Vote no on Issue 2: Farm animal care is a matter for statutory law, not the Ohio Constitution: An editorial

Voters should reject Issue 2 next month. Using the Ohio Constitution to create a new regulatory body is unseemly and objectionable.

The measure, proposed to voters with disagreeable haste by the General Assembly, would create a 13-member Ohio Livestock Care Standards Board and entrench it in the Constitution.

Even if a livestock care board were a good idea in Ohio -- and it might be, since treatment of farm animals in Ohio is not well regulated -- it violates good sense to write such matters into the Constitution, because no changes in the board's makeup or duties would be possible without another referendum.

The board, mostly appointed by the governor, would establish "standards concerning the care and well-being of livestock and poultry."

There is a "but," however: The chief motive for creating the board is to pre-empt the Washington, D.C.-based Humane Society of the United States from bulldozing through in Ohio the draconian reforms in farm practices it has helped to institute in six other states.

Humane treatment of farm animals should be everyone's goal. But it's wrong for the Humane Society to try to achieve it through inflexible demands for a ban on close-confinement cages that sometimes are needed for the animals' safety, and that for some family farms represent a substantial investment not easily discarded during a recession.

The Humane Society's pressing for such a ban in Ohio is what precipitated the Ohio farm lobby's misguided rush to embrace its similarly draconian constitutional proposal.

The market already is driving change. Some Ohio farmers have responded to consumer demand for free-range chickens and for hormone-free feeding practices. That's the organic, consumer-driven change the state's farms -- many of them still family-run -- could and should accommodate.

What's not needed is radical change, written into the state Constitution either by the farm lobby or by animal-rights groups unconcerned whether they end up driving farmers out of business. Ohioans who vote "no" on Issue 2 on Nov. 3 should be prepared to vote "no" again, should the Humane Society seek its own ballot measure in a future election.

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