So What Did We Get in the Ohio Compromise?

As I wrote yesterday, we saw a pretty significant deal being brokered last week in Ohio on the use of animals in agriculture. To briefly recap, last year Ohio voted to create a Livestock Care Standards Board, composed of political appointees and with fairly sweeping regulatory powers. Animal advocates in the Buckeye State took to the ballot on their own with a list of proposed reforms to put a bit of a leash on the Board. Last week, the signature gathering went by the wayside, with news of a three-way deal between agriculture, the Humane Society of the United States, and Ohio's governor.

The centerpiece of the non-binding agreement are seven reforms, listed in yesterday's post, ranging from a ban on gestation crates and veal crates to stronger penalties for cockfighting. It looks like a pretty good list of new reforms, but what did we really get out of the Ohio Compromise?

Well, the pork industry gets to keep gestation crates for another decade and a half. Veal calves are still going to be living in brutal conditions until 2017, at which time they'll move to slightly less brutal (though far from ideal) conditions. Poultry isn't really going to get much more humane, although I guess if you're planning on opening up a non-humane egg farms, you'd best get your paperwork in before December 31.

Beyond the somewhat glacial timeline before any significant reforms are enacted, there are a lot of unanswered questions here. For example, why no mention of H.B. 55 in the deal? H.B. 55 is a pretty straightforward bill granting judges the ability to include family pets in protective orders in cases of domestic violence. H.B. 55 also seeks to remove the specific mention of pit bulls from the state's vicious dog law. (Pit bulls are the only breed mentioned in the law.)

Beyond pit bulls and protective orders, what about those humane slaughter and downed animal reforms? Will the state actually pony up the dough for additional inspectors to enforce these and other parts of the "reform" package?

Looking on a more holistic level, we basically got an endorsement from Governor Strickland on these reforms, but at least some of them are going to require legislative action. That's a potentially huge problem, because who knows what's going to happen to these things after they've been hacked at by 132 state representatives and senators? Will they be substantively changed? Will they even pass at all?

Color me unimpressed with the Ohio Compromise.

I think we needed this fight in November; we could have done better. What we ended up with is another ten to fifteen years, depending on which agricultural animals we're talking about, before there's any significant change. That's a lot of animals that aren't going to benefit from this compromise. Look at it this way, virtually none of the agricultural animals suffering in Ohio today are going to see even the smallest benefit from this deal.

Not that the fight in November would be guaranteed, or even easy. In order to get their proposed reforms on the ballot in November (before the deal, that is), Ohioans for Humane Farms would have needed around 600,000 petition signatures by last week. In order to make that happen, you either need some fairly deep pockets to hire signature-gatherers, or a herculean volunteer effort. (By all accounts, the effort relied on the latter.) You also have to make sure that all 600,000 of those signatures are valid — no duplicates, and everybody who signs has to be a registered voter in Ohio. When you're talking about over half a million names, that's a pretty tall data-keeping order as well.

Then, assuming that your signatures are valid and numerous enough, the real fun begins. With the proposed reforms on the ballot, it's time to start persuading some voters. Open up those checkbooks, because it becomes a battle of the airwaves. Time to start running commercials on television and radio, heavy internet advertising, and possibly paid mail and grassroots campaigns, supported (in a perfect world) by volunteers going door-to-door and phone banking. All of those things cost money and plenty of it. Generally speaking, whoever runs the best campaign (and it is more or less a political campaign, without a candidate) comes out ahead on election day.

So what's the payoff for taking this thing to November? Well, stronger reforms, primarily — not having to wait a decade or so before anything meaningful happens. The reforms would also be much better-protected than they are under this non-binding compromise. To be fair, however, pursuing this thing on the ballot means we wouldn't have the "sweetener" reforms, such as the puppy mill piece, the cockfighting piece, or the exotic animals part. Those, however, could've been handled at the legislative level.

We could have accomplished more in Ohio if we'd stuck it out until November.

That's the trade-off. If you take it to November, you've got faster, more secure protections for animals. If you lose, you're more or less back where you started. Farm Sanctuary says they'll continue to monitor the situation closely; if Big Ag doesn't hold up their end of the deal, the signatures can still be submitted to get these issues on the ballot. I think it's worth a few more months of work, and yes, a few hundred thousand dollars, or more, of HSUS money.

Photo credit: law_keven