For the last 5 days I've been working with layer chickens. The first three days were on a cage hen farm, followed by a day at a hatchery and the last was a free range layer farm. It was both what I expected and not in a few different ways. Overall I was pretty happy with what I saw but my opinions on the egg industry haven't actually changed at all, and I'm going to make an attempt to explain why.
I'll start with a little bit about what we did, what we saw and my feelings and opinions when we went through it all. Then I'll do a bit of a comparison between the major types of egg production, where I would like to see the industry go and why.
So the first day at the cage farm we were taking blood samples from the hens. Every three months they give the hens a vaccine in the form of a spray against Newcastle Virus. Newcastle virus is a highly contagious disease which can be absolutely devastating if it gets into a flock. The virus can cause anything from digestive or respiratory distress to death. A few weeks after the vaccinating occurs, blood samples are taken from a number of birds out of each shed to make sure there is an appropriate immune response. The blood samples were taken from a vein in the underside of the wing. This was a little bit distressing for us to be thrown into as the needles were bigger than the veins we were taking blood from and it was very easy to cause bleeding and damage to the birds wing.
I can say though that I was a little bit surprised at how little the birds seemed to react. We didn't have to use much pressure to hold them at all and even when the needle went in not a single bird flinched.
The second day we were weighing 30 chickens from a number of the sheds. In this time we got to know the birds a bit better. They were all very alert and inquisitive, more so than I was expecting from cage hens. There was a huge range of personalities amongst the hens. There were some that tried to attack you, yet others were sitting quite peacefully against the edge of their cages while they seemed to really enjoy us patting and scratching them.
The third day we went to the grower facility where the hens are kept from day old chicks to the age of 16 weeks when they are then taken over the the main farm and introduced to the cages they will spend the rest of their lives in.
It was interesting here because there were both cage growers and free range growers. Basically the free range hens are in the same density as the cage hens (~25,000 per shed) except the cages have been removed and turned into perches. As growers they don't have access to the outside, which was interesting to learn. The free range sheds were also much dustier and you could see the same sort of personalities in these chickens as with the cage hens. We managed to catch a couple and have cuddles but it wasn't as easy as cuddling the cage hens, for obvious reasons.
Then we spent a couple of hours at a hatchery. The chicks are all sorted according to sex, hy-line brown chicks are brown if they're girls and yellow if they're boys so it's pretty easy to tell. The boys are killed using carbon dioxide, so they go to sleep and die, and are then used to make blood and bone fertiliser. The girls go into a machine where they have the very tip of their beaks lasered off and are also vaccinated.
Having been used to animal rights propaganda and pictures of hardly any beak left, most of the old hens we saw looked like they had almost complete beaks. It really is just the tip that's taken off. If you didn't know they had been trimmed you wouldn't have noticed.
Today was our last day and we had a tour through the free range hens as well as a talk with the guy who manages both of the sites we were at. The hens there seemed very relaxed and happy. They didn't have much fear of people and the ones that went outside seemed happy digging around or lying in the sun while the ones inside were perching or digging in the sawdust. Almost all of the hens we saw had red, upright combs while the caged hens were pale and floppy. They were just as bright eyed and inquisitive though. It was actually a bit of a pain trying to walk through them as they were particularly good at getting underfoot.
Now onto the comparison.
As far as costs go, caged hens are the most efficient. Free range hens require four times as much labour and eat 15% more food. They also produce around 25 eggs per hen less than cage hens. Not all of the eggs are laid in the nesting boxes so someone has to walk through several times a day to check for mislaid eggs. It's also more difficult to pull out any dead birds. The free range barns are quite a bit dustier than the cage sheds as well, although the cage sheds have a much stronger ammonia smell.
Free range sheds tend to require a bit more fiddling around to get the environment perfect which can be quite costly. It's a lot easier to get a controlled ideal environment in a shed.
The access to outside makes it much easier for the birds to be killed by predators (foxes being a big one) and also makes the spread of contagious disease with wild birds or rodents a lot easier.
There was greater bio-security measures in place at the caged site than the free range site as not having the exposure to wild animals makes the cage hens more vulnerable to disease.
Cage hens have constant access to food and water, where free range birds have to travel further and are more likely to have to compete for both if they travel outside. Having 5 hens in one cage enables them to sort out the 'pecking order' much easier than having 25,000 all in together.
The free range chickens have one ultimate advantage over the caged chickens - they get to actually be chickens. A big part of animal welfare revolves around the animal's 'right to express natural behaviours.' In chickens this includes flying, perching, dust bathing and scratching. Free range chickens are able to do all of these things while conventional cage hens can do none. The access to outside is what gives the hens the red comb and to me that's a sign of good health.
It's pretty easy for free range chickens to kill themselves by 'misadventure.' A big cause of this is when they all crowd on top of each other and suffocate or are crushed to death. They can also get stuck in the wire or the fences more easily than cage hens.
In my opinion the ideal form of commercial egg production is just deep litter barns. This is when you have chickens in a big shed with a thick bed of saw dust or wood shavings, they can perch and nest and run around but they don't go outside. It still allows the hens to express their natural behaviour but avoids some of the bio-security and disease issues. It's not quite consumer perfect, as they love seeing chickens running around in the grass, but it's a big move in the right direction. I'd love to see commercial production away from cages and towards barns, but there are still a number of benefits to cage production, mainly to workers, but some to the hens. Cages are still the most efficient way to meet market demands for eggs at a pretty constant rate throughout the year.
If we made a move towards all barn hens and no cage hens, I'd be pretty happy. As far as I'm concerned, the best possible way to farm chickens is for everyone to have a couple pet hens in their back yard, but good luck making that happen!
