Hens in Cages: Not the Future of Farming
The Minnesota State Fair draws a ton of people – 2,046,533 went through the gates last year during the ten-day run—so if you have something to promote, the fair not only allows you a huge audience but everybody in that audience is already all softened up and happy from all those corn dogs and deep fried cheese curds, thus they’re more receptive to whatever it is you’ve got to tout. So if you’re advocating for your device as the best new way to slice vegetables and-it-can-be-yours-for-only-nineteen-ninety-five, or you think that your background and levelheaded approach would make you the best fill-in-the-elective-office-here, or you have some common sense idea that everybody will see the logic in, if they just hear you out, well, welcome to The Great Minnesota Get-Together.
I was among the hordes wandering the fair this past week, and I’d had my share of fried food (my new fave: a giant egg roll on a stick!), so I was both softened and happy when I encountered somebody promoting something so despicable that I felt like I’d been ambushed. It happened in the Future Farmers of America building – a double ambush for me since I’ve always had huge respect for this organization. The FFA and I have a history - back in the 1960’s, when I was a farm teen, I was president of our local FFA chapter. I represented our chapter several years in a row in the FFA Speech Contest, and I memorized the creed and can still spout great chunks of it: “I believe in the future of farming, with a faith born not of words but of deeds…in the promise of better days through better ways, even as the better things we now enjoy have come to us from the struggles of former years.” And so on. Well, sorry FFA, the times and I have moved on and you, apparently, have not. The FFA, you see, had a large display at the fair promoting battery cage torture chambers for chickens.
It was bad enough that there were propaganda posters pushing a viewpoint that caged chickens were better in every way than free chickens, but even worse, there were actual battery cages on display and they were filled with chickens! The people who created this display were obviously so blinded by their point of view that they couldn’t see how this would appear to the public. The little hens were so crowded in the cages that there was barely room for them to move. All they could do was stand in one place and lay eggs for the length of the fair – sentient beings reduced to machines. I wonder how many people who viewed this travesty were savvy to the fact that these hens weren’t going to be released after the fair. They would simply be stuffed in another battery cage somewhere else and would continue this nightmare until their egg production dropped and they were slaughtered.
Caged hens in the FFA Building at the Minnesota State Fair
My wife, Kathy, engaged the young woman who was in charge of the display and tried to get her to see that these hens were being mistreated. The woman told Kathy that she was anthropomorphizing. That’s a common response, but I don’t buy it. “Anthropomorphizing” is one of those impressive multi-syllable words that people like to throw around. It means that you are mistakenly ascribing human behaviors and characteristics to animals. Well I’m a human and have any number of behaviors and characteristics – on this particular day some of the behaviors I was displaying included taking my dog for a stroll, wandering around the state fair, and enjoying a giant eggroll on a stick. I will be the first to say that I’m pretty certain that chickens would not engage in those activities (although it is possible that they would like the egg roll quite a bit). But here’s the deal: Chickens are sentient creatures and experience both distress and joy. Any behavioral scientist will tell you that. But you don’t need to hear it from a scientist – all you have to do is spend an hour in my coop watching my hens. And hens do have any number of innate chicken behaviors that they can’t engage in when they’re locked in a tiny cage with a bunch of other hens: Roosting, dust bathing, pecking and scratching, finding an isolated place to lay their eggs, and so on. Hens in a battery cage can often be seen pushing their way around and under other hens in a panicked and fruitless search for a place to lay their eggs before they finally give up and lay them on the slanted wire floor and watch them roll away to the egg conveyer. It is not anthropomorphizing to say that battery cages disallow hens from their natural behavior. And it is not anthropomorphizing to call this a form of torture.
Here’s a picture I took of one of the propaganda posters on display: “Free Range vs. Environmentally Controlled Cages.” Needless to say, the way the facts are laid out in this poster, cages win hands down. I’ve been through all of this before in many other posts, but let’s take a look at each statement and see what’s wrong with this pictue.
