Lewis Bollard

Eighty-eight percent of Americans told a recent survey that they think gestation crates and battery cages are unacceptable.

Try finding any other issue that 88 percent of Americans can agree on today.

It's not surprising, though.

We, as a society, have already decided that animal cruelty is wrong.

If you treated your dog the way that a factory farm treats their pigs, you'd be committing felony animal cruelty in most US states.

And this isn't just about the animals.

Factory farms, which densely crowd together hundreds of thousands, even millions of near-genetically identical immune-compromised individuals, are the perfect breeding grounds for disease.

They control these diseases with antibiotics, tons of them.

In fact, even as we face an antibiotic resistance crisis in humans, we are feeding far more antibiotics to farm animals than we use in all human medicine.

but antibiotics can't stop viruses, which is why we have a bird flu pandemic sweeping through America's factory farms right now.

After I learned all this, I dedicated my life to ending the worst abuses on factory farms.

And the good news is, I've seen more progress in the last decade than in all prior decades combined.

On these three practices, we are close to a tipping point.

Take the gestation crates.

Advocates have won bans on them in 11 US states, from California to Florida.

The Brazilian pork industry, led by giants like JBS, is moving away from the crates entirely.

Take the battery cages.

Advocates have won promises from the world's largest supermarket and fast-food chains to stop sourcing eggs from caged hens.

McDonald's is now 100 percent cage-free in its US and Canadian egg supply, and Costco is nearly there too.

44 percent of US hens are now out of cages, up from less than 10 percent a decade ago.