by Clare Druce
The concept of systems that suited the behavioural needs of the animals was cast aside. Maximum production in the shortest possible time became the order of the day, with the additional, and huge, economic benefits to the farmer of a drastically reduced workforce. At the same time manufacturers of veterinary drugs, and perhaps veterinarians themselves, were glimpsing a bright future – intensive systems would surely breed diseases calling for mass medication.
Not everyone, however, was fooled by post-war ‘progress’. In 1948 an item appeared in The Farmers Weekly of April 2nd under the heading ‘Science Gone Mad’.
‘There was such strong criticism against a proposal for the poultry battery laying system at the Essex Institute of Agriculture’s farms that Essex Education Committee last week decided to refer the matter back for further consideration.
Mr A L Shepherd said that this system of egg production condemned the hens to “permanent imprisonment in small cages.”
Mr S S Wilson: “It is an example of science gone mad. It makes the bird a mere machine.”
…Supporting the system, Mr S G Haskins said they had been assured by experts that they could not have a balanced course in poultry at the Institute without a battery system.’
I expect the ‘experts’ got their way, down in Essex. Certainly the battery system was taking off fast. Perhaps the most disastrous aspect of this sorry story has been the unwavering support intensive farming has received from government. Worse still, intensive systems and know-how have been enthusiastically exported worldwide.
In the early 1970s I attended a lecture by Fritz Schumacher, author of the influential book Small is Beautiful. Factory farming, he said, was the last thing needed by populations in developing countries. Factory farming drastically reduced the need for farm workers, with many now driven off the land and into the cities, there to suffer the miseries of unemployment, while farming lost all hope of sustainability.
*
Britain, famously a nation of animal lovers, naturally felt obliged to keep up appearances. Laws to protect animals must seem to be present and correct, and they continued to be passed.
As Violet and I delved ever deeper into the subject, we began to understand that the UK was guilty of enacting welfare legislation and codes of practice that included inherent suffering, thereby legalising it. This country, along with others, has indeed dug itself deep into a bottomless, merciless pit.
Bit by bit, Chickens’ Lib realized that simply revealing the suffering for all to see was not enough. The need was for the basic legal framework to be challenged, a need that remains urgent to this day.
Over the last few decades, legislation relating to farmed animals has been updated many times. This book is not for those concerned with complicated points of law, past and present. My intention is to expose and simplify the crux of the problem.
I will merely highlight the fact that, while purporting to represent progress, even the updated animal welfare acts of the twenty-first century will, unless practices are radically changed, serve only to illustrate the same old double standards.
Cruelty enshrined in law
The campaign waged against the pathetic state of birds delivered to East End butchers’ shops was ongoing, sustained by various animal rights’ groups based in and around London. In March 1975 the Evening Standard highlighted the problem, accompanying the article with a photograph of those faeces-encrusted poultry crates stacked up on the pavement. An exhausted battery hen crouched nearby, on deformed feet. After a graphic description of local squalor, reporter Jillian Robertson told how the RSPCA had sent an inspector to Cobb Street and Leyden Street, all to no avail: “The inspector found the chickens to be in bodily condition comparable to those of all hens kept in batteries” said a spokesman [for the RSPCA] “Such conditions are not in breach of legislation currently in force [Chickens’ Lib’s emphasis] and the society cannot prosecute. We are extremely concerned with certain aspects of intensive animal husbandry. We have set up the Farm Livestock Advisory Committee which is currently looking into the question of battery farming.”
So the RSPCA’s hands were tied, apparently, by the very legislation drawn up to protect animals. How could it be that cruelty to farmed animals, obvious to any sensitive child, could yet be deemed ‘not in breach of legislation currently in force’?
The above conundrum will be a recurring theme throughout this book.
A breakthrough
Summer 1975: We’re in luck! Our application for a slot in BBC 2’s Open Door, a make-your-own programme initiative, has been approved. We’ll be ‘lent’ a television crew and producer, but the script and cast will be up to us. Allotted only ten minutes, we’re to share the programme with two other groups (one of them dedicated to belief in UFOs).
