04/13/06 Whole Life in a Cage
Animal Friends locked up in a narrow cage are sending a message that because of egg-consumption chicken spend their entire lives in cages
At Easter time when people buy and spend an enormous number of eggs without thinking of them as cholesterol bombs or potential salmonella infection, Animal Friends warns about the ugly truth of extreme cruelty to hens and chickens which lies behind jolly commercials for "fresh" eggs and "ecological and healthy" poultry.
In order to reveal the horrid truth of breeding and treatment of egg-laying hens and slaughtering of chickens, three of our activists will be locked up in a cage sized one square meter in order to invite passers-by to at least for a moment think of egg-laying hens who spend all of their miserable lives in such cages, trying to make those passers-by think about not to eat eggs for their own health and for the sake of animals.
This action will take place on Easter eve, April 13, 2006, from 11 A.M. to 2 P.M. on the Rijeka's Korzo near Radio Rijeka. Along with the three activists in a cage, activists will hand out leaflets about vegetarianism and show a video footage on breeding of battery hens.
The goal of the action is to present inhumane conditions in which chickens and hens are bred for the purposes of meat and egg industries. At this very moment, millions of egg-laying hens are locked up in confined cages just for the purposes of laying eggs. They spend their whole lives cramped in cages living on a surface the size of an A4 sheet of paper, and are not even able to spread their wings. Part of the beaks of young birds are sliced off with a red hot blade, because due to conditions they live in, they become frustrated and end up attacking one another. Male chickens end up as waste material, suffocated or, more commonly, crushed alive.
The cages are made of wire that cuts into their legs and plucks their feathers, which causes them wounds, scabs and furuncles all over their bodies. Farmers ignore their physical and mental agony completely by keeping them under artificial lighting instead of the sunlight, up to 22 hours a day, so that they would eat more and therefore gain weight faster.
Moreover, they are constantly exposed to the stink of their own excrement, they suffer from a permanent feet deformity and very often from a "egg-laying hens' fatigue" - a disease that also results in bone weakness, "seacoast syndrome" - results in watery egg-whites, "fear and hysteria syndrome" and "fat liver syndrome" that can be fatal causing bleedings of the liver. Farmers tend to solve these problems with a number of dangerous medicines that increase animals' suffering and also endanger the health of humans. Also, egg-laying hens have to go through forced moulting in order to increase the period of laying eggs and the size of eggs. They have to suffer through all of these procedures until they reach the period in which their exhausted bodies are no more capable of laying eggs.
Battery cages are already banned in many countries all over the world. The European Union has reached a decision that bans breeding of hens in cages that will come into effect on January 1, 2012, and from January 1, 2004 production and use of new cages will not be allowed.
Animal Friends asks for the legal ban on battery cages so Croatia would follow the current changes in the civilized world regarding the treatment of animals which are incorporated into legislations of the member states of the European Union which Croatia tries to join.