Monday, May 4, 2009

Meet Chicken

On Sunday while travelling through the countryside near Whangarei we found a brown shaver hen pecking in the grass on the roadside outside a free range egg farm. We picked her up and put her in a cage in the car. She spent the rest of the afternoon with us driving round. We gave her the very imaginative name of Chicken, maybe we had been in the car too long but think it suited her quite well.

In the early evening we dropped her off at her new home where she will be able to live out the rest of her natural life.

Why take a hen from a Free Range Farm you ask.

Even though hens on a free range farm are not in cages and can move around they are still only there to make profit for the farmers. When hens on both battery and free range farms stop laying ‘enough’ eggs to be profitable they are all sent to slaughter. So even a so called ‘free range’ hen who could live for 15 years has her life cut short to only a couple of years.

Naturally hens live in very small flocks however on many free range farms hens are forced to live in flocks much larger than that, some even over one thousand birds. This causes stress to the hens and makes it hard for them to form hierarchies, which are an integral part of a hens social structure.

Living in larger groups can also lead to hens becoming aggressive and peaking each other. Like on battery hen farms many ‘free range’ farmers remedy this situation by cutting the tip of the hens beak off; this is known as de-beaking. This procedure is carried out when the hens are chicks and is very painful as there are many nerves in a hen’s beak. Glenrocks Free Range farm where Chicken came from used this practice.

Many free range egg farms source their hens from the same hatcheries used by battery hen farmers. The parents of these chicks are factory farmed and live in over-crowed sheds in conditions much like those of broiler (meat) chickens. When fertilised eggs are laid they are taken from the mothers and placed inside incubators until they are ready to hatch. At this point the eggs are placed in draws until they hatch. Half of the chicks will be males, who obviously cannot produce eggs. At one day old the chicks are sorted by gender; because the males are not economically useful they are killed; either by gassing, neck dislocation or instantaneous fragmentation (which basically means being minced alive). This is the same for both the battery hen and free range industry. For every female hen in a battery hen cage or on a free range farm there is a chick who was killed because he made the misfortune of being born a male.

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