Chickens are at the center of an unlikely $15 million electoral battle underway in California, pitting agri-business tycoons against a coalition of environmental, public health, and animal welfare advocates.

This January, “Sam,” an undercover investigator for the animal protection group Mercy for Animals, visited a Gemperle Enterprises egg farm in Merced County, California. What he saw horrified him–chickens packed six or eight to a single cage, each with less space than an A4 sheet of paper. The cages were stacked several stories high, forcing birds in the lower rungs to live out their lives in the excrement of birds above.

This summer, volunteers collected 800,000 signatures to put Proposition Two on the state’s November ballot. The Proposition mandates that all farm animals be given enough space to lie down, turn around, and fully extend their limbs. If passed, it would end the confinement of veal calves, gestating pigs, and egg-laying hens in restrictive cages across the state–20 million animals in all, the vast majority hens confined to battery cages.

This has the egg industry enraged. Big Eggs has already poured $7.5 million into defeating the measure, with egg industry magazines calling for $50 million in campaign funds from the biggest egg barons.

But Matt Samson of Californians for Safe Food–the group representing the egg industry and other opponents of Prop Two–insists this isn’t about the money.

Samson told me that stricter regulations would simply push egg producers out of state, hurting local business while enlarging the carbon footprint of importing eggs into California.

Yet most of the $7.5 million behind the ‘no’ campaign has come from out of state egg producers–an unlikely move if these companies were expecting a windfall of egg exports to California. The Proposition gives California’s egg producers until 2015 to go cage-free, and in the meantime the likely beneficiaries are California’s smaller, local, and more sustainable family farms.

The real egg industry fear is not that California will import its eggs, but rather that it will export its higher welfare standards. When asked why out-of-state egg producers oppose the proposition, Samson conceded they fear “longer-term ramifications” against caged production. After similar ballot initiatives against pig and veal calf confinement in Florida and Arizona in 2002 and 2006 respectively, industry took the message. Smithfield Farms, one of the nation’s largest pig producers, announced it would phase out narrow gestation crates, and even Burger King promised to adopt more cage-free products.

To Samson, this poses new risks. He worries that cage-free facilities threaten public health by fostering Salmonella. His group’s website even declares the Proposition could bring avian flu to California.

Yet cage-free chickens are still kept indoors and are hence no more vulnerable to avian flu, which travels in the air, than caged chickens. Moreover, 5-10 percent of California’s egg production is already cage-free, and this hasn’t sparked the feared salmonella epidemic. If anything, less densely packed birds are less vulnerable to air-borne diseases and less likely to require antibiotics to stay alive–which explains the endorsements of the Center for Food Safety and Senators Boxer and Feinstein for Prop Two.

Samson and Prop Two’s opponents also argue that the initiative won’t help chickens. “A lot of the conventional wisdom about chickens is true...chickens do flock together,” he said, suggesting that chickens are less stressed in cages.

It’s an odd contention that 250,000 chickens would by choice flock into one barn and cram themselves into narrow wire cages. And it doesn’t explain why egg producers have to ‘de-beak’ battery caged chickens–searing off their beaks to stop the stressed birds from pecking each other to death. Both the California Veterinary Medical Association and the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals endorsed Prop Two, citing the suffering caged animals endure when denied their basic instinct to move.

Samson’s contention also clashes with the experience of ‘Sam’, the investigator at Gemperle Enterprises. As he documented in his diary on Jan. 19, 2008, “I saw a live hen, who had escaped notice during de-population of the cages. I pointed out the chicken to a co-worker. He said, ‘I’m going to kill it.’ The worker held the hen upside down by her legs, as he attempted to break her neck. He then dropped the bird onto the floor … She struggled frantically – her wings flapping violently as he stood on her. Then the worker kicked her into the [manure] pit. I saw her struggle briefly in manure before sinking in.” Gemperle Enterprises has so far donated $216,288 to oppose Prop Two.

Californians can vote this November to end such institutionalized cruelty. The rest of us can donate to the “yes” campaign online, and urge our Californian friends to vote. Beyond that, we can work to make America entirely cage-free. And if charity starts at home, there’s no better place to begin than Harvard–where two thirds of the eggs in our undergraduate dining halls still come from hens living in battery cages like those described above. For the environment, human health, and the animals themselves, that needs to change.

Lewis E. Bollard ’09 is a social studies concentrator in Kirkland House. His column appears on alternate Fridays.