Have a look at a piece of standard loose-leaf paper. A battery-cage hen has less than this amount of space to live out her entire life! At some point, maybe you've experienced the crush of a crowd on a subway or bus during rush hour, on the dance floor, or at a concert. Imagine that tight squeeze was all you knew of living.
As an individual, making a change to cage-free eggs helps ensure that egg-laying hens on farms have an acceptable quality of life. But you also can help effect change on a much larger scale by encouraging your alma mater to commit to using cage-free eggs.
California's Proposition 2 makes confining hens in battery cages a criminal offense, and similar bills relating to battery cages have been introduced in states such as Arizona, New Hampshire, Washington, and Vermont. But why wait for all 50 states to implement a change through law? One small change for a campus now can end the suffering of -- literally --millions.
While current students may be posting flyers and holding rallies, we also can be strong voices in creating a more humane campus environment at our respective schools.
Kudos to the more than 350 universities and colleges that have enacted policies to eliminate or significantly reduce their use of eggs from caged hens. These campuses include Harvard, Dartmouth, University of California-Berkeley, University of New Hampshire, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Tufts University, Georgetown University, and University of Texas. For a complete list, visit the Humane Society's web site, www.hsus.org.