All hens' eggs are due to be free-range within two years

All eggs to be free-range within two years

Extract from the Telegraph:

"Sainsbury's, the Co-op and Morrisons have all agreed to ban eggs from caged birds while Marks & Spencer and Waitrose already sell only free-range eggs.

All products containing egg will also use free-range varieties.

The chains will phase out battery hen eggs over the next two years, before an EU ban on battery cages due to come into effect in 2012.

Asda and Tesco have not yet followed suit, but have cut back shelf space given to battery hen eggs.

In Britain, "enriched cages", which are larger and have a perch, nest and litter, will still be legal but Germany will also ban these cages.

The move comes as the celebrity chef Jamie Oliver launches a campaign to persuade consumers to demand better welfare for hens.

He examines the poultry industry in a one-off television programme, Jamie's Fowl Dinners, in which he shows a series of films and interviews explaining the brutal living conditions of battery chickens that are killed for meat.

Sainsbury's, which Oliver promotes, said it was the first major supermarket to announce a ban on battery hen eggs and was expected to end the sale of all such eggs by next year.

Morrisons also plans to stop selling eggs from caged hens by 2010. A spokesman said: "We see animal welfare as an extremely important factor when sourcing produce - that's why we have taken action on eggs.""

TV chefs, Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall and Jamie Oliver, begin a campaign against the cruelty of intensive chicken production

The shameful price of cheap food

Extract from the Telegraph:

"We are living in the era of cheap food, when you can pick up a chicken in the supermarket for less than the price of a pint of beer. But there is a hidden cost: of the 850 million birds reared in Britain every year, only five per cent have had anything approaching a comfortable life. The vast majority are intensively reared, in prison-camp environments.

Now two of our most celebrated campaigning chefs, Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall and Jamie Oliver, are about to try to change our minds, and to ensure that the 25 kilos of chicken meat we each consume a year have come from birds that were decently treated.

Starting next week, Channel 4 is devoting a season of programmes to the nation's eating habits. There will be a one-off Oliver special - Jamie's Fowl Dinners - in which he demonstrates the realities of industrial chicken production, while Fearnley-Whittingstall's aptly titled Hugh's Chicken Run will follow his attempts to set up an intensive farm - in the course of which he is reduced to tears.

The way chickens are reared provides an insight into the intensive techniques used to satisfy our demand for cut-price meat and vegetables. In this world, a bird that will feed a family of five can be raised in a mere 39 days, when before the Second World War it would have needed around 20 weeks to reach the same weight. Modern methods see 40,000 birds packed into one artificially lit barn, reeking to such an extent that if the ventilation system failed they would be gassed by their own droppings. Each bird inhabits a space smaller than a piece of A4 paper, and most will have been de-clawed and de-beaked to prevent them damaging their neighbours. To encourage them to feed continuously, they are given only one hour of darkness in each day. They will never experience natural light or see a blade of grass.

These birds are meant to fatten quickly, so exercise is undesirable. Low light levels keep them drowsy, but as they grow they become so densely packed in as to find movement impossible. Even if they had the notion to try to make it to an open door, they grow so fat that their legs often become useless. During the process of catching and transportation, tens of thousands may die, as they are packed together even more tightly than in their sheds. (Chickens need three times as much air as human beings for their size: in a lorry, they may get almost none.)"