New Zealand Open Rescue

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