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Battery Hens Campaign
Aims
The main aim of the Battery Hens Campaign is to end the keeping of laying hens in battery cages. This is based on the ethical standpoint that it is unacceptable to continue to use such intensive poultry husbandry systems, which cause suffering to vast numbers of birds, when different systems are available (and have, indeed, been used in the past), which offer a better prospect of providing for the birds' welfare.
Additional aims are:
- to ensure that this ban includes all battery cages, including ‘enriched’ cages;
- to ensure satisfactory protection for laying hens kept in any production system (both legislative protection and effective control and enforcement mechanisms);
- to ensure transparent and coherent consumer information in respect of hen eggs (labelling, advertising etc.) through strict legislative requirements and effective control and enforcement; and
- to increase consumer awareness and influence buying habits in terms of animal welfare criteria.
Contents
Resources Available | Campaign Images | Photographs
Background Information | Statistics | Latest News!
The Battery Hens Campaign takes a two-pronged approach:
Voluntary - seeking to influence consumers to stop buying eggs produced in intensive systems (and improve consumer awareness of egg laying systems and practices generally). (Click link for more information.)Legislative - seeking to achieve a legislative ban on the keeping of laying hens in battery cages (and the introduction of legislative provisions to improve welfare in alternative systems and improve consumer information/labelling). (Click link for more information.)
The voluntary campaign fuels the legislative campaign by increasing public awareness of the issue, heightening calls for change and changing consumers' buying habits (decreasing battery egg consumption). The resultant change in consumer buying habits could include the giving up egg consumption entirely, the eating of fewer eggs and/or the boycott of battery eggs (taking eggs from alternative systems, such as free range, instead). As the market share of battery eggs declines, resistance to a legislative ban will decrease. There will also be an increase in calls for better consumer information in relation to egg sales (accurate labelling and advertising to enable informed consumer choice). In turn, accurate labelling is likely to increase moves away from battery egg consumption.
WAN would like to express its grateful appreciation to Compassion in World Farming (CIWF) for the provision of valuable information and photographs.
