Cows

The measures would end confinement practices like gestation crates for sows and cages for laying hens; they would bar sick or "downer" animals from entering the food supply, and they would prohibit strangulation and other inhumane types of euthanasia for farm animals. Pacelle's on a whirlwind tour of Ohio to energize the volunteers. The Humane Society has put 27 issues on ballots in different states, he tells them, and he doesn't intend to have Ohio be his first failure.

Pacelle's smooth, tanned face and neat jeans and jacket contrast with the plainer dress of the four weather-worn farmers he parades before the crowd. Tom Harrison — who serves as the campaign's treasurer — is a retired sheep farmer from Wood County, south of Toledo. He's balding, with a raspy voice that recalls Senator Sherrod Brown's. "I'm a meat eater," he says. "I've raised sheep for 30 years. You ought to treat them with dignity. Animals aren't a commodity, and that's what you're seeing on factory farms. I'm glad the Humane Society came into Ohio on this issue. It makes people more aware of the food chain."

Kevin Fulton, a heavyset younger farmer with a toothy smile and self-confident manner, has flown in from Nebraska. ("There's people in Nebraska, if they knew I was here my house would be burned down," he quips.) He talks about his journey from assembly-line agriculture to chemical-free, open-pasture farming. Confinement farming, he says, is "taking dignity from animals, putting them in concentration camps."

There's a lot of such emotional language — and grisly pictures — being used to frame an issue that most Ohioans are remote from in this post-agricultural society. These plays on emotion are what worry the Ohio Farm Bureau, a group as demonized by animal-rights and environmental activists as the Humane Society is by livestock farmers. But the Farm Bureau is not averse to emotional appeals of its own.