Will battery cages for laying hens be banned by the year 2000? The European Parliament agreed this in January, but the decision has to go to the Council of Agriculture Ministers for decision. The hen used to be a creature that ran about farmyards and fields, scratching at the ground, uttering throaty sounds and coming in to lay its eggs in a nest in a shed, or, now and then, "laying out", so that the farmer's wife and children often had to go searching the hedges for the impromptu nest with its eggs. All changed by the battery system. An Irish publication, Organic Matters, bought in the organic butchers O'Tooles of Terenure, Dublin, gives us some of the distressing details of today's methods. Sometimes, goes this article by Aoife Ni Fhearghail, up to five hens are confined in a cage so small that one hen alone cannot even fully stretch her wings. In the Republic, 1.8 million hens spend their entire productive lives confined in such cages, deprived, the article goes on, of fresh air, exercise, sunshine and freedom. No scratching the ground, no dust-baths, no perch at night or even a nest for the eggs. Each hen, she calculates, has less individual space than an A4 sheet of paper (say, eight inches by 12). As hens are peckers of the ground and food, they might peck each other in confined spaces, so, it appears, they are often debeaked at a young age.
The egg industry, according to this article, holds that there isn't enough land to keep all our hens free-range and that free-range eggs are too dear. A ban on battery cages would spell ruin for egg production, the operators argue. But the writer quotes the case of Switzerland, which banned battery cages in 1992 without cutting down the sale of eggs. In fact, the sale of Swiss-produced eggs increased from 62 per cent in 1981 to 72 per cent by 1997. Which admittedly could be due to increasing prosperity or other causes. Still, it is said here that the demand for organically-produced eggs far outstrips demand. Seems to be reasonable, though if there is a big difference in price, people of lesser means may be deprived of healthy nutrition in a battery-less poultry and egg market.
The writer of the article in Organic Matters is Campaigns Officer with Compassion in World Farming, Ireland. Now we have to wait for the decision of the Council of Agriculture Ministers in Brussels, including, of course, our own man. There is price to bear in mind, but also our own standards of morality in exploiting the creatures around us for our own uses. And so thinks the European Parliament.