*
Our producer Roger Brunskill turned out to be as helpful as could be. Gradually, Violet and I worked out a script, having decided we must have live hens in the studio: battery hens to illustrate the cage system, with a control group of healthy free range birds. We would describe the cruel frustration of a hen’s natural behavioural patterns, the diseased state of millions of birds, antibiotic over-use, official lack of concern…
And, in good time, we must find our hens, ready for their star parts.
*
Thursday October 9th 1975: the two-hour long evening rehearsal at Television Centre in Wood Lane proved hellish. We (that’s Violet, Vivienne, Reg Johnson, a good amateur actor friend, and me) were nervous. All except Reg fluffed our lines. We’d tried to learn our parts so we could do without scripts, but the evening proved how risky that might be on Saturday, when the programme would go out live.
For the rehearsal, some of the crew were trainees, and got things wrong. We’d provided photos of politicians past and present, with whom we had bones to pick, for example Mrs Thatcher, and Peggy Fenner, Parliamentary Secretary to the Agriculture Minister. The trainees managed to get several images upside down first time around, which added to the feeling that our programme was destined to be a shambles. The whole thing was shot in black and white and looked dreary in the extreme. We came away terrified.
Worse was in store. The following evening, transfixed with horror, I watched a trailer. In optimistic tones the announcer told viewers that three women from Chickens’ Lib would be featured the following day, on Open Door. TV library pictures of the outside of huge battery sheds filled the screen, accompanied by excerpts from Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony (dramatic irony there). It all looked so smooth, so totally professional. But we’d not done it yet. There’d only been yesterday’s ghastly rehearsal.
A friend rang and told me about a previous Open Door. Apparently a contributor had given up in despair, buried his head in his hands, and groaned ‘Oh Christ!’
A pity she mentioned that.
*
Saturday October 11th 1975: Adrenalin must have flowed in bucketsful, for we all seemed on good form, hens included. We converged at the TV Centre lugging rolls of wire netting, with the ‘good’ and ‘bad’ hens in separate containers.
Once in the studio, we put the street-wise free rangers in one pen, hoping they wouldn’t turn flighty, and the sad-looking ex battery ones in the other one. We’d just realized we’d be allowed to have scripts on our knees, so that was a huge comfort, though we hoped to do no more than glance at them.
Then it was time to begin.
*
Reg started off, playing a man about to enjoy his breakfast egg when he lit upon an article in the newspaper he was leafing through. It was telling it how it was. ‘More like the dark ages. No natural daylight ever,’ Reg commented, reading on, with mounting disgust, that antibiotics were routinely given to battery hens. Finally, ‘I think I’m going off the idea of this egg’, he sighed. ‘How do I know these antibiotics aren’t part of my daily ration too?’ He pushed the egg away.
Next, Violet described Chickens’ Lib’s beginnings, and told viewers that 80% of all British eggs now came from battery far
ms. She described dishonest advertising, and the pathos of a battery hen’s living conditions.
Now Vivienne took over. Gently she removed the battery hens from the cage, calmly placing them in one of the hastily constructed enclosures. They looked shocking, yet entirely typical of ‘spent’ battery hens. She spoke of Cage Layer Fatigue (a common cause of mortality), and of feather pecking by fellow prisoners, so severe as to cause death. She mentioned how we’d raised these subjects with Mr Moyle, then Parliamentary Secretary to Fred Peart. He’d asked ‘How do we know it’s cruel? I should want a scientific report before I make up my mind.’ She added: ‘Incidentally, we invited Mr Peart the Minister of Agriculture and his henchman Mr Bishop to confront us in this studio today but unfortunately they both declined.’
Then it was over to me and I described some of our activities – our attempts to influence MAFF, our need to grab the attention of the media, how we were still demanding an impartial enquiry into factory farming.
