Joel Salatin
Ever since the Covid debacle, I’ve become dubious of ANYTHING the government says – er, way MORE dubious. The official narrative is wrong 90 percent of the time.
So a bunch of things suddenly fell into place for me today when one of our staff, who just returned from visiting family in Michigan, came with stories of signs over vacant egg shelves in the supermarket saying: “Egg shortage due to cage free chicken production.” She didn’t have pictures; I’m hoping someone reading this blog can take some pictures.
I’m not sure she quoted the signs exactly right, but it brings to mind conversations I had several years ago when Burger King announced that within 10 years they would use only cage-free eggs. The food writer for the Washington Post called me to get my comments about such an earth-shattering announcement. Of course, she assumed I’d be thrilled and have all kinds of wonderful things to say about it.
My response was “Why 10 years? We have a Burger King 15 minutes from our farm; we could supply cage-free eggs today. In fact, we can do even better and offer pastured GMO-free, vaccine-free eggs right now. Why the long runway?”
I began doing some sleuthing on the issue, talking to folks friendly to the industry. They were quite surprised at my naivete. “Don’t you realize the plan? The long runway is to give time for the industry to prove the superiority of caged hens so they don’t have to go to cage-free.”
Industry folks were adamant, and are right now, that caged birds are healthier than cage-free. And they will fight tooth and nail to keep caged production systems.
It actually makes sense. Cage-free means the birds live in and on their poop and stir up far more fecal dust to inhale. Caged birds, although they can’t move around, at least don’t live on their poop and don’t have fecal bedding to stir up and create pathogenic dust. The industry position is that cage-free is harmful to laying hens, period. And the industry has a lot of money tied up in caged infrastructure, from housing to egg collection to feed distribution. That’s the train, and it doesn’t like to be derailed.
Those old conversations from several years ago suddenly popped into my mind when I learned today that supermarkets are putting up signage blaming cage-free chickens for the bird flu. “See, we told you, you dimwit animal welfare folks. You’re such idiots and now your cage-free rules and prejudices are destroying the egg industry.” This could be a great win for the caged-laying hen industry.
Could it be that the entire bird flu epizootic is an industry plan to discredit cage-free eggs and tilt the public toward caged-laying hens? Is that possible?
An interesting article. Personal involvement with both free-range and caged poultry farms (No details) indicates that from the perspective of the Hen’s health alone , Free-range’ (Where the hens are all permitted to wander-around within a large unobstructed room with a floor of wood-shavings and laying boxes along one side for the bird’s convenience) is better for the bird than ‘Caged’ , if only because it at least gives the hen the chance to socialise and interact with others of it’s kind,
Observation indicates that effectively a ‘Free-range Hen is a Happy Hen’ and this is reflected in egg production which seems to be higher than that of the caged birds.
Conversely, the ‘Caged’ environment, wherein one, frequently two, hens are confined to a small (Albeit see-through) box, with no outside stimuli or ‘social interaction’ with others of it’s kind, results in massive boredom to the extent that the bird indulges in self-harm, or, if accompanied by another bird, it turns on it’s companion and proceeds to try to peck it into oblivion.
The results in either of these scenarios can be decidedly unpleasant when (at times literally) picking up the pieces after two birds have had a set-to, and is IMHO validation of the ‘Free-range is better’ concept. If nothing else, it results in fewer dead bodies for disposal – a point repeatedly made by free-range’ animal welfare advocates.
While initially the ‘Free-range’ idea met considerable resistance from within the poultry-farming industry in NZ, the general public found the idea of ‘Free-range’ eggs quite a novel one (Especially as ‘Free-range’ was presented as ‘Liberating the hens from their cages’, with the accompanying gruesome ‘caged bird’ images), the result being that large numbers of ‘free-range’ egg cartons now proudly displayed on supermarket shelves., although as to most consumers an egg is an egg is an egg, one does have to wonder if, while consuming their breakfast fried or boiled example, the average consumer even cares about the egg’s origins.
I suspect that they may not…
Better still if they can runaround outside.
……”the bird indulges in self-harm, or, if accompanied by another bird, it turns on it’s companion and proceeds to try to peck it into oblivion.”……
To be fair you can have vent pecking if you have three layers free range on the back lawn. The addition of a rooster to the flock usually sorts out the problem quick smart.
The big red buggers are likely to dislike you. Plenty of kids found that out.
I’m generally in favour of free range chickens, but the impact of breeding has in chicken happiness with their surroundings is something too often overlooked.
Some years ago my brother was given some hens from a friend of his who lived on a lifestyle block. The chickens were not laying eggs at all when they should have. They were a breed to be in cages laying, and they didn’t seem happy like his other hens who were busy laying.
My brother gave them to my dad who had an empty chicken coup at the time. They were immediately laying eggs and enjoyed the security of a much smaller area to run around in. It wasn’t a case of them laying eggs out of sight for the first guy either. He got some other breed of hens more suited to free range life and they were laying on time for him.
Hmmm that very odd case at hampden was free range .
More bullshit designed to sell chicken vaccines