I grew up with dogs and cats, but I also grew up with chickens, horses, and rabbits. Because of that, I never learned to separate animals into categories. From a young age they were all just animals to me, and they all seemed equally capable of being scared, or content, or attached to someone.

Once I had chickens, I stopped eating chicken. I couldn't do it. They had personalities. They followed me around. They were pets, and it never made sense to me that the ones at the store were supposed to be something different.

I think that's the whole problem. Most people don't see farm animals the way they see their cat or their dog, so it's easy to look away from where meat actually comes from. And a lot of people don't want to know. I understand why. It's a hard thing to sit with. But not knowing is exactly what allows this industry to keep operating the way it does.

Pigs are smarter than dogs. They recognize their names, they play, and they form friendships they remember for years. Cows recognize faces and have best friends in the herd. Mother cows call for their calves for days after they're taken away. Not minutes. Days.

The only real difference between the animals we love and the animals we eat is which ones we happened to bring inside. If you did to a dog what is completely legal to do to a pig in this country, you would go to prison. Same fear, same capacity to suffer, completely different laws, and no one can really explain why.

And it's worse than most people realize. The Humane Methods of Slaughter Act doesn't cover chickens or turkeys at all. That's the majority of animals killed for food in America, and there is almost nothing protecting them. No requirement that anyone watch. No requirement that anything be recorded.

The labels don't help either. "Natural" only describes processing. "Free-range" can mean there's a door somewhere. "Humanely raised" is often approved based on paperwork a company writes about itself, with nobody ever visiting the farm. People pay more because they're trying to do the right thing, and they're being misled.

Almost everything we know about these places came from someone sneaking in with a camera. That should tell us something. We depend on workers risking their jobs to show us what the state could simply require to be filmed. If there were nothing to hide, none of that would be necessary.

England has required cameras in every slaughterhouse since 2018. The industry is still standing. It just can't operate in the dark anymore.

I'm asking the California Legislature and the Governor to do three things:

Require video monitoring in every California slaughterhouse, with footage kept and available to state inspectors
Require someone to actually visit the farm before any product can be labeled "humane" or "humanely raised"
Publish inspection results in a public database anyone can search
This is not a ban. I'm not telling anyone what to eat. I'm saying that if these practices are acceptable, they should be able to survive being seen.

California already voted for Prop 12, so people here clearly care. This is the next step.

These animals will never be anyone's pet. Nobody is waiting at the door for them. The least we can do is stop pretending we don't know what's happening to them.

Please sign.