EDUCATION
If You Were a Chicken — You Would Probably Prefer to be Caged
Astonishing new data about laying hens: Industrial free-range environments are no better than battery cages
We all are used to the pictures of laying hens kept in mass stocks, penned up by thousands or even tens of thousands, or sitting in battery cages all their miserable lives long. Most of us shiver when we look at such images — but forget them quickly, at the latest when having the next breakfast, while eating one or more tasty eggs.
Eggs, eggs, eggs
The reason why we humans are doing this to chickens, is because of their ability to produce organic vessels that actually are meant to contain their embryos, but can also be used by us as nutritious and relishable food — eggs.
While we are used to the pictures of the animals that give us this food, we normally are surprised when learning about the requirements that are necessary to appease our hunger. For the sake of simplicity, let’s focus on the numbers for the US here:
In 2019, 399.656.000 laying hens lived in the US — roughly 400 million (1). That means a massive increase in the past two decades, since in 2000 the number of laying hens was 333.593.000; the number of commercial laying hens in 2019 is stated by another source as 340 million (2).
The hens produced a total of 99.1 billion eggs in 2019. That means, on average every hen laid 294 eggs per year, so nearly one egg per day. About the same number of eggs Americans eat per year — the per capita consumption was 290 eggs in 2019 (3).
It’s all about productivity
Somewhere all those eggs have to come from. The commercial egg industry in the US has a long history and has developed rapidly to keep up with population growth, managing to keep eggs affordable in large quantities (4). The hens are produced and forced to lay as many eggs as possible before they die, long before a natural death would overtake them. For example, in the US starvation is used to make the birds molt and thus lay more eggs when becoming older. The whole system would not work if there was not intensive mass animal farming on an industrial scale. In 2019, the vast majority of laying hens in the US still were kept in conventional battery cages (5).
The horror of the battery cages
“Barren battery cage eggs come from hens kept in small cages in which they are unable to express their natural behaviors. They are prevented from foraging for food, nesting, roosting, and dust-bathing. This causes hens extreme physical and psychological discomfort.” (as stated on ciwf.com)
Everyone would agree to that. Normally, imagining to be one of those miserable hens causes psychological discomfort even for oneself. Cage-free, or even better, organic environments seem to be a possible solution to the problem (6). In California, for example, all laying hens are required to be kept cage-free by 2022 (7). The opportunity to run around, spread their wings, interact with other individuals, and lay their eggs in nests are benefits that should be positive factors for the animal’s welfare.
On the contrary, not having these options should lead to suffering, which means keeping animals from doing all these things is cruel and therefore cannot morally be legitimized.
It’s more complex than you think
But, as always, things are more complex when you take a closer look. A team of Dutch and German Neuroscientists did just that (8): They investigated 48 laying hens which were raised from 16 to 48 weeks of age in three different environments: battery cages, small littered ground pens, and free-range system.
The three groups were blindly classified by their plumage condition. One-third of the animals were in bad shape: They had significantly fewer feathers than the others.
Which of the three groups would you put these animals in? The ones raised in battery cages, in small littered ground pens, or free-range system? If you had to choose one of the three systems as your own environment to live in, your choice probably would be clear. No one likes to be caged.
After killing the birds and examining the brains with neuroscientific methods, the results were astonishing: Neuroscience has ways to measure the amount of stress an animal was exposed to when alive (e. g., they measured neuroanatomical effects in the hippocampus and nidopallium caudolaterale in their brains).
By far the most stressed chickens were the ones that had been raised in the free-range system.
Obviously they also had to suffer from physical effects, since they were the ones with the bad plumage condition. The loss of feathers can be traced back to feather picking. So, even without being able to understand the complex methods of modern neuroscience, it was actually quite easy to understand which of the three groups of hens was the most unlucky.
At first, this result seems to be hard to understand. Actually, it’s logical if you are familiar with chickens and their natural environments.
Where they come from
Our domestic chickens (Gallus gallus domesticus) descend from the red junglefowl (Gallus gallus), a species that is native to Southeast and South Asia (9). They live together in small groups, well organized in social hierarchies, preferring habitats composed of open and covered areas — edges of woods, bushland, and so on. In these environments, they are able to forage and have enough cover from birds of prey.
Their domestication for human started around 8,000 years ago.
How different are the conditions in our laying hens’ cage-free environments! In the case of the hens used in the study, they came from a stable that housed a maximum of 12.000 hens, sub-divided into four compartments for 3.000 birds each. The stable provided 600 m² of effective living space (ground floor and perches), so a total of 0,05 m² per individual.
“Under natural living conditions, chicken live in small groups of 10–30 animals establishing a stable hierarchy, which is based on individual recognition” (Patzke et al. 2009, p. 147).
Birds are smarter than you may think, but hens simply cannot distinguish that many individuals. They cannot establish their pecking order which would be necessary for a beneficial social interaction. As a result, the chicken are stressed to a maximum and start to pick feathers.
Furthermore, normally laying hens are not offered cover. These birds live in fear of birds of prey and are genetically programmed to look for cover whenever they sense a sort of danger. If they cannot do this, their stress level increases.
These factors led to the scientists being able to measure the lifelong increased stress levels in the animals’ brains.
In our human society, many individuals complain about their increasing chronic stress level. So in a way, it’s easy to understand the birds’ problematic situation. On the other hand, we can learn from the study’s results:
We should avoid anthropomorphizing animals
It’s not sufficient to apply what we think is good for us on them. We cannot know “what it is like to be a bat”, a famous paper by philosopher Thomas Nagel I wrote about in a previous story, but it is possible to “ask” animals what they would prefer, for example in what housing conditions they would like to live in (of course this means to examine their brains, for which they have to been killed at first).
In the case of laying hens, these birds obviously would not prefer a little more space to live in. They would prefer living in smaller groups and having a more varied environment in which they are able to retreat and take cover.
The conclusion should not be to argue against cage-free environments (of course it shouldn’t). It should be to question industrial mass animal farming in general, be it for the production of meat or eggs or whatever.
Industrial mass animal farming always is inhuman (if that may be the right term), so from an ethical perspective there are only two possible choices: Either one gets his or her eggs from small farms where chickens are kept appropriately, or one does without entirely.
We must learn to have a close look at other species, learn about understanding their needs, and try to minimize their suffering if we use them as farm animals.
References
(1) statista.com
(2, 3) unitedegg.com
(4) M. T. Kidd/K. E. Anderson: Laying hens in the U.S. market. An appraisal of trends from the beginning of the 20th century to present, in: Journal of Applied Poultry Research 28/4, 2019, pp. 771–784. [>>Link to PDF]
(5) ciwf.com
(7) nbcnews.com
(8) N. Patzke et al.: Consequences of different housing conditions on brain morphology in laying hens, in: Journal of Chemical Neuroanatomy 37, 2009, pp. 141–148 [>>Link to PDF]
(9) R. A. Lawal et al.: The wild species genome ancestry of domestic chickens, in: BMC Biology, 2020. [>>Link to PDF]
