Chickens’ Lib for battery-hens

Press, 21 October 1977, Page 13

Chickens’ Lib for battery-hens

Opponents of batteryhen farming, including a group from Britain called Chickens’ Lib, are asking the bureaucrats of Europe to outlaw the system. They told E.E.C. officials in Brussels that battery hens endure unnecessary suffering; they are packed so tightly they attack each other, lose their feathers, go blind, and lose the use of their legs. Protectionists from Germany, the Netherlands, and Switzerland have

joined the British group in the protest. To illustrate the hazards facing the hens, Chickens’ Lib, led by Mrs Clare Druce and her mother, Mrs Violet Spalding, bought four laying hens from a Midlands battery farm. “I picked them at random. I did not have much else of a chance because I was so overcome with the smell inside the battery,” says Mrs Druce. “When we got them home we put them in the

garden and they all seemed wobbly. One pecked away at the grass and then fell over: The bird continued to peck furiously at the grass lying on its side, unable to rise.” Mrs Druce claims these examples are typical. “We have seen hens just like these in markets that have obviously come from batteries, but our difficulty has always been to prove which battery farms they come from,” she says.

“We want the Ministry of Agriculture to set up a full public inquiry. Ninety per cent of the nation’s 55 million hens are in batteries.” The battery egg producers reject the protesters’ claims. At the farm where Mrs Druce and her mother bought the four hens, the owner said that, apart from moulting, “hens have no need for feathers because they are kept in warm temperatures.” Neville Wallace, director-general of the British Poultry Federation, also maintains that keeping hens in batteries is not cruel. “I do not defend that battery hens should be featherless and pecked. But the restriction of movement is not necessarily harmful. Battery birds are bred to accept this. Healthy, comfortable

hens will lay more eggs than those that are' not in the peak of condition or are suffering.” His federation cites figures showing that the average free-range hen will lay 187 eggs in a laying period, a semi-battery hen 216, and a battery bird 238. “Battery production has been banned in Denmark for years but there is a strong move there to remove the ban,” he says. “Many Danes are" convinced that putting hens in battery houses is no more — if at all — cruel than involving birds in other forms of intensive farming, and that nonbattery methods do not attain the best production figures.” The delegation to Brussels accepts that the freerange egg will cost the

customer more. It supports a Swiss Government scheme aimed at encouraging free-range egg production. The free-range egg sells at five Swiss cents (just under 2 cents New Zealand) higher than the battery egg. Two cents go direct to the producer, the rest to marketing and a subsidy fund to support prices when the market price falls. Claude Beck, of the Swiss Federation for the Protection of Animals, says: “Economics are vital. If we protectionists demand too much we could kill any new scheme. Capital outlay could be enormous and the price of the egg is crucial. We are after better treatment for the hen, but we do not seek to put egg producers out of business.” — John Ball, “Sunday Times,” London.