Free range chooks are under threat. Far from a life roaming without restraint, a push to redefine the production of free range eggs nationally will make life even tougher.
Under the proposed changes from the Australian Egg Corporation, practices such as the ‘debeaking’ of hens will become more common to free range production and the number of birds per hectare may increase from 1500 to 20,000. Eggs they produce will be labelled as ‘free range’.
Animal welfare groups and free range producers have had long-held concerns over the factory farming of hens for egg production. Free Range Farmers’ Association spokesman, Phil Westwood, sees the proposed changes as a backward step for welfare and a potential windfall for large industry.
“This proposal, if it is adopted, will reap millions of dollars for the big operators by allowing them to charge a premium for their version of ‘free range’ eggs,” he told Crikey.
AECL’s changes will have industry-wide implications if adopted. According to the CSIRO’s Model Code of Practice for the Welfare of Animals, for eggs to be labeled ‘free range’ a maximum of 1500 birds can be kept on one hectare. Westwood says what is on paper and what occurs on the ground are radically different.
“Currently most ‘free range’ birds in Australia are debeaked — or beak trimmed as the industry prefers to call it — because generally they are run in flocks of many thousands in each shed.”
According to the Hen Welfare Advisory Group (an arm of AECL), about 15% of all eggs sold in Australia are free range. The practice of debeaking is a standard industry practice but the CSIRO Model Code outlines that “every effort should be made to avoid beak trimming” in free range egg production.
Westwood sees the AECL’s proposal as an attempt to bend the rules laid out by the Code. “The automatic beak trimming of birds is not condoned by the Model Code, so unless the Code is changed, the eggs cannot legally be defined as free range,” he said.
Free Range Poultry Australia (FREPA) spokesperson Meg Parkinson has cautioned against a knee-jerk reaction to the proposals. The 20,000 figure “was not actually proposed”, she said; “it was a part of the general discussion on what AECL may decide”.
According to the RSPCA, 11.6 million battery hens live in Australia in “less space each than an A4 piece of paper”. While Sweden, Finland, Switzerland, Germany, Austria and Norway have banned battery cages, Australia has adopted no such approach. The European Union is set to ban the practice by 2012.
It is hard to stomach the unutterable cruelty of the egg industry. I watch my hens happily scratching around and clucking to each other all day, they respond to every move we make in the garden and come running to us like old friends. How can anyone so mistreat nice girls like this?
Profoundly depressing – another backward step for animal welfare in Australia. As the EU moves forward, we put more animals in cages.
The egg industry is profoundly cruel, regardless of free range, ‘free to roam’ (the latest misleading term used by sellers), barn, battery or cage. Here are two extracts from Jonathan Safran Foer’s ‘Eating Animals’. Anyone who eats meat, eggs, or drinks milk, has a duty to read this book.
“BATTERY CAGE
Is it anthropomorphism to try to imagine yourself into a farmed animal’s cage? Is it anthropodenial not to?
The typical cage for egg-laying hens allows each sixty-seven square inches of floor space — somewhere between the size of this page and a sheet of printer paper. Such cages are stacked between three and nine tiers high — Japan has the world’s highest battery cage unit, with cages stacked eighteen tiers high — in windowless sheds.
Step your mind into a crowded elevator, an elevator so crowded you cannot turn around without bumping into (and aggravating) your neighbor. The elevator is so crowded you are often held aloft.
This is a kind of blessing, as the slanted floor is made of wire, which cuts into your feet.
After some time, those in the elevator will lose their ability to work in the interest of the group. Some will become violent; others will go mad. A few, deprived of food and hope, will become cannibalistic.
There is no respite, no relief. No elevator repairman is coming. The doors will open once, at the end of your life, for your journey to the only place worse ( see: processing ).
BROILER CHICKENS
Not all chickens have to endure battery cages. In this way only, it could be said that broilers — chickens that become meat (as opposed to layers, chickens that lay eggs) — are lucky: they tend to get close to a single square foot of space.
If you aren’t a farmer, what I’ve just written probably confuses you. You probably thought that chickens were chickens. But for the past half century, there have actually been two kinds of chickens — broilers and layers — each with distinct genetics. We call them both chickens, but they have starkly different bodies and metabolisms, engineered for different “functions.” Layers make eggs. (Their egg output has more than doubled since the 1930s.) Broilers make flesh. (In the same period, they have been engineered to grow more than twice as large in less than half the time. Chickens once had a life expectancy of fifteen to twenty years, but the modern broiler is typically killed at around six weeks. Their daily growth rate has increased roughly 400 percent.)
This raises all kinds of bizarre questions — questions that before I learned about our two types of chickens, I’d never had reason to ask — like, What happens to all of the male offspring of layers? If man hasn’t designed them for meat, and nature clearly hasn’t designed them to lay eggs, what function do they serve?
They serve no function. Which is why all male layers — half of all the layer chickens born in the United States, more than 250 million chicks a year — are destroyed.
Destroyed? That seems like a word worth knowing more about.
Most male layers are destroyed by being sucked through a series of pipes onto an electrified plate. Other layer chicks are destroyed in other ways, and it’s impossible to call those animals more or less fortunate. Some are tossed into large plastic containers. The weak are trampled to the bottom, where they suffocate slowly. The strong suffocate slowly at the top. Others are sent fully conscious through macerators (picture a wood chipper filled with chicks).
Cruel? Depends on your definition of cruelty (see: cruelty).”
Liz , my sister has 3 hens on a 400+ mt block in close to Brisbane. Heaps of eggs for only 3 chooks and always leave with a dozen real yellow eggs. You are what you eat.
In growing horror I watched Jamie Oliver’s expose of the poultry industry and then began further reading on the subject. Footage of a Victorian battery hen farm on ABC’s ‘Lateline’ a few months ago was the worst I had seen, appalling and repulsive. The animal liberationists who, whilst taking the footage, managed to save a few dying birds, were in tears of distress.
Consequently I no longer eat chicken – even free range. Nor do I eat eggs – even the expensive organic free range variety purchased at the health store. I do not trust labels sufficiently to be sure no cruelty has been involved.
Word of mouth deriding the big players in the industry is a starting point for a grass roots movement to help these poor animals. If eating chicken or eggs becomes unfashionable (like smoking) the profit-driven industry will be forced to change.
People who own chooks are fortunate – and so are the chooks.
As with the practice of mulesing of lambs Australia once again demonstrates it’s Neanderthal approach to animal welfare. We are a very sick society where profit is the only motive.
Europe is once again showing the way and Australia sucks.
I will no longer be buying chicken or eggs. If enough people decide not to we may make this ghastly Australian Egg Corporation disappear into obscurity. With a bit of good fortune the Australia-New Zealand Food Standards mob may go the same way. What use are they?