A Compassion Over Killing Report:
Animal Suffering in the Egg Industry
Battery Cages
In
the United States during 2002, 87 billion eggs were produced
by roughly 336 million laying hens.(1)
Ninety-eight percent of these hens were confined in battery
cages.(2) These "battery
hens" suffer from a number of debilitating welfare problems,
including the thwarting of natural behaviors, bone weakness
and breakage, feather loss, and numerous diseases. Battery
cages are wire cages that normally house three to ten hens.
A typical U.S. egg farm contains thousands of cages(3)
at an average density of 59 square inches of space per bird.(4)
Thus, each bird has an amount of space equivalent to just
over half the area of a letter-sized sheet of paper. In 1999,
the United Egg Producers (UEP), a trade association representing
more than 85 percent of U.S. egg producers, created an Animal
Husbandry Advisory Committee. The advisory group recommended
that hens receive an average of 67 square inches of cage space
per bird. UEP member producers are encouraged to gradually
increase cage space per bird, in order to reach the recommended
density of 67 inches, by 2008. However, even the new proposed
standard is still less than a single sheet of letter-sized
paper, an amount Dr. Joy Mench calls "meager."(5)
A study by Drs. M.S. Dawkins and S. Hardie (1989) found that
hens need an average of 72 square inches just to stand erect,
178 inches to preen, 197 inches to turn around, and 291 inches
to flap their wings.(6) Hens
in battery cages cannot perform any of these important natural
behaviors. Dr. Mench, a member of the UEP Animal Husbandry
Guidelines Committee, said that "a different decision
about the minimum recommendation would have been reached had
the committee given more weight to the information from the
preference testing and the use of space studies, since these
indicate that hens need and want more space than 72 inches."(7)
In
the United States during 2002, 87 billion eggs were produced
by roughly 336 million laying hens.(