A COK Report:
Animal Suffering in the Egg Industry

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Battery Cages

In the United States during 2002, 87 billion eggs were produced by roughly 336 million laying hens.(1) Ninety-eight percent of these hens were confined in battery cages.(2) These "battery hens" suffer from a number of debilitating welfare problems, including the thwarting of natural behaviors, bone weakness and breakage, feather loss, and numerous diseases. Battery cages are wire cages that normally house three to ten hens. A typical U.S. egg farm contains thousands of cages(3) at an average density of 59 square inches of space per bird.(4) Thus, each bird has an amount of space equivalent to just over half the area of a letter-sized sheet of paper. In 1999, the United Egg Producers (UEP), a trade association representing more than 85 percent of U.S. egg producers, created an Animal Husbandry Advisory Committee. The advisory group recommended that hens receive an average of 67 square inches of cage space per bird. UEP member producers are encouraged to gradually increase cage space per bird, in order to reach the recommended density of 67 inches, by 2008. However, even the new proposed standard is still less than a single sheet of letter-sized paper, an amount Dr. Joy Mench calls "meager."(5) A study by Drs. M.S. Dawkins and S. Hardie (1989) found that hens need an average of 72 square inches just to stand erect, 178 inches to preen, 197 inches to turn around, and 291 inches to flap their wings.(6) Hens in battery cages cannot perform any of these important natural behaviors. Dr. Mench, a member of the UEP Animal Husbandry Guidelines Committee, said that "a different decision about the minimum recommendation would have been reached had the committee given more weight to the information from the preference testing and the use of space studies, since these indicate that hens need and want more space than 72 inches."(7)

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