Fight over caged chickens

LIVINGSTON – What do chickens want?

Not so much, really: room for a dust bath, a place to perch, a nest. Absent those three basics – the nest especially – chickens get stressed, animal behavior experts say.

But most egg-laying chickens live without any of those things, in bare cages like the ones stacked four rows high in the J.S. West and Cos. barn in Merced County.

Nearly 150,000 white chickens pace and murmur here, eight birds in each 4-square-foot wire box. A fine dust sticks in the throat. It's 10:30 a.m. and the egg counter on the wall already has topped 59,000.

The Humane Society of the United States says caged chickens suffer – and it's gathering signatures to put a measure on the November 2008 ballot that would make California the first state to ban barns outfitted like this one.

"You don't need to be a scientist to know that confining a bird to a space in which it can barely move is cruel and inhumane," said Paul Shapiro, director of the Humane Society's factory farming campaign.

The proposal, which would take effect in 2015, rides an international wave of opposition to farm-animal confinement. The European Union is already in the process of phasing cages out altogether by 2012, and in the past two years dozens of food-industry trendsetters, from Ben & Jerry's to Burger King, have pledged to buy some or even all of their eggs from hens raised cage-free.

Cage-free eggs command a premium price. Many of the country's largest conventional egg farmers have already diversified their operations to include some cage-free barns.

But the Humane Society's proposal in California – and the fear that similar regulations will follow elsewhere in the country – has scrambled the nation's $6 billion egg industry.

Farmers, including many already deep into the cage-free business, say a ban on cages would run many of them out of business, drive up prices and restrict consumer choice.

What's more, they say, banning cages wouldn't do much to improve the lot of California's 19 million laying hens.

In a rare move for an industry in which each visitor to a chicken house raises the chances of a ruinous disease outbreak, some farmers have opened their barns to reporters, an effort to demonstrate that while a caged life may not give a hen everything she wants, she's likely to be cleaner and healthier than her average cage-free counterpart.

Some animal-welfare experts say they have a point.

"When you give a hen some of these behavioral freedoms, you increase health risks," said Joy Mench, a University of California, Davis, professor who has worked with both the Humane Society and mainstream egg producers to craft welfare standards for caged and cage-free hens.

In the cage-free systems, perhaps 30,000 chickens live together in huge barns, each with about 2 square feet of floor space. They get nesting spots, perches and loose material to scratch around in, but typically have no access to the out-of-doors (unlike the hens that lay certified organic and free-range eggs).

Europe's continent-wide experience in converting to cage-free egg production has already yielded thousands of pages of studies comparing the two systems, Mench said. Two key results:

• During their roughly two-year laying life, cage-free hens die at more than twice the rate of caged hens, likely the result of increased exposure to one another, and to their own manure.

• Cage-free hens suffer high rates of broken bones – 67 percent in one survey. Most modern laying hens suffer from osteoporosis, Mench said, and they're easily injured while jumping around a cage-free barn. On the other hand, she noted, workers often inadvertently break the bones of caged birds as they are removed before being euthanized.

The Humane Society's Shapiro agreed that cage-free systems are far from perfect. But, he said, while birds in a cage-free barn may face a higher risk of disease or death, the alternative – life in a cage – guarantees suffering.

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• Call The Bee's Jim Downing, (916) 321-1065.