UK NEWS

JAMIE’S FIGHT TO SAVE HENS FROM ‘CRUEL’ BATTERY CAGES

CAMPAIGNING: Oliver exposes intensive farming in TV's Jamie's Fowl Dinners

Wednesday January 2,2008

By Polly Buchanan

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JAMIE Oliver is urging supermarkets to help to end the “barbarity” of battery chicken farming.

He and fellow TV chef Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall want the stores to stop selling cheap chicken meat from birds reared in tiny, dark cages in which they peck the flesh from each other and cannot flap their wings.

Jamie and Hugh say they are appalled at the way battery-farmed chickens are reared from egg to bird in just 39 days.

“It’s disgusting, the smell is awful,” said Jamie. “Why would anyone want to eat these birds who are walking in their own faeces?”

Oliver exposes their plight next Wednesday in a one-off programme for Channel 4, Jamie’s Fowl Dinners.

And as an experiment for his new TV show Hugh’s Chicken Run, Fearnley-Whittingstall started a chicken farm breeding intensive and free-range poultry side-by-side.

He faced weeding out chicks that did not make the grade. “I can’t face killing any more, it is so dreadful,” he said, holding his head in despair.

Oliver and Hugh want to turn Britain free-range and hope they can have the same impact as Jamie’s school dinners campaign.

The RSPCA says just five per cent of the 855 million chickens reared in Britain each year are kept in conditions that meet its recommendations. The rest are allocated a space smaller than an A4 sheet of paper.

The RSPCA is calling for retailers to replace battery chickens with free-range, organic and Freedom Food equivalents by 2010. The RSPCA’s Dr Marc Cooper said: “If people knew how the average chicken was treated before it ended up as their Sunday roast, they would be disgusted.

“Some supermarkets are selling chicken for as little as £2 per kilo, which can be less than it costs to produce the bird. Selling chicken so cheaply doesn’t provide farmers with enough to enable or encourage them to rear their birds to the standards that the RSPCA finds acceptable.”

A spokesman for charity Animal Aid said: “The public are being misled if it is thought that improving the margins solves the problem.

“Better conditions don’t stop the birds being commercially inbred. It’s like murdering, raping and abusing, then giving your victim somewhere soft to lay their head at the end.”

The campaign follows the RSPCA’s success in asking shoppers to shun eggs from battery cages. Almost 38 per cent of eggs sold in Britain are now from non-caged hens.

AT LAST

02.01.08, 12:49am

Good on yer Jamie, its about time something was done for these birds ,its cruelty for money, they will probably say its for supply and demand
but there is no excuse for cruelty

• Posted by: Maggie • Report Comment