After that, Reg read from two MAFF letters we’d received: ‘This Department spent a whole year planning different flooring for battery cages,’ and: ‘The Ministry has considered advising lighting in batteries being made mandatory, so that stockmen can see the hens.’
I pointed out that our country’s egg production was now in the hands of businessmen, not farmers, and claimed that the argument that this country could not provide enough farm land for free range egg production was a myth.
By way of a challenge to the Ministry of Agriculture, Violet concluded: ‘We suggest that your refusal to sanction a public inquiry stems from the fear of what would be revealed. Monsieur Lardinois, the EEC Farm Minister, has publicly stated that he would like to see battery cages banned in all EEC countries. Chickens’ Lib was heartened to read this and will continue to work for this ideal in this country.’
She ended our programme with an appeal to the viewers: ‘Will you help us to eradicate this crime against the animal kingdom?’
And it all went wonderfully well! No fluffing of lines. No upside down Mrs Thatcher. We were in gorgeous colour and both lots of hens stayed within their little coops. Oh what a huge, what a fantastic relief! It was all over.
For the next week or two letters of support came flooding in, some enclosing donations.
Our Open Door marked the beginning of national support.
*
October 23rd 1975: ‘Mrs Druce (and Mum) to the rescue’ ran the sarcastic heading in Poultry World. Disgust was expressed that we’d had: ‘…ten minutes peak viewing time on the BBC2 programme for minority groups, Open Door’. PW reported how an outraged Neville Wallace, Director General of the British Poultry Federation, had written to Sir Charles Curran, DG of the BBC, to complain about the programme, claiming that: ‘… the corporation would never let the industry make such a programme without the opponents of intensive farming being allowed to state their case.’
Well, tough, Mr Wallace. Just for once, we’d had it all our own way.
*
In the same volume of Poultry World we spotted an item headed ‘The cost of chickens’ lib’ (no capitals, please, we thought – we’re generic). In the article, Dr David Wood-Gush of Edinburgh’s Poultry Research Centre had told the industry: ‘Animal welfare agitators are going to cost the industry money. They were also strengthening their lobby with scientific data on a ground swell of new research’.
And that was all true. Scientists everywhere were embarking on careers in ‘poultry welfare’, much of it involving the study of cruel practices that a decent person could recognise as such, at a glance. Some ideas for projects were downright bizarre. Take this example: Professor Trevor Morris of Reading University yearned for a new kind of hen: ‘Breeders should be working towards a “throwaway” hen that starts laying at around eleven weeks of age. Such early maturity would slash working capital requirement and please bank managers’. (1)
In time we came to realise that the findings of much research would come in useful, if only to back up what we already knew, that a hen has retained every one of the instincts of her distant ancestor the junglefowl, and that intensive systems breed intractable problems all their own.
Our Open Door also sparked off criticism (kindly meant, I think) from the Director of the Enteric Reference Laboratory, part of the Central Public Health Laboratory. Violet had written to him with a query about antibiotic growth promoters, only to be told by Dr Anderson that, so far, there was no indication that they could cause harm to man. His letter dated September 9th 1975 ended: ‘A word of warning! Please do not let fly on television unless you are sure of your facts!’ Future developments were to prove that Chickens’ Lib was in sound command of the facts.
Man-made suffering
Despite several years of campaigning, neither Violet nor I had yet ventured inside a battery unit. All our knowledge of the system had been gleaned from literature, official advice to farmers, or hearsay. All the hens we’d known personally had been intercepted en route to slaughter.
We had at least chatted with one Oxfordshire battery farmer, glimpsing rows of caged hens as we stood on the threshold of one of his units, while he told us how he’d not had any kind of official inspection in seventeen years, nor did he expect one, ever.
Now that we were country dwellers, the time had come to face up to real life, as lived inside the sheds.
*
We’d recently heard of a large battery egg farm on the outskirts of Birmingham. Not too far, then, from our homes in Oxfordshire.
