This is a subject which has just been discussed on Radio 2's Jeremy Vine show:
Lighting the touch paper...
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2007/07/15/nhens115.xml
Standing back and waiting for the explosion!
He'll do anything to get the callers in will Jeremy. ::)
I wonder if the writer has been to a battery farm? I have and its not nice! The hens in the picture look nothing like battery hens... maybe they just arrived... and the battery's dont look like that either. Though did anyone notice the 2nd chook on the left had been debeaked?
Yes OO I did see that.
It's a ludicrous premise. The article states that free range hens are more stressed as they have the natural stresses of being eaten etc. Well, that's how animals should live isn't it? They should have the natural freedoms and worries of their little chucky lives.
The alternative is horrible. I have never been to a battery farm - I don't think I could but I have seen footage and things like River cottage where Hugh F/W was trying to change eating habits and took a group of die hard cheap chuck eaters to what I suppose was meant to be the middle ground -no cages but still living on a bed of their own poo, pale, half blind, just horrible. The pics I have seen of caged hens just break your heart. The worst one was where a hen in cage with another hen had used that hens dead body as a sort of nest to lay on. Horrendous.
Even the ones that they call Barn reared (or whatever it is) are kept in poor conditions.
A group of local activists broke into a Barn reared farm recently and saved some hens, they recorded the whole thing and put it on the internet, the poor hens were kept in terrible conditions, jam packed in barns couldnt move, they were missing feathers and even had maggots on their backs. Nasty :(
Having kept hens in my youth and visited battery establishments it can only be "biased" research... A happy battery hen is as rare as the proverbial teeth!
:-X
Quote from: SueSteve on July 16, 2007, 14:56:01
Barn reared
Thank you Sue, that's what I was thinking of on the Hugh F/W show. Still horrible isn't it?