So how much are you willing to pay for eggs imported from Nevada? $5 a dozen? $10? They are incrementally making animal products more expensive to price people out of using them. It's working, people are falling for it.
I really don't think that the Prop. 2 was a shady ploy to force everyone in California to become a vegan. California has a long history of ballot measures that probably ought to have been put to the legislature, and not the general vote - that's why the state's budget is in such a mess right now.
I think people just said, hey, California has enough people who are concerned about animals that we can propose and pass a measure that gives battery hens, veal calves, and gestating sows a little more room. It seems like an awfully nice idea. 63% of voting Californians agreed. The potential economic consequences were certainly brought up during the campaign season, but people voted to pass the measure anyway. This sort of thing happens all the time - it's not like some scary HSUS operatives snuck in and falsified the vote to make it impossible for people to eat eggs.
It's also worth considering that we pay surprisingly little for the food we eat in the US. According to the USDA Economic Research Service, the average national retail price for a dozen eggs in January '10 was $1.79. That's $0.15 per egg -
fifteen cents per serving of high-quality protein. There aren't many protein sources we can get for $0.15/serving. Factory farming (battery laying operations) and farm subsidies make this possible. I can't find official data on "free-range" eggs, but I'm finding a high price of $3.50. That's still $0.30/egg/serving.
Prop. 2 doesn't take effect until 2015 (if indeed it ever does), so it's difficult to project the price of eggs after the measures take place. UC Davis did a study, though, that estimated a cost increase of at least 20% to producers. (Read the executive summary here:
http://aic.ucdavis.edu/publications/eggs/executivesummaryeggs.pdf) I'll throw in an extra 10% for shipping costs from Nevada, and so - a 30% increase over current prices would yield a new retail price of
$2.33 per dozen eggs. Remember, this is using UC Davis's own estimates, and assuming that the changes were effective today. That's $0.19/egg.
Considering the horrific conditions in which battery hens live their brief, miserable lives, and the fact that the Prop. 2. provides only a modicum of relief to these animals (they're still debeaked, still not given much room, still slaughtered long before the end of their natural lifespan), a $0.04 cost-differential seems a pittance. It saddens me that people are so unwilling to concede any ground at all - in price, in taste, in frequency of consumption - to alleviate even a small amount of animal suffering.
Instead I donate to our local animal shelters and I drop off high quality food several times a year to them. Ive also supported our non kill shelter and adopted both my cats from them..
