by Clare Druce
MAFF certainly should have expected trouble – the Protein Processing Order 1981 had been up and running since 1982. The list of proteins allowed in livestock and poultry feed was startling, and included: ‘… the whole or any part of any dead animal or bird, or of any fish, reptile, crustacean or other cold blooded creature or any product derived from them and includes blood, hatchery waste, eggs, egg shells, hair, horns, hides, hoofs, feathers and manure, any material which contains human effluent and any protein obtained from these materials by heat, sedimentation, precipitation, ensiling or other systems of treatment…’ We’d been surprised by human effluent, and so, it emerged, was MAFF. We interested Richard North in the matter (a different Richard North, this one the Environment Correspondent for The Independent) and he was able to report: ‘Officials said yesterday that they did not know why such a provision [human effluent] that was noticed by an animal rights campaigner while reading the order, should have been included. The order has been criticised for allowing unsound design of works, and for containing very little regulatory control over plants which harbour harmful bacteria, such as salmonellae. At present about 13% of samples from plants reveal contamination by salmonellae, and about twice as high a percentage of imported animal feed is found to be contaminated. Because of a change in the practice of renderers, who supply animal protein to feed manufacturers, less heat is applied to feed than used to be the case.’(3) So expediency ruled in the matter of animal feed, putting a small saving in the rendering process above human and animal health: animals, even naturally vegetarian ones, were to be fed just about anything, as long as it was cheap.
Hindsight is reputed to be a wonderful thing but in this case, and others, a bit of foresight was what was needed. Although nobody could have foreseen the precise tragedy of Bovine Spongiform Encephalitis (BSE), the terrible cattle disease that caused CJD in humans, the precautionary theory should prevail. Because it did not, when BSE struck millions of animals were slaughtered, the countryside practically closed down for walkers and tourism, and all too many people paid the highest possible price.
But to return to salmonella. Given the scale of contamination in animal feed, nobody in the know should have been surprised when Salmonella enteritidis PT4 was suddenly causing sickness and deaths in the British population. Now, with no time to rush through vaccination programmes for hens, there was nothing for it but a mass slaughter of infected flocks.
Totally inexperienced and unqualified men were involved in killing the birds. Teams of the unemployed could be taken on if ‘supervised’ by a MAFF inspector or vet. Rumours abounded of hens being killed by being swung round by the head, to break their necks. In the case of the Daventry nuns’ hens, miners rendered redundant by Mrs Thatcher were called in to dispatch the birds. And so the nuns’ story went from farce to tragedy, from black humour to a particularly ghastly end.
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The salmonella crisis did bring about change. The current British Egg Information Council’s ‘Lion Egg’ scheme claims that around 85% of UK hens are now vaccinated against Salmonella enteritidis PT4, the strain responsible for most salmonella food poisoning and deaths in humans. This leaves approximately 15% of UK hens unvaccinated, and the Chief Medical Officer’s advice has remained unchanged since the 1980s – it’s still risky to eat raw or lightly cooked eggs (unless in pasteurised form), especially for the very young, the elderly and anyone whose immune system is compromised.
Post script
The salmonella outbreak, and no doubt the unrelenting campaigning against the nuns’ farming methods, hastened the manufacture of the ‘Belgian’ chocolates. But there was a snag. The hoped-for conversion of existing stables in the convent’s grounds into a chocolate factory proved unexpectedly expensive.
From this point in the tale I have to be a little vague. Recently, I tried to establish the precise facts. I visited the Daventry Express offices and looked through relevant past editions but, just at a crucial stage in the saga, some front pages were missing. I did read that the Pope had given his approval (or was it a blessing?) to the chocolates idea, but after that I’m relying on memory. I’d heard that, in gratitude for papal approval/blessing, the nuns had sent the Pope a box of chocolates, perhaps the very first one they’d produced, and that when the gift was acknowledged it was pointed out that the chocolates tasted odd.
My belief is that the nuns, unable to afford the stable conversion, decided to use the redundant battery sheds for their ‘factory’ and, fearful that traces of deadly salmonella might yet linger in the woodwork, had been over-zealous with the creosote.
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But now I must zoom back to those early years of Chickens’ Lib. Again, my parents had upped sticks and followed us, a move that made perfect sense, both for the sake of Chickens’ Lib and because by a lucky chance my sister Helen and her family were now living not too far away, in North Yorkshire.
The Halifax Four
Violet quickly set up her Chickens’ Lib office in a small outbuilding at her home, while mine was now a study measuring roughly six feet square. In one respect I liked it – I could reach everything without moving from my desk. An old-fashioned photocopier loomed in our hallway, while the dining room table served for some tasks and the living room for others. When, four years on, we came to sell the house the estate agent who came to value it took a dim view of our somewhat unconventional set-up; trying to remain courteous, he warned us that our home appeared ‘cluttered’. Well, what did he expect? The house was never intended to accommodate a pressure group.
Fortunately for our self-esteem, a neighbour had spotted the frontage being measured, and guessed we were moving. He had a friend looking for just such a house…Later that same day, we were able to phone the agent, telling him we’d virtually sold, and so we had.