1. Death loss has been reduced from 40% in free range conditions to 5% in well-managed, environmentally controlled cage systems. Where did these numbers come from? There are no citations, so we’ll never know. This HSUS monograph (which, btw, lists 105 citations) discusses chicken mortality in caged and cage-free systems. It points out that historically, as farmers moved to larger flock sizes mortality went up. Then, as chicken cages were developed mortality went down – however this same period also saw the development of vaccines, better hygiene practices, and improved genetics. This article also suggests that managing a cageless flock requires more knowledge and skill than managing chickens in cages. More and more flocks are becoming cage free due to increasing consumer demand for humanely produced eggs, and any farmer who simply pulls his chickens out of their cages without making any other changes is likely to suffer huge losses. If a small number of cage-free farms suffer high mortality, it will skew the results. The article quotes a Veterinary Record report that showed that in one study one “free-range farm had only 1.8% mortality at 70 weeks, demonstrating that some cage-free producers are adept at minimizing mortality.” The article concludes: “The current predominant method of intensively confining hens in small, wire cages causes unacceptably poor welfare. Even if mortality rates could not be corrected in cage-free systems, it might be worse to spend a long life confined to a restrictive, barren cage than a short life in an enriched, cage-free environment that offered a much greater degree of freedom to express natural behavior. However, because hens in well-managed cage free systems can be both healthy and free to express behavior that is important to them, the choice is simple.”
2. Egg production has improved from 140 eggs per hen per year to 240-300 eggs per hen per year. As with the first statement, we don’t know what these numbers represent. Are they comparing historic egg production with current numbers? While this poster is supposed to be comparing caged hens with free-ranging hens, nothing in this statement about egg production states or even hints that that’s what’s being compared. I can’t fathom why taking hens out of cages would do anything to affect their egg-laying rate. Some factors that do affect egg production are the breed of the hen and how much light she is subjected to. Also, hens don’t lay eggs when they are molting or broody. Factory farms use high-production breeds and breeds that are not likely to go broody. They also usually cull (slaughter) their hens at one to three years of age, which limits the number of annual molts the hens go through. While all of these factors will result a higher number of eggs per hen per year, it has nothing to do with cages. Also worth mentioning: My free-range heirloom breeds will lay more eggs in total than any factory farm hens – because I allow them to live out their natural lives. Granted egg production goes down as the hens get older, but the old girls still faithfully hop into the nest boxes and lay eggs—just not as frequently. This morning I collected a little white egg from Mary the Campine and a nice green egg from Sam the Easter Egger. Both hens are seven years old.
3. Chickens are healthier in modern production systems and therefore require less need for antibiotic or anti-parasitic treatments. The argument that caged hens are healthier hens is counterintuitive. A hen in a battery cage spends her entire life standing on a slanted wire floor, barely able to move, and unable to engage in normal chicken activities. That hen is stressed, and stressed hens are more likely to get sick. Given that a modern factory farm laying hen complex contains a multitude of laying barns, with each building containing several hundred thousand hens, it isn’t surprising that reports suggest that sick hens often go unnoticed and untreated.
4. Chickens are less stressed when kept in small groups of 4-8 birds because they do not have to re-establish a “pecking order” like they do in big groups. First of all, chickens crammed into small spaces will peck each other regardless of if that space is a battery cage or a crowded “cage-free” confinement barn. Rather than solving the pecking problem by allowing hens more room, the poultry industry instead routinely cuts off part of every chicken’s beak. Whether beak trimming causes pain to the chicken is a topic that is debated, with many in the egg production industry saying it does not. A chicken's beak, though, is a complex sensory organ with a robust nerve supply. The presence of nerves would almost certainly indicate that a hen would experience pain when her beak is cut. Behavioral studies have borne this out and some studies indicate that hens with trimmed beaks feel chronic pain the rest of their lives.
5. The move to environmentally controlled caged housing has provided the consumer with a cleaner, safer and healthier product than ever before—the incredible edible egg. Sure. The hen lays an egg and it rolls down the slanted wire floor and is whisked away on a conveyor. There’s not much contact time, so there’s not a lot of opportunity for the egg to become soiled by the “dirty bird” that produced it. Yet eggs sold in the US, by law, have to go through the same washing and handling procedure regardless if they were produced by caged hens or hens foraging on pasture – and the end product is the same—the incredible edible egg. So, if the end-product is the same, why wouldn’t we choose the more humane option?
