Agriculture
From ANIMAL PEOPLE, December 1992:
“If the livestock industry demonstrates good
faith toward animal advocacy, it should suffer little eco-
nomic impact from increased regulation to enhance animal
contentment,” Ohio State University agricultural economists
Carl Zulauf and Matthew Krause recently told Feedstuffs
readers. Zulauf and Krause assumed that consumers would
be willing to pay marginally higher prices for animal prod-
ucts to be assured that they were not obtained by cruel meth-
ods. Some individual farmers would be hurt by obligatory
changes of method, they said, but others would prosper,
and the overall net effect would be nil. Much of the cost of
replacing equipment and facilities would be absorbed into
the ongoing cost of upkeep. Zulauf and Krause did not con-
sider the possibility that consumers might continue to move
toward vegetarianism at the unprecedented pace of the past
decade––a trend that could encourage many farmers to
abandon animal production.