SACRAMENTO — The odd duck on the Nov. 4 California ballot is the measure calling for chicken rights.
The right for egg-laying hens "to lie down, stand up, fully extend their limbs and turn around freely" in their little cages, to quote from Proposition 2.
The initiative, sponsored by the Humane Society of the United States, also applies to pregnant pigs and caged calves being raised for veal. But the largest pork producer in California already has said it will stop using small crates. And there are few veal operations in the state.
So Proposition 2 really is about California's 19 million egg-laying hens. Calves and pigs were added, I suspect, because strategists concluded that voters relate more to mammals than to squawking birds.
This is not your ordinary election issue. It's on the ballot with such normal proposition topics as abortion, drugs, legislative redistricting and same-sex marriage.
But it's a heated campaign -- proponents accusing the egg farmers of inhumanely caging hens, the farmers denying it and warning the measure would force them out of business. It's a big bucks contest, with both sides pouring in millions.
Polls have shown Proposition 2 winning handily. But I'm guessing most voters haven't really focused in, that they've had a lot more on their minds lately than the treatment of chickens.
I've been torn myself. I like chickens and respect them. But they're tough to warm up to.
Growing up on a small orange ranch in Ojai, I did my share of shoveling chicken manure, collecting eggs, and serving up corn mash and table scraps. Many a Sunday, my brother and I would be sent to the chicken pen to select and prepare the dinner entree for our mother to fry.
We'd wield the hatchet and not give it a second thought. These aren't cuddly critters. Mean is their routine. Chickens, after all, invented the pecking order, the original organization chart. And they'll peck persistently on a weak colleague.
Ours were "free range" chickens, to use today's highfalutin terminology. We'd let them roam the orchard during the day, pecking for seeds and insects. At evening, our border collie-Australian shepherd would herd the birds back into their pen and they'd strut into the sheltered roosting area for the night.
It was a good life for the chickens -- an Old McDonald's Farm existence that has little relationship to today's factory egg farms.
