http://www.wspa-usa.org/pages/2499_food_labels_that_make_the_grade.cfm

I’ve only heard of the 3rd but haven’t actually seen these products.

If by “certified humane” you mean the American Humane Association’s trademarked phrase, “free farmed,” that seems to involves actual inspections, so it potentially has a lot of useful meaning, though it might be too soon to say how it’s working out.

But they should defend their choices on the editorial page in a straightforward way, or condemn themselves in a straightforward way, or just do something to to straighten out the forked tongue they’re currently speaking with.

Without going into all that again, it seems to fall out along a fairly rough but not unreasonable standard: most papers reject ads they consider to have grossly offensive content, they usually reject ads from groups they consider irredeemably offensive in themselves regardless of content, they respond to reader pressure for ads on controversial but marginal topics, and they blithely rake in the bucks on everything else without concern. Implicitly, they accept that many acts of moral consequence are “eleemosynary” – i.e., morally significant, but optional, in the sense that it would be good or bad to do them, but not so much so that they should be regarded as obligatory or prohibited but rather matters of personal conscience. The editors may not be morally indifferent on every issue, but they – as do most people – likely regard many issues as matters of inclination rather than obligation, and they are not inclined to draw an unnecessary line on those grounds if it would hurt them financially.

For most people, in fact, the issue of farm animal welfare simply doesn’t rise above this broad category of “yeah, but . . .”. A small percentage regard the issue as important enough to cancel subscriptions or write to the editor, but not enough to make a financial difference or cause a controversy big enough to move the issue from “optional” to “marginal” or from “marginal” to “offensive”. As long as the issue is widely perceived as a matter of personal conscience, it is not seen as morally wrong to let your conscience fall to one side or the other of the line – and thus there is no compelling reason to take a position contrary to one’s other (financial) interests. If the editors did personally happen to feel strongly about the issue, they might make another decision, but the odds are low that a sufficient percentage of the Times‘s top people does feel that way, any more than the general public does.

If it’s not unreasonable that they might have the position they appear to have – that animal welfare is, at most, a morally significant but not morally compelling issue – it seems to me it’s not unreasonable for them to run ads for industries implicated in that question. You can say that they just have the wrong position on the basic issue, but then so does the vast majority of the public, and I don’t know why we would expect the Times to have clearer sight in that regard. (They may be better informed, which is a matter of significance, but I’m not sure most people’s reluctance to embrace animal welfare is a matter of ignorance, at bottom.)