No Battery Cages Campaign Heats Up

Our No Battery Cages campaign is heating up, with our attention focused squarely on St. Joe's University and West Chester University.

In the fall over 1,000 St. Joe's faculty and students signed a petition calling on the school to go cage-free. Over a hundred letters were submitted to the administration and dining services, and numerous campus paper articles discussed the issue. While the Catholic Archdiocese of Philadelphia and local Catholic school Immaculata University have gone free, and while the Pope, National Catholic Bioethics Center, and National Catholic Rural Life Conference have all decried battery cage egg farms as unethical and against Catholic values, St. Joes - a Catholic university - continues to support this cruel practice.

Yesterday, in the bitter cold, a group of Humane League volunteers gathered outside a St. Joe's basketball game to begin educating alumni about the cruelty that St. Joe's is supporting by purchasing battery cage eggs. Hundreds of leaflets were distributed to St. Joe's alumni (as well as many students), and our body screen TV was there to show them exactly what kinds of farms St. Joe's is getting its products from. In the coming weeks, as St. Joe's students continue to share information with their administration and ask for a policy change, we'll continue to educate the St. Joe's alumni community about the issue and have launched a "Do Not Donate" campaign, encouraging alumni to withhold donations until the school does the right thing and goes cage-free. You can learn more about the campaign and watch a video at http://www.CageFreeStJoes.com .

Meanwhile, we have just started working with students at West Chester University to encourage their school to go cage-free. Aramark, their dining services provider, has their contract up for renewal this May and we are encouraging the school to not renew that contract unless Aramark switches to cage-free eggs on campus. We've launched a WCU campaign website at http://www.CageFreeWestChester.com, and will keep you updated as things move forward!