A battery chicken cannot walk, it cannot stretch its wings and it is deprived of fresh air and sunlight. Chickens naturally dust bathe to preen themselves and recondition their feathers but are also unable to do this in cages. Dust bathing is the chicken rolling around in soil or sand and in doing so the bird is grooming and cleansing its skin or fur from parasites. Once again this is preventing the chickens behaving in a natural and instinctive manner, thus causing them stress and exhaustion.
Over two million chickens die in their cages each year because of improperly treated faeces. The vast majority of chickens have their beaks trimmed! To control injuries caused by feather pecking. The chickens’ beaks are trimmed just so that they can pack as many chickens together as tightly as possible. This can cause great pain for chickens and affect their ability to eat. This is extremely unfair and cruel to the chickens because the way they are treated in these battery farms in inadequate to meet the chickens’ needs and does not allow them to carry out their natural instinctive activities.
Most farms have four or five birds per cage, each cage about twenty by twenty inches. Cages can be stacked up to six cages high from one end of a farm to the other. They are in their cages for about seventy-two weeks and by that stage their bones are brittle from stepping on their wired cages. The cages they are kept in are tiny and the wires are making their lives a misery and causing them great pain. This is just another one of the many reasons why farming chickens in cages should be banned.
Jane Howorth and her husband moved house and decided they would keep some chickens, Jane went to a battery farm to buy a dozen chickens but when she realised the cruel conditions the chickens were kept in, she came home with three dozen chickens!
“ I went to a battery farm intending to get a dozen,” explains Jane. “ I was so appalled by the conditions; I came home with three times that amount.”
Jane is appalled at the conditions in which the battery caged chickens are being farmed in and so am I. This just further proves how bad the conditions battery caged chickens are kept in and Jane is so appalled by the conditions she takes about forty chickens home with her, instead of the original twelve she had planned.
The barn system of farming chickens is an improvement on the battery cages system but even still it is not as good as the free range system of farming chickens. Barn chickens are kept in a loose flock in sheds with raised platforms and the floor is covered in wood chippings. The wood chippings are a substitute for the soil or sand therefore it enables the chicken to dust bathe. By law there may be no more than twenty five chickens per square meter. This is better than cages but there is still not much room for the chickens to live in.
Free range chickens have access to the outdoors during the day and by law they have to be kept by one thousand chickens to a hectare which is ten thousand metres. This is lots of space for chickens to walk around and plenty of space for them to live a pretty good life. This is the fairest way for chickens to be farmed because they have plenty of space to move around and live in; they are able to carry out their normal activities and needs, such as dust bathing or just being able to spread their wings.
This is why I believe that farming battery chickens should be made illegal and that a more fair way such as the barn or free range systems should be the only way chickens should be farmed. It is the least we can do to let the chickens lead as normal and as happy a life as possible. Don’t you think?
Sites I used:
Jack Hutchinson 11C
