From Animal Freedom Aotearoa's website www.animalfreedom.org.nz

It was before first light on Sunday 20th February. After careful planning the Coalition to End Factory Farming (New Zealand Open Rescue, Animal Freedom Aotearoa and the Wellington Animal Rights Network) set off for a battery hen farm in Tuakau. Around 6am Coalition members, corporate media and our own team of camera toting documenters converged at the entrance to the factory farm.

By around 6:35am two well prepared protesters from the Coalition were atop two 7 metre high feed silos, holding up banners that read 'ban cages', and 'battery hens suffer' to highlight the plight of the birds in the sheds below. Another larger banner was attached high to the front of the silos. The sickening stench of the farm permeated our nostrils in waves.

As the day progressed more caring people came to join us in opposition to Factory Farming. Tasty vegan foods kept us well sustained and in good cheer.The Tuakau farm is situated on a high traffic rural road and we recieved an overwhelmingly positive response from countless motorists, many stopped to express their disgust with the cruel ways the hens are kept and factory farming in general, showing a keen awareness of many issues.Locals joined us, taking up placards and banners. Some local children even baked us biscuits to help keep up energy levels, amazing!

Overall, we received a lot of media coverage from a broad section of corporate media, as well as our own media who were uploading images and messages from the demo throughout the day, we received a lot of positive feedback and some people even responded directly by coming out and joining the protest.

Coalition media spokespeople appeared on television news shows making clear, well backed arguments in favour of abolishing factory farming and when possible against farming in general. 

There was a fluctuating number of police throughout the day with little impact on our activities other than trespassing protesters from the farm.

Overall we had a strong presence and a good turn out. We wish to say a big thanks to all who got involved! 
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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

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Our new website! 03/14/2010
 
Well finally New Zealand Open Rescue have our own website! You'll see lots of changes here over the next few months as we add stuff and customise the site more, so keep your eyes peeled!

Last year (2009) we collaborated with band 8 Foot Sativa, Meat Free Media and Sunset Studios to make a music video for the band's song Sleepwalkers. NZ Open Rescue provided footage from our investigations of factory farms and slaughter houses for this hard-hitting video. You can watch the video here

In 2009 we took former Pork Board frontman Mike King inside a pig factory farm, enabling Mike to confront the cruel reality of this industry for the first time. Our investigation with Mike was a key element of a highly successful expose on the NZ pork industry that was showcased on TVNZ's Sunday show.

And 2010 is going to be another busy year for NZ Open Rescue! The Code of Welfare for Pigs is currently being reviewed and the Code of Welfare for Layer Hens is due for review later in the year. So it really is a big year for challenging factory farming in NZ. Watch this space!
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