Measure Free Hippie Cook

Opening the Cages: The Humane Movement to Liberate Poultry

7 April 2010 by Jean Johnson

While I’m on a roll with the food politics articles I’ve written, here’s one on hens published in E/The Environmental Magazine, January 2007. Also, tak to C. Bundy who took two of the photos used here.

Over easy and whisked into omelets, eggs delight many. But the hens that laid the eggs are another subject. Visit 95 percent of the egg operations in the United States today, and you’ll find as many as a quarter million hens crammed into batteries of cages stacked ten rows high—quarters so tight they cannot even flap their wings.

“The modern hen lays an egg on around 320 days each year, and during the two hours surrounding that process, she is severely frustrated,” Ian Duncan says, expert on laying hens and emeritus professor in the department of animal and poultry science at the University of Guelph, Canada, who holds a university chair in animal welfare. “That seems unacceptable to me.”

Duncan also notes that without perches, the chickens do not sleep well at night, and because they cannot get exercise, they develop weak bones akin to osteoporosis. That said at least with the growing minority of producers, “the trend seems to be getting the birds onto the floor of the barns and even outside,” Duncan observes.

“This new ethic is conservative, not radical,” says Bernard Rollin, PhD, faculty in the departments of philosophy, animal sciences, and biomedical sciences at Colorado State University. “It is a return to the roughly fair contract those who have husbanded animals for virtually all of human history have had with animals—that of taking great pains to put one’s animals into the best possible environment one could find to meet their physical and psychological natures.”

Rollin’s point is well taken. No less a mainstream organization than the Humane Society of the United States formally began a campaign to raise awareness about conditions related to confined farm animals in 2005. By the end of 2006, HSUS had drawn sufficient public attention to the wretched plight of laying hens to help change the egg-purchasing policies of several large companies including Ben and Jerry’s.

“We will be phasing over to the good eggs over the next four years,” says Sean Greenwood, spokesman for the ice cream company that markets itself as socially conscious. “We’re not chicken experts and learned about all this from the Humane Society. But we are a company that believes in being fair to animals.”

“We looked at major buyers and worked with them to stop buying the most abusive types of eggs that are available,” says Paul Shapiro, director of the Humane Society’s Factor Farm Campaign. “Ben and Jerry’s is a huge company, and they deserve credit for improving the welfare for hens who are laying eggs for their ice creams.”

But Shapiro cautions against assuming that all is well. “Consumers need to realize that cage free eggs don’t necessarily mean cruelty-free,” he adds. “That said hens free from the nightmare of battery cages are leading much better lives, so this is a serious improvement that ought to be applauded. There is significantly is less suffering involved.”

Hens living in cage free operations, as John Brunnquell, president of Egg Innovations notes, “are free to move around the barn, interact with peers, and enjoy natural sunlight,” but they do not get outside. That’s because we, the consumers, still have not indicated we will support full lives for the hens that give us our eggs.

“We want to expand significantly the number of people in this market so this is a way to produce affordable cage free eggs,” explains Brunnquell. “On the other hand, eggs that are labeled organic by definition must come from hens that are free roaming with access to the outside.”

“The organic shoppers have said they are willing to pay the price for the more expensive outside access, but the cage free shopper hasn’t. So we don’t want to lose those people by pricing product out of their range.”

Brunnquell grew up on a small family egg farm in Wisconsin that used cages, but after earning a masters degree in poultry science, he decided to move his operation to 100 percent cage free, complete with third party audits to ensure full compliance. “Back then, I could articulate all the arguments for cages, but at the end of the day when I walked into a poultry barn, I evolved a stronger feeling that cage free was a correct way to go.”

The third party audits Brunnquell uses from Humane Farm Animal Care are in lieu of formal federal or state regulation protecting animals in confined farming operations. According to Rollin, that’s because the agricultural industry has pressured for a laissez faire approach to regulation.

“These big companies are kingdoms unto themselves and aren’t used to the oversight that animal research enjoys in university settings,” Rollin says. “They account only to their stock holders, so many owners simply say they will just move to Asia if US regulators clamp down.”

The US bureaucracy might have lagged, but as Shapiro sees it consumers are coming around. “Since we started our campaign in 2005, we’ve praised a number of companies that now have switched over to cage free eggs: Ben and Jerry’s, AOL, Google, the Bon Appetit Management Company that services more than 70 universities, and, of course, natural food purveyors Wild Oats Natural Marketplace, and Whole Foods Market.”

To expand this net, Shapiro suggests people “use their power as consumers, ask grocery store managers to stop selling cage eggs all together, and talk with the directors of dinning halls at their companies, schools, and hospitals.”

Duncan agrees that consumers can change practices, but he thinks education is critical. “I think it’s got to be a labeling scheme with compulsory photographs showing quite clearly how the hens that produced the eggs are kept.”

Compulsory photographs on cartons of eggs? Consumers aware of how the animals who provide the product they purchase spend their lives? The concept might sound extreme, but surely the hens that are laying the eggs would flap their wings in approval—if only they could.

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