Happy Day for Hens!

As Aldous Huxley once said,
“Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.”

“1 in every 30 Americans, that is 10 million people, back the Humane Society of the United States, an organization that seeks a humane and sustainable world for all animals and is America’s ‘mainstream force against cruelty, exploitation and neglect.’ This means that 29 out of every 30 or 290 million Americans may not care very much about animal cruelty. That is a huge number of people.
I wrote that a couple of years ago and the really good news is that another million now back the society, that is now 1 in 28 Americans!
But the fact remains that many farm animals are still subjected to the most appallingly cruel conditions in factory farms. Would those who love their own family pets be happy for them to be treated to the same kind of cruelty? By our inactions we appear to condone miserable birthing cages or farrowing crates for female pigs, where they are held for months and can hardly move let alone turn around or socialize with other pigs; we eat and apparently enjoy the French delicacy pate de foie gras which requires that ducks and geese are force-fed unnaturally large quantities of food through a metal tube that is shoved down their throats and into their stomachs two or three times each day. This barbaric treatment produces a liver that is fatty, diseased and ten times the normal size. It sounds disgusting and it is; goodness knows how those birds must suffer. We prefer not to know about the calves separated from their mothers within the first few days of birth and crammed into individual crates or stalls, tethered by their necks, so they can hardly move, for the duration of their dreadful short lives; and we ignore the plight of the 280 million laying hens in the United States which spend their lives cooped up in tiny cages with no more than the space of an A4 piece of paper that they can (hardly) call their own.”

However not all is gloom and doom. Compassion in World Farming is celebrating a landmark piece of EU animal welfare legislation that came into force today, making the use of barren battery cages for egg-laying hens illegal throughout the European Union (EU).
There's a short and pretty silly film of hens celebrating as well!
But, and this is why we cannot be complacent, 13 EU states are likely to be non-compliant, with 84 million hens still stuck in those dreadful cages. And these eggs may still be imported and sold in the UK, or used in the manufacture of other foods offered for sale. So those of us who care about animals and their welfare must remain vigilant. Our work is not over yet.

You can go to the CWF “The Big Move” website to ask the European Commission not to let non-compliant nations get away with flouting the ban. And we can all be more thoughtful about what we are buying and eating. Please think about this, for the sake of sentient animals everywhere.

And a Very Happy New Year to all my readers.