Eggs - who have you scrambled?
Around 66% of eggs produced in the UK come from ‘battery’ hens. Rows of wire mesh cages are stacked on top of each other inside huge windowless sheds. Four or five hens are crammed into a cage, with less space each than three-quarters of an A4 piece of paper. They can barely move, let alone stretch their wings.
The cramped conditions lead to unnatural behaviour such as pecking at each other. To try to stop this from happening, chicks often have the tips of their beaks sliced off with a hot blade, which is extremely painful.
The hens begin their lives in giant hatcheries. The male chicks born in these units are useless to egg farmers, as they cannot lay eggs, so they are gassed or tossed alive into giant industrial shredders.
There are moves to ban existing battery cages across Europe by 2012. But the proposed new cages will only provide extra space equivalent to a postcard!
Before they are 18 months old, hens are usually worn out and not ‘profitable enough’ for the industry. These are sent for slaughter and sold for just a few pence, to be used as ingredients in cheap products such as stock cubes.
‘Free-range’ hens may have a better life than those who are intensively reared in sheds, but they are still slaughtered at an early age when they start to lay fewer eggs, and in the same way as factory-farmed animals. ‘Free-range’ chickens are often kept in crowded barns, with barely any room to move. There might be openings on one side of the barn only, so it may be difficult for the ones furthest away to get out.
See the info on chickens reared for meat.
