Has the animal rights movement won any major political victories?
No, not in this country. The only thing you could count as a legislative victory was a referendum that passed in Florida on pig stalls. Now in Florida, you can’t keep a pig in a stall so small that it can’t turn around, whereas in the rest of the U.S. you can. That’s a very small victory. The other victories have come about—as you were saying about Starbucks—through corporations slightly altering their practices. McDonalds, for example, lay down a requirement for their egg suppliers that pens must have a certain number of square inches per bird. It is actually a miserable amount—still less than a single sheet of typing paper—but it is significantly more than what most hens in the U.S. have. What about free range chickens? If you really mean free range—that is, birds who have access to outside and not just a little bit of bare dirt or grass—it is virtually non-existent in the U.S. Maybe a tenth of one percent of all eggs produced are really free range. There has been some success with a