1. An environmentally controlled barn protects the birds from the ravages of extreme weather changes. Um….Sure. So does a humane coop. Am I missing something here?
2. Modern chicken barns protect birds from predators. True fact: Chickens roaming happily on a pasture are in the great outdoors. There are predators in the great outdoors. Battery hens are crowded into cages. There are no predators in cages. Here’s an analogy—kids on playgrounds sometimes suffer accidents. Kids in closets never suffer playground accidents. Which are the better parents? Those who take their kids to playgrounds or those who lock their kids in closets? I don’t need to explain this do I?
3a. Manure is carried away immediately with a moving belt beneath the cage so air quality is improved and there is less chance for fecal contamination. This is true only about half the time. This Livestock and Poultry Environmental Learning Community article states that about half of layer hen barns have manure belts. In most of the other half battery cages are positioned over a manure pit – the manure falls through the wire bottom of the cage and accumulates in the pit, thus the hens live their entire lives over an accumulation of their own excrement. There have been several reports like this Canadian exposé where “amid the excrement, the eyewitnesses found the bodies of more than 200 hens, [in the manure pit] who had evidently fallen while being moved in or out of their cages and were just left to die, likely from dehydration or starvation. Many were buried alive in the manure.” Manure conveyor belts are obviously a huge improvement over manure pits, but it is misleading to suggest that every facility uses belts when half of them don’t.
3b. Once an egg is laid it rolls gently to another conveyor belt and is transported safely to be cleaned and processed, giving consumers a fresher, more wholesome product. I already plowed this ground in my commentary on statement 5 above.
4. Modern barns allow all birds to consume a high-quality ration specifically designed for their needs and consists of corn, soybean meal, vitamins and minerals. Backyard and commercial flocks allowed to free range on pasture also get nutritionally balanced chicken feed, of course. In addition, they get to eat all the fresh green plants they want and any bugs or worms they can catch or scratch up. One study has found that “compared to official U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) nutrient data for commercial eggs, eggs from hens raised on pasture may contain 1⁄3 less cholesterol, 1⁄4 less saturated fat, 2⁄3 more vitamin A, 2 times more omega-3 fatty acids, 3 times more vitamin E, and 7 times more beta carotene.”
5. Modern barns allow a farmer or manager to walk through the barn and see each bird at a glance to make sure all is well. Seriously? We’ve just been talking about how each factory farm facility has a bazillion birds, how sick and even dead birds have been unnoticed and neglected and how birds even wind up dying in the manure pits from starvation and dehydration. So, no. Just no.
6. Birds that are more comfortable, cleaner, and less stressed are healthier and happier birds, which is the goal of all farmers. Okay, I’ll not argue about cleaner – a bird that has never had a chance to scratch in the dirt is a clean bird. More comfortable? Seriously? Less stressed? Seriously? See everything above. We’re still talking about hens in cages, right? And, really, I would like this statement to be true. But most of the folks running these gigantic egg operations are nothing like the farmers I knew growing up. In the old days the farmer was up close and personal with his farm every day – often knee deep in it with a pitchfork in his hands. The people who manage these giant operations sit behind desks all day and don’t know one end of a pitchfork from up. Do they care about happy healthy birds or do they care more about maximizing profit?
You know what I’d like to see in the FFA building when I go to the fair next year? Another display on egg production, only without the bias and hype. There are all kinds of agricultural enterprises in this state and while some of them are corporate and gigantic, many of them are not. The folks at Locally Laid Egg Company, for example, are running a medium-sized Minnesota business that successfully produces high quality eggs while keeping all of their hens free-ranging on pasture. When do we get to hear about them at the fair? More and more consumers around the country are clamoring for sustainable and humanely-produced eggs. Oregon has just joined the growing list of states that have passed legislation disallowing the sale of eggs from caged hens. Walmart Inc., McDonald’s Corp., and General Mills Inc. have joined the long list of corporations who have vowed to use only cage-free eggs. I feel really optimistic that we’re moving in the right direction. Personally, like it says right there in the FFA creed, I do believe in the future of farming. And hens suffering in battery cages are just not part of it.
