Death comes to us all. Life's but a walking shadow | A few years ago I worked on a research project where I visited & worked at a large cage-layer facility, 15 houses with a 100,000 birds per house. I think at that time the standard was 9 birds per cage and there was hardly enough room for them to move. The ammonia was so high that if the fans failed for more than just a very few minutes birds started to die. More than a few minutes and 100,000 birds could die. And this was a state of the art building all wired up with sensors & automatic everything. I got to know the Manager and he would explain the production system and some of their issues.
For instance, I have an occasion to work in one house where it seemed to me that my slightest movement would set off the birds and within a few seconds 100,000 birds would be in an absolute panic. The noise was absolutely deafening. I asked the manager about this because it was so remarkable. The manager explained that this particular strain of white leghorns were prolific layers, beat the average by a significant percentage but they were psychotic. They were so excitable that they could shake the cages so much as to cause the wire cages to fail due to metal fatigue. Whole cage systems shaken apart.
Fast forward to a few days ago. I mentioned to my wife (who has contacts in the poultry business) that all of the pictures of cage free birds were brown. Her immediate response was you can't use the modern white breeds in a loose housing system because they will kill each other.
You know this whole cage free movement started some years ago in Europe. Like here, the producers at first maintained that it simply wasnt' possible, not efficent. But they've worked at it for a few years, gained some experience and developed some systems that are pretty good. If I remember correctly the difference in costs is something like 10 cents dozen due to the lower density and higher building costs. The big player in layer equipment, Big Dutchman now has a big program in European style cage-free equipment.
A chicken's life is pretty limited no matter if it's cage free or free range but I not sure we should subject them to the miserable exsistence of a high density cage system just because we can. |
"Free Range"
