In South Africa there are 22.8 million laying hens trapped in battery cages with no solid bases and no perches. The space allowance per hen is 75% of an ordinary A4 sheet of paper; they are debeaked because in the overcrowded confines of the battery cage, there is no place to hide and, unable to peck at anything else, the hens peck at each other’s feathers and sometimes draw blood; they are often detoed so that they won’t scratch each other as they clamber over one another to get to the food trough in front. After a year in the battery cages, they are sold to hawkers for informal slaughter, never having experienced even one of their natural behaviours such as sun-bathing, dust-bathing and foraging for food. They die never having felt the soil beneath their feet nor the warmth of the sun.

Every consumer who eats battery eggs has bought into this gross abomination of human behaviour towards chickens. As environmental author Leonie Joubert (Scorched and Boiling Point) puts it in Animal Voice, December issue: “Some of the things we do to animals are simply not part of what would be regarded as normal, healthy, human behaviour”.

This is just a snippet of why broiler chickens must be banned and why it is unacceptable for us as humans to contribute to such an inhumane process.

For more detailed information on the lives of broiler chickens, please visit www.animal-voice.org.

You will be shocked to find out what you have been supporting and funding.

Be the change you want to see in the world.