinements, both for gestation and finishing, and crated gestating sows. The crated gestating sows are better off in the crates B/C there is always going to be a pecking order with these animals and IMHO it is more cruel to see the lower end getting beat up and thin while the ring leaders are fat & mean to the smaller, weaker sows. In the crates you can easily adjust the feed amount to put weight on the thinner animals. As far as farrowing crates verses open pen farrowing, the amount of less crushed pigs alone would atest to the farrowing crates being safer & better than the open pens. If you were to walk into a well run farrowing room you could see immediately how comfortable the sows actually are. My farrowing house when I had hogs was actually more comfortable than my house.

agree with CAB, and battery cages are for laying hens.  They are crowded, but I raise chickens free range and have to cage up showbirds for shows and they really don't mind it seems.  G-crates to me are not that bad, they have lots of benefits, the biggest thing people complain about is sows biting bars, which I think is just something for them to do, open lot sows bit on fences and chew wood all the time so the stress arguement doesn't hold for me.  I have read of people putting short chains in each crate for the sows to play with and it prevents a lot of bar biting.

  Bite on bars? They bite on each other. They can & do bite hard. I have the scars to prove it. A sow's bite is one of the dirtiest bites there is. Almost always becomes infected. Mine did.

These are issues dealing with animal welfare and the trade offs involved in various housing systems - go to the AVMA web page and look for the LayWell report and the report on animal welfare also google the 5 freedoms from the UK report. Not all systems in ag have the welfare of the animal as the highest priority - HSUS picks the easy sells and presents only one side of the argument - the lay public buys what they are selling.

PS it would be good if you spelled veal correctly and investigate the topic a bit more on your own