It was school holidays, and the children would have to come too. Perhaps not an ideal family day out, but they didn’t complain. (At around that time, Alison had wondered aloud how it would be to live in a family that wasn’t running a pressure group; I hadn’t detected resentment, just idle curiosity.)
Most expeditions with me at the wheel involved getting seriously lost, and this one was no exception. Eventually, after several of what became known in my family as ‘footling circles’ we found the place: endless rows of dreary, windowless grey sheds stretching into the distance, holding captive many thousands of hens. Perhaps millions, for this was big business. Like a sick joke, the ‘show’ shed, the one nearest to the road, had pink climbing roses trained around its door.
We tracked down the boss, a cheery enough fellow, apparently doing very nicely out of all those hens. He wouldn’t sell to us, his reason being that no flock was near enough to slaughter age; but it seemed this was a family business, with satellite farms in the area. Obligingly, he phoned through to one of these, telling a woman called Sheila to let us ‘young ladies’ have a few end-of-lay hens. With this introduction, we set off again, full of renewed optimism.
The August sun beat down, and the countryside just got better and better. Our destination turned out to be an old farmhouse built of mellow red brick, standing well back from the road, while in front of it crouched a range of low, forbidding battery sheds. We went up to the house, knocked on the door (rousing several dogs to frenzy) and waited nervously. Finally a woman opened the door and we said our piece, not forgetting to mention Sheila’s name.
‘Sheila? You’ll find her over there,’ said the woman, pointing to the sheds. ‘Just give her a shout.’
We’d noticed two people working in the first one; probably the woman was our Sheila. Things were going well.
*
We expected a horrible scene, anticipated being outraged, but nothing had prepared us for this. A large open-topped tank stood near the door, full almost to overflowing with evil smelling slurry, around which clouds of flies swarmed. Tattered hens were crammed into their cages, some almost featherless, jostling for space, trying hopelessly to move around. The feeling of stress in the fetid air was tangible.
I experienced a powerful and quite unexpected reaction. I knew then that I’d have infinitely preferred witnessing a natural disaster, the aftermath of an earthquake, for example. I’d have rather been among victims of leprosy, even, because at least then I wouldn’t have had
to think that people had wilfully caused this terrible suffering. The misery we were seeing was man-made. It was unnecessary and despicable.
Despite our shock, we remembered to sound casual, to show no emotion. Could she spare us four hens, just for the garden?
“That’s fine,” said Sheila. “The boss phoned, said you were on your way.”
We steeled ourselves not to look around too eagerly. If Sheila became suspicious she just might change her mind and show us the door.
But she didn’t. She grabbed four of the pitiful, protesting hens from one of the cages, put them in our boxes, and took the money. In no time, we were outside once again, into the blessed daylight.
Afternoon sun was enhancing the beauty of the old house, and the fields and hedges. Back in the car, we remarked how ironic it was that this hellish ‘farm’ should be set amid such surroundings.
*
The children were bearing up well, and so were the hens, so, keen not to miss out on any publicity, we made our way to the offices of the local paper, the Redditch Indicator. Soon we were entering the newspaper’s foyer, only to be quickly directed into an empty staff kitchen. I expect we looked a queer lot, and probably the hens still reeked of the battery. Maybe we did too, though Violet and I were too tired to notice, or to care.
A handsome young reporter soon appeared, to hear us out. Elegantly, he hoisted himself onto a draining board (chairs being in short supply) and began to take notes. Then, a good sign we thought, he arranged for a photographer to take pictures.
*
August 26th 1977: The Redditch Indicator ran an article, alongside a good sized photo of our hens, explaining that they were destined for a trip to Whitehall Place, to back up our argument about the cruelty of the cage system. The newspaper must have contacted MAFF, for the account concluded: ‘However, a Ministry spokesman told the Indicator this would serve little purpose and he could not guarantee that anyone in London would even look at the hens…The group will not name the farm where they bought the birds. Mrs Druce says it is pointless victimising one establishment when the conditions there are duplicated all over the country.’