I recently visited California and attended a Gala in support of Proposition 2, which was hosted by Ellen Degeneres and Portia de Rossi. The event featured moving performances by Carol King and Moby and raised funds to help air television commercials in California in support of Proposition 2.

Proposition 2 is the most significant effort ever undertaken in the U.S. to protect farm animals from intolerable abuse. It seeks to ban three cruel confinement systems:  veal crates, gestation crates and battery cages, and if successful, will lessen the suffering of 20 million animals. California is the largest agricultural state in the U.S., and it is the sixth largest egg producing state. Enacting Prop 2 will send ripples across the nation and help codify the fundamental principle that all animals (including those exploited in agriculture) deserve to be treated with respect.

I was deeply moved to see so much enthusiasm for Prop 2 among animal advocates in California. But factory farm corporations across the country are raising millions to try and defeat this basic humane measure. We don’t have their resources, but it’s critical that we do whatever we can to advance this crucial effort.

For decades, industrialized animal agriculture has acted with reckless self-entitlement, abusing animals and bullying those who challenge their routine cruelty.  Factory farms mistreat workers, pollute the environment, threaten rural communities and public health, and they manipulate government institutions to avoid responsibility for the harms they cause.

Agribusiness also has quasi governmental institutions, such as the American Egg Board (AEB), which work with the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA), to promote sales. The American Egg Board’s mission is marketing, and it is prohibited from “influencing government policy or action.” But the AEB  has allocated millions of dollars to help oppose Proposition 2, a citizens’ initiative in California that seeks to ban some of the cruelest types of factory farm confinement - veal crates, gestation crates and battery cages.  The Yes on Prop 2 campaign has sued the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the American Egg Board over the unlawful allocation of $3 million to campaign against the enactment of Prop 2 this November.

The factory farming industry routinely misleads citizens in order to maintain its advantageous position and the cruel status quo. A recent op-ed by one of their “experts” made the explicitly false claim that gestation crates are necessary to protect piglets from their mothers. Not only is it nonsensical to say mothers can’t care for their young (as demonstrated here at Farm Sanctuary where pregnant gestation sows recently rescued from Iowa floods have given birth and proven to be fantastic mothers), but there are no piglets in gestation crates in the first place. Gestation crates are where breeding sows are kept during their gestation period.

We must continue to expose abuse, to challenge unethical, dishonest, and illegal behavior, and to demonstrate that as a society we oppose cruelty and injustice. The leading edge of our fight is Prop 2 in California, and it is absolutely critical that we support this vitally important effort.