Hi,

Meet Rosie.

Rosie is the mother of ten, so far. But she hasn’t seen her first litter of piglets since they were taken away from her at just 21 days old.

Now she’s pregnant again—artificially inseminated of course—and she’s spent the last three months trapped in a “gestation crate” so small she can’t even turn around. Her muscles have atrophied, her heart and bones have weakened, and her hooves are overgrown. Meanwhile her crate is laden with bacteria, and she’s caught another UTI. Rosie will go through four litters, just like this, until her “reproductive performance” wanes and she is killed.

This is not how she wants to live.

This is Agnes.

Agnes has laid quite a lot of eggs at this point. That’s pretty much all she can do, wedged in a battery cage with four other stressed hens. She certainly can’t exercise—she can’t even open her wings—and with the sloping wire mesh floor, her feet have developed open lesions. Her claws are overgrown because she can’t scratch the ground as nature intended. She’s been bred to lay an excessive number of eggs, and her skeletal system is leaching calcium to form eggshells. Her bones are becoming brittle. She’ll be lucky if she makes it through the coming months without suffering the agony of a broken bone.

Like people packed in a stuck elevator, Agnes and her cagemates are under high stress. Sometimes they’ll peck at each other.

This will go on for another year before Agnes is stuffed into a transport crate and trucked to slaughter.

At THL, we worked hard to support California’s Proposition 12, hailed as one of the strongest animal protection laws in existence. Voted overwhelmingly into law, Prop 12 bans the sale of products in California that are the result of extreme confinement. Now Prop 12 is being challenged by the pig industry, and it could be struck down by the United States Supreme Court next year.

But we’ve come so far in freeing animals from extreme confinement. Today, thanks to advocates like you, more than a third of the US egg-laying flock lives free from cages. There’s growing public support for the cage-free movement, a growing recognition that animals deserve better. With the fate of Prop 12 hanging in the balance, we need to keep pressure on restaurants, grocery stores, and other sectors to end the extreme confinement for animals like Rosie and Agnes, once and for all.

October 2 is World Farm Animals Day. It’s a day to honor farm animals by taking action to end their abuse. At THL, we’re on it. But we need your support more than ever, as we do everything in our power to win protections for animals. And right now, a generous donor will match your gift, for twice the impact!

Will you give today—to help end extreme confinement and other abuses of animals raised for food?

For all you do for animals, thank you.