The First Controversy of Chris Christie's 2016 Presidential Campaign: Tortured Food
Governor Chris Christie has a problem. The vast majority of Americans don't want to eat tortured animals. No, the governor of the eleventh most populous state in America likely does not want to torture animals... but he has a problem, a political problem. The politics of his presidential ambitions conflict with the politics of the state he was elected to represent.
The problem spawns from (a pig torture device called) a gestation crate. After a female pig is artificially inseminated, she is put into a narrow crate for the duration of her four-month pregnancy. The crate is so small that she is unable to move forwards, backwards or even turn around. During the reproductive period of her life, she will likely spend 2.5 years unable to move. To pigs that are active, naturally curious, intelligent, sentient beings, the treatment is akin to torture.
Nine states have enacted laws to ban the crates.New Jersey should be the tenth state to ban this barbaric practice. In bipartisan agreement, both the State General Assembly and the State Senate overwhelmingly voted to ban gestation crates (60-5 and 29-4 respectively). According to PolitickerNJ, gestation crates are not currently even used by New Jersey farmers, making the state politics easy. Ban an instrument of torture that few, if any, New Jerseyans actually use...READ MORE...