Pregnant pig amendment — a great idea after all
November 4th, 2006 by admin
Lakeland Ledger columnist Tom Palmer provided a refreshing perspective on Amendment 3 in a recent column.
Proponents of Amendment 3, which would make it very difficult to pass future amendments, often hold-up 2002’s “pregnant pig amendment” as an example of an issue that shouldn’t be in the state constitution. Mr. Palmer writes that, looking back on the 2002 ballot initiative which banned the use of cruel gestation crates on pig farms, maybe the issue was more important than he first thought. He explains, “the effect of this amendment was to prevent factory hog farms from locating in Florida.” He considers what “the implications of the proliferation of factory hog farms in Florida would have been” and suggests that accidents involving manure lagoons at factory farms would be disastrous, “I’ll leave it to your imagination what would happen if there were a major manure spill from one of these facilities into a Florida river.”