A month ago they chained themselves to the top of silos at a battery hen farm to draw attention to the plight of battery hens. Today they are nursing rescued battery hens they took during a daring rescue last night. 

Last night Deirdre Sims and Marie Brittain illegally entered a Waikato battery farm rescuing several hens and documenting appalling, but typical, industry conditions.

Ms Sims explains, “The public don't get to see what goes on inside factory farms. Breaking the law and risking arrest is the only way we can expose the cruelty that these industries go to great lengths to conceal.”

The action was taken in support of 'Person in a Cage' Carl Scott who is currently living in a cage for one month and calling for the public to make submissions to the government to ban battery cages.

“During our rescue last night we found a hen which had become trapped underneath the feed tray. She is very weak and thin, indicating she had been trapped for days unable to reach food or water. In a shed containing approximately 20, 000 hens, its not surprising that a single hen could remain trapped without farm workers noticing. She is unable to stand and it is unclear at this stage if she will be crippled for life.”

“Both Marie and I have been inside battery hen farms countless times. But time and again we are shocked and saddened by what we see. The suffering of these animals is unimaginable and unacceptable.”

“The egg industry is proposing to replace standard battery cages with so-called 'colony' cages. But for a battery hen, a cage is still a cage. Three millions hens can't walk properly, run or stretch their wings. Its not a normal life for a chicken and cages need to be banned immediately,” concludes Ms Sims.

Sims and Brittain are calling for the government to listen to calls from the public to ban all cages for layer hens including the proposed colony cage systems. The Code of Welfare for Layer Hens is open for public submissions until 29 April.
Add Comment
 
 
Recently New Zealand Open Rescue inspected a free range egg production facility located in the lower North Island. This facility was a small scale commercial operation but we were shocked at what we uncovered. From the outside, the facility looked like a typical battery hen unit; ominous, industrial scale warehouse sheds with large feed silos. Inside the units, things looked quite different but the callous treatment of animals as mere units of production was exactly the same as on any other type of factory farm.

Several thousand egg laying hens were crammed inside the sheds which were sectioned in half. The hens were panicked and hysterical, terrified of humans. As we moved slowly through the crowds of hens documenting their living conditions, we noticed several of them suffered from prolapses and many had rubbed red raw skin. All the hens in this facility were de-beaked.  Free range hens are still often de-beaked as living in flocks of several thousand is highly un-natural. Hens can’t find any sort of meaningful social order in such large flocks, so fighting is constant in order to establish hierarchy.

Following our visit to this facility, we were shocked to learn that there are no regulations around how often supposed ‘free range’ hens are meant to be allowed access to the outdoors. A local in the area told us that they had seen the hens at the facility we visited outside only once in over a year!  We felt that the many people who purchase free range eggs in good faith that conditions for animals are better in this type of production system, would be shocked if they had seen what we witnessed. The idyllic scene of happy free range hens scratching in the earth and basking in the sunshine that comes to mind when people purchase free range eggs was certainly not what we experienced during our investigation at this typical free range facility.

View photographs from our investigation here

4 Comments