Filthy Battery Cages in the A.C.T.

You may have seen Jamie Oliver’s recent TV show on eggs and chicken meat. If so, you’d have seen him stroll through a huge, modern looking battery egg production shed. We saw the shiny, clean metal of the cages and heard him say that there was no strong smell. As bad as these shiny cramped cages are for the hens, many older battery cage facilities, including the Pace Farm Canberra sheds at Parkwood (Macgregor West) are far worse.

They are filthy, stinking hell-holes full of manure, cobwebs, mice and rats and have a stench of ammonia and manure that can knock you over.

I’ve been to the Parkwood sheds twice.

Each visit coincided with Pace Farm de-populating (emptying) one or two of their sheds. They do this after about 12 to 15 months when it is determined that the hens have passed their peak production.

It’s not a matter of monitoring each hen and retiring her when she's past her prime, they pull all 20,000 to 30,000 hens out of the shed on the designated date.

These so-called ‘spent hens’ are yanked out of the cages which they have shared with one or two others for over a year and passed by their legs down a bucket-line of casual workers then crammed into crates to be taken by truck to be slaughtered for second quality meat products including pet food and stock feed (for example, see http://www.greatplainsprotein.com/)

In the process, some hens are dropped or escape from their cages. Many of these end up in the manure piled up on the ground level of the sheds below the cages – the accumulated droppings of the thousands of hens over the previous year.

These hens are supposed to be retrieved. The ACT Domestic Poultry Code of Practice section 12.7 states, “Where birds are found to have escaped into the manure area under cages they must be captured as soon as practicable on the day of observation and returned to cages or destroyed humanely”.

But they are not worth a lot to Pace so are left to fend for themselves.

On my first visit, there were many birds in the manure who had obviously been there for some time as they had hard balls of manure built up around their legs making it difficult for them to walk. On the second visit, the manure was wetter and many birds were stuck fast – some drowned or drowning in the more liquid sections of the manure.

The fermenting, stinking manure will be scooped out by a front-end loader in the following days before a fresh load of young hens are crammed into their homes for the next year or so.

The cages shown in Jamie Oliver’s show were bad enough, denying the hens the opportunity to be hens, to spread their wings, dust bathe, nest etc. But the Pace cages in Canberra are even worse.

If you still eat eggs – please make sure you buy free range eggs, preferably from a certified organic supplier.

Better still – give them up. They are not necessary.