My girls supply me with 4 or 5 beautiful free range eggs every day and they are quite happy supplying these. They get to roam the garden, grazing, hunting insects and having lovely sand baths in stead of spending their lives in a 8″ × 12″ wire cage (the size of an A4 sheet of paper). They get to choose when to go to bed and when to lay their eggs, following Mother Nature’s natural daylight cycle in stead of their “daylight” being on a timer and being woken up 2 o’clock in the morning and being forced to lay another egg, giving 1½ eggs a day instead of the normal 1 egg every two days. They lie in the sun, spreading their wings and soaking up the sun’s Vit. D in stead of having Vit. D pumped into them via additions to their food. They exercise regularly by chasing insects (and one another!) in stead of being cramped up in those 8″ × 12″ wire cages with not even room above their heads to stretch their legs. They get to socialise and experience family bonds, something which a battery chicken will never know. My girls are not culled when they get to the end of their egg-laying cycle, but in stead get to live a happy, healthy and fulfilled life.
It is sad what we do to our animals in order that we may eat and survive…
“I am battery hen. I live in a cage so small I cannot stretch my wings. I am forced to stand night and day on a sloping wire mesh floor that painfully cuts into my feet. The cage walls tear my feathers, forming blood blisters that never heal. The air is so full of ammonia that my lungs hurt and my eyes burn and I think I am going blind. As soon as I was born, a man grabbed me and sheared off part of my beak with a hot iron, and my little brothers were thrown into trash bags as useless, alive.
My mind is alert and my body is sensitive and I should have been richly feathered. In nature or even a farmyard I would have had sociable, cleansing dust baths with my flock mates, a need so strong that I perform ‘vacuum’ dust bathing on the wire floor of my cage. Free, I would have ranged my ancestral jungles and fields with my mates, devouring plants, earthworms, and insects from sunrise to dusk. I would have exercised my body and expressed my nature, and I would have given, and received, pleasure as a whole being. I am only a year old, but I am already a ‘spent hen.’
Humans, I wish I were dead, and soon I will be dead. Look for pieces of my wounded flesh wherever chicken pies and soups are sold."
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Read more about The Life of one Battery Hen. (Sensitive information - I cried when I read it...)
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