But to return to 1978: Violet and I now felt ready for action. It was high time to get down to the serious business of finding some Yorkshire battery hens.
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November 22nd 1978: A quick trawl through ‘poultry’ in Yellow Pages pointed us to a battery unit just outside Halifax, safely out of our immediate area. With two cat baskets on the back seat we set off on the first bitterly cold and frosty morning of the season, to find ourselves blessed with immediate success. The battery owner told us he had thirty thousand hens, and the birds in one shed were going to slaughter in two weeks’ time. So yes, he was willing to sell us a few ‘spent’ hens.
He took us inside the shed and dragged four pitiful looking birds from their cage. Hastily we stowed them away in the baskets, paid, and made a quick getaway.
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So what exactly are ‘spent’ hens? Old, spent, end-of-lay – they’re all industry terms, usually describing hens of just 76 weeks of age.
Of course a hen of this age is not old, nor should she be spent, and she certainly won’t have given up laying eggs. It’s just that the most prolific, and therefore the most profitable, egg production occurs in the first year of lay. Profits aside, she should have five or six years of life ahead of her, maybe more. I remember Peter Roberts, founder of Compassion in World Farming, boasting a hen aged ten. “She’s still laying,” he told me. “At least once a year, usually around mid-summer’s day.”
But in the world of commercial egg production, most hens are off to slaughter at eighteen months.
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Our cluttered Yorkshire home had a double garage accessible from the house. I’d already fenced off one corner of it in readiness for the hoped-for hens, suspending a heat lamp over the enclosure to mimic the warm environment battery hens are used to.
Carefully we removed our newcomers from the two baskets, feeling again that warm, rough skin of battery hens against our hands. Only one hen still had plumage. We noticed her beak was intact. Clearly she’d missed the red-hot blade of the de-beaking machine and been left with the perfect tool for relentless pecking of the other three, in a doomed attempt to fulfil a hen’s instincts to use her beak to good purpose.
Nearl
y a year of laying ‘farm fresh’ eggs had taken its familiar toll and the featherless hens certainly looked spent. We’d name them all soon, but there and then we decided on Minny for the smallest and perhaps most vulnerable of the group.
For a few minutes we watched spellbound as the birds took their first tentative steps. They looked uncanny, almost grotesque, yet immediately behaved like true farmyard hens, pecking around in the straw for grain. The only giveaway was their mode of walking: cautiously they would pick up one foot then doubtfully place it down, experimenting, finding that by putting one foot in front of the other they could actually make progress.
We wanted to linger there, observing our new hens, but there was work to do. MAFF (Leeds division) must be contacted, and the RSPCA. Though we held out little hope of support, we knew we must report this unit.
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The next day, a local RSPCA inspector visited our hens, complete with camera. He explained that in the past he’d been a professional photographer, and we were encouraged. Even if nothing else came from yesterday’s expedition, we’d saved four little hens from transport and slaughter and just might end up with some good photographs.
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A week later, the RSPCA inspector’s photographs arrived in the post and they stunned us. The naked birds look weird, almost graceful, yet at the same time truly shocking.
No action followed our complaints but we now had the material for a devastating and unique leaflet.
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The winter of 1978-9: The Halifax Four stayed in the garage until late March. The feathers of the three most damaged ones took an unusually long time to re-grow, and the winter had been hard. Conker, the one with the intact beak, was splendid, her feathers a rich brown. But there was no more harmful feather pecking now. Happily occupied hens rarely damage each other.
The heat lamp glowed warmly night and day, and, despite their pitiable condition, all four went on producing eggs. Watching them indulging in their age-old behavioural patterns, frustrated until so recently, was infinitely rewarding. Their feet and legs grew strong as they kicked them back in search of grain buried in the straw.
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Spring 1979: At last it was time to let the birds outside. We’d bought a hen house and run, and they soon settled in, perching at night like proper hens. One day I became seriously worried – two were contorting their bodies in a patch of dry, dusty soil. They looked grotesque, and for a moment I thought they were having fits (both at once? surely not!). Then I tumbled to it – they were dustbathing.
Hens, as I came to realise, are enthusiastic about their dustbathing. Given a patch of dry earth or similar, they writhe around in it, preferably in groups. And how they flick it about!
Dr Marian Stamp Dawkins, lecturer in Animal Behaviour at Oxford University, has described how battery hens will go through the motions of dustbathing, even on the bare wire of the cage floor. In scientific circles this fruitless attempt to clean the feathers is known as ‘vacuum dustbathing’. This pathetic activity demonstrates the strength of ancestral memory. Born and bred in barren captivity, living on harsh wire, still battery hens will attempt to keep their feathers in good condition, using purely imaginary dust. Dawkins also observes how, if released from the cage environment and supplied with suitable dustbathing material, hens carry out what she calls ‘an orgy’ of dustbathing (1).
On one occasion we put food for a group of newly acquired battery hens in a nine-pint iron cooking pot, chosen because they wouldn’t easily knock it over. They soon found a good double use for it, treating the dry mealy contents as the perfect medium for a thorough dust bath. Food in battery units is in a trough outside the cage, only reached through the bars. It’s possible that battery hens look longingly at this substitute for dustbathing material.
