The end of battery farms in Britain – but not Europe

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/u...farms-in-britain--but-not-europe-6281802.html

A step in the right direction, however

So only the British will comply with this EU wide law allowing our egg producers to be undercut by illegal foreign eggs?

 

I have to wonder at the cleanliness of the cage-free/free range eggs. I recently saw a chart that indicated that the health of chickens in so-called battery cages was actually better than that of cage-free/free range chickens. I'll have to see if I can find it again.

Until I find it, however, for your amusement:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?NR=1&v=QacnqdH30A4

Chicken agility . . .

 

Consider yourself lucky Mr. The Impaler. We get illegals in this country long after they've hatched.

 

Well I don't know about the health of battery chickens being better than free range, I do know that a proper free range chicken must be better off than a battery one that only has 33.5 square inches to exist in.

 

You would think so, but while the bone density of the free range chicken is better, it is also more prone to injury and to disease than the confined chicken.

 

Well if you haven't got space to move it is hard to injure yourself. Another important point here is the countries which seem to be ignoring an EU wide law. British chicken farmers have paid out something like 25 pounds a chicken to met the new EU regulations but some of their continental competitors appear to be ignoring it.

 

I guess the EU suppliers have come to realize that the animal rights extremists behind the new laws have ulterior motives for making chicken keeping and the products of their efforts prohibitively expensive and have decided to re-examine the junk science behind the movement. They may also realize that the AREs use stair-step methods to achieve their goals and that after there has been compliance with the cage-free/enriched cage system that the AREs will state that only free range will do. Free range chicken keeping is prohibitively expensive on a large scale due to chicken deaths and the labor-intensive methods needed to provide care and collect eggs. In the U.S. the AREs have already started to claim that the enriched cages that they insisted on ten years ago are "unacceptable" and that chickens must be free range--and California/West Coast consumers are already seeing a net drawn around them that would make bringing in eggs from surrounding states illegal. This situation, of course, forces them to comply or to get chickens and eggs from Mexico, an area that is known for its humane treatment of animals (just in case you didn't realize it, the last phrase is fraught with sarcasm).

 

They are being let down. The government dropped the ball here, and if I was part of the industry I'd sue to get the law changed... assuming I was financially stable enough to do so while being compliant with the law. If not, the law be damned, I'd have no choice but to ignore the law while I challenged it in court. I'd seek a stay of judgement (or whatever legal equivalent) until the government addressed the industry's concerns. But, being from the U.S., I'm not sure which stratagy I'd use, which one would keep my business viable while challenging the governments refusal to ban non-compliant state's eggs.