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Battery Hens
The Issues Humane Alternatives How you can help
The Issues
More than 10 million battery-caged egg producing hens across Australia live in cramped, overcrowded wire cages, often stacked up to five or more rows high. Each hen is a prisoner in a space no bigger than an A4 sheet of paper.
The wellbeing of hens is directly linked to their ability to act out their natural behaviours: foraging for food, perching on a roost, dust-bathing, preening, laying their eggs in a nest, and even just flapping their wings. Battery hens can do none of these things.
They lay their eggs on a sloping wire floor that permanently disfigures their feet as their claws become twisted around the mesh, sometimes preventing them from reaching food and water.
The overcrowded conditions cause serious muscle damage from lack of movement, and feather damage and skin abrasions from wire rubbing. The hens suffer further injuries as cage mates attack each other out of frustration. To prevent injury from such anti-social behaviour, young chicks often endure “debeaking”, the removal of up to half the upper mandible (beak), causing shock and sometimes death of the one to ten-day old chicks.
The hens are often force-moulted, depriving them of food, water and light to speed up their moulting process and increase their laying capacity. When their reproductive laying period is over, they are simply slaughtered.
The welfare of battery-caged egg producing hens is the most compromised of all farm animals. Scientific evidence indicates that battery hens suffer intensely and continuously throughout their confinement in cages. They are denied their right to normal animal behaviour in accordance with the RSPCA’s Five Freedoms, and RSPCA Qld is strongly opposed to this cruel and unnecessary practice.
Download this information as a fact sheet – click here.
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