But to return to the Halifax Four. Sometimes they would stay up until dusk, and we sensed they were making the most of every bit of daylight. Over the years we’ve often enough been accused of anthropomorphism, but maybe research to prove the obvious will one day be carried out into how much deprived hens long for natural light, grass and fresh air. Certainly we got the impression that the Halifax Four couldn’t get enough of it.
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Summer 1982: The Animal Liberation Movement, Queensland (QUALM) issued a battery hen leaflet. The photo on the front was of the Halifax Four, and the credit below read BATTERY HENS FROM ‘FARM’ IN YORKSHIRE, UK. Photo courtesy of Chickens’ Lib, UK. The text inside was ours, with the relevant statistics changed and QUALM’s contact details replacing ours. The battery system had already spread like wildfire in that vast country of open spaces; to our delight our leaflet was helping in what was fast becoming a worldwide campaign.
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Twenty-two years on: August 14th 2004. Scene: Borders bookshop in Leeds. My children’s book Minny’s Dream had recently been published. The story tells how Paula moves to the country and finds her way into the battery farm next door. Secretly she befriends one of the hens, Minny, who tells Paula all about her misery.
That August afternoon was to be a book-signing event, and I was ready and waiting, complete with a good pen. Nervously I hung about, while the tannoy boomed out my name through the store. I’d prepared a short talk, and decided to show the QUALM leaflet and tell the children how far little Minny had travelled. All the way to Australia, from Yorkshire!
Only there were no children to tell, not a single one. Eventually, a middle-aged woman did wander over and we had a chat. Realizing from her accent that she was Australian, and on the off-chance she’d be interested, I dug out the QUALM leaflet.
And she was interested. In fact she was the lawyer responsible for drawing up QUALM’s constitution, some quarter of a century previously. And she remembered the leaflet well.
We agreed it was quite a coincidence, and she took the evidence away with her, to tell the story on her return home.
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With all our rescued birds, we wondered if they ever thought back to their incarceration. Recent research suggests it would be arrogant to assume that those dark days are forgotten. No longer is it necessary to listen helplessly to the taunt that it’s anthropomorphic to award feelings and judgements to animals – at last the expression ‘bird brain’ has lost its sting. Consider the following facts…
Brainy birds
Dr Joy Mench, Professor of Animal Science at the University of California at Davis, has stated: ‘Chickens show sophisticated social behaviour…that’s what a pecking order is about. They seem to recognise, and remember, particular characteristics of other flock members, and that helps them figure out their position in the social hierarchy. In addition, they have more than thirty types of vocalization.’ (1)
Dr Lesley Rogers, Professor of Zoology at the University of New England, Australia, has stated: ‘It is now clear that birds have cognitive capacities equivalent to those of mammals, even primates.’ (2)
Dr K-lynn Smith, Associate Lecturer in the Department of Biological Sciences at Macquarie University, Australia, has this to say about a chicken’s intelligence: ‘Chickens are remarkable animals. They live in long-term stable social groups consisting of a dominant male and a dominant female and several subordinates of each sex. Their communication is quite sophisticated, on a par with many primates. They produce over 24 distinct signals, two specifically in the context of food and two in the context of predators. These sounds are as specific as a word. For example, females that hear a male ‘food calling’ will approach him and begin to look for food. However, if the female has previously found food, she will ignore the signal. This suggests that the sound creates a mental representation of food and that the female compares her knowledge about the presence of food with that provided by the male. If the information is not useful, she will discount it.
In these groups, females also eavesdrop on the food calling behaviour of males and remember their reputation for providing food. Occasionally males call in the absence of food, which may be a form of deception to lure the female cl
oser to the male. Females will begin to ignore males that use this tactic too often.
Chickens can perform transitive inference, have numeracy, exhibit empathy and social learning. If you were to describe this list of abilities most people would assume you were talking about chimpanzees or some other ‘higher’ primate. They are truly surprised when told that this is a description of the humble chicken.’ (3)
Professor John Webster of Bristol University set up an experiment in which corn was dyed, some yellow, some blue. Both were harmless to the chickens but the blue corn made them feel sick, and they soon left it alone. When the hens in the study came to hatch out their chicks, a similar mix of coloured corn was spread around. Straightaway the mothers taught their young to avoid the blue. Professor Webster commented: ‘What this tells us is that the mother hen has learnt what food is good, and what is bad for her, that she cares so much for her chicks she will not let them eat the bad food, and she is passing on to her young what she has learnt. To me, that is pretty close to culture – and an advanced one at that. Chickens are sentient creatures and have feelings of their own.’ (4)
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The considerable intelligence of birds is now widely recognised, which serves to highlight the tragic plight of factory-farmed poultry. Many a time we’ve seen ex-battery hens take their first proper steps, experience for the first time the rustle of straw underfoot, enjoy a first-ever dust bath. Having scientific confirmation of chickens’ intelligence makes the history of our rescued birds all the more poignant.
Governments have sanctioned the cruel battery system, plenty of farmers (though not all) have been happy to go along with it, but what about the country’s supposed ‘moral compass’?