It's encouraging that so many consumers are demanding that chickens and other animals raised for food be treated less cruelly. Once people understand that animals have interests and feelings that must be protected, it is one small step to realizing that there is no good reason to eat them at all.

As Joanne Scharer pointed out, labels such as "free-range" or "cage-free" are not all they're cracked up to be. Animals raised on free-range farms are generally not treated any better than animals raised in conventional factory farms.
Animals simply cannot be raised and slaughtered in a way that is completely without suffering -- the sheer number of animals required to feed society's current meat habit makes individual attention to the animals' wants and needs impossible. Most "free-range" animals are still mutilated and forced to endure long trips to slaughterhouses without food or water. All of them have their lives violently cut short, and all are denied most of their natural behaviors.

Free range and organic meat, eggs, and dairy products are not any safer or more nutritional than conventionally produced meat, eggs, and dairy products. They are still loaded with fat, calories, and cholesterol, and they still lack fiber, complex carbohydrates, and many essential vitamins and minerals.

The healthiest, most humane option is to choose vegan alternatives to eggs, milk, and meat. Each vegan saves more than 100 animals every year, and vegans are much less likely to be obese, or suffer from heart disease, cancer, and other diseases than meat-eaters.
-- Heather Moore
 
Fowl illusions  (In response to: FOR THE BIRDS)

Oregonians are right to demand alternatives to inhumane factory-farm animal products.
Despite picturesque images of barnyards on the covers of many egg cartons, about 280 million egg-laying hens in the United States are confined in wire battery cages without enough space even to spread their wings. Hardly able to move for their entire lives, these birds endure lives wrought with suffering.

The promising news is that across the country, grocery stores, restaurants, and universities are switching from battery cage eggs to cage-free eggs. Willamette University, Burgerville, JoPa restaurant and café, and Cup and Saucer Café have ended their use of eggs from caged hens. Even Nike doesn't serve cage eggs in its corporate cafeteria.
 --Kelly Peterson
 
Political smoke and mirrors (In response to: SICKO IN SALEM)

Thanks very much for presenting such a compelling picture of the healthcare crisis here in Oregon, and why the private health insurance-based system is the problem rather than the solution.

Knowledgeable healthcare reform advocates in
Oregon are dismayed that many of the political leaders who claim to be on the side of the people, and who most loudly bemoan our current private health insurance based-system -- most notably Governor Kulogonski, Senators Bates and Westlund, and Representatives Merkley and Greenlick, (even Gov. Kitzhaber has quietly backtracked on the goals he professed to be promoting through the Archimedes Movement) -- have done quite the opposite. In fact, they have spearheaded a drive to turn Oregon into another national test case for a totally private health insurance-based system, in part for the same politically-motivated reasons Michael Moore discusses in "Sicko."

Despite the best efforts to the contrary by those in the healthcare reform effort who see past the political smoke and mirrors, the politicians in Salem have seen to it that Measure 50 and SB-329, just like Wyden's plan in Congress, do virtually nothing to actually address the core problems with the private health insurance model. By design, they have ended up simply as efforts to prop up the broken private healthcare coverage system that has failed the U.S. and Oregon as you explain so well in your article.
--Anonymous