To show you what your free range egg providers really look like?

[StridTheKiller]

That's all. Rescued a dozen ladies this weekend, ex-free range chicken farm hens. The photo shows the rest. Vile trade.

Poor little girls! When you say you rescued them, how do you mean? Is there a rescue charity for ex layers? Do the farms just chuck out the ones that start to look ill?
Hopefully, they’ll know some happy moments for the time they have left OP ❤️

Meat and eggs are expensive though so that's not really a good argument.

Depends on the farm. If you live near a Tesco that sells Wood Farm free range eggs, you can walk through the farm on a footpath.

As long as it isn't bird flu season, you can see lots of happy chickens, chickening about in the fields.

I worked in a free range chicken farm when I was at school, the chicken were not in this condition and they had a huge area to roam in during the day (put in at night). Bird flu has made it pretty impossible for birds to be ‘free range’, they have spent a lot more time indoors.

I would love a couple hens in my garden but worried because when the neighbours had some we ended up with a lot of rats 😬

Oh good god @Illpickthatup I guess I care up to a point, like most people. But not enough to give up eating eggs or pass your self-devised purity test.

Just checked - they are in Sainsburys and Asda as well but only regional to the farm.

Some hens from ONE location. Hardly evidence to damn the whole industry.

YABU and you know it.

I don't eat dog, but yes IMO it's far better to eat eg pheasant which has had a more or less completely free life then been shot than it is to eat battery/cheap "free range" chicken which has lived a pretty terrible life before being killed. That's not an unusual opinion, the RSPCA would be with me on that.

And if you want to bring it to the human analogy, if I had to sentence two people: one who'd murdered a stranger, and one who'd kept a baby in a cage for ten years and then murdered them, then yes I'd be confident in saying that one crime was much worse than the other.

It’s awful, isn’t it. Not to mention the maceration/gassing of the poor male chicks.

They (the government) need to revise the legal definition of free range.

''self-devised purity test''

👏👏👏

Just saw that my Sainsburys has Clarence Court and a bunch of smaller farms. To be honest, I hadn't thought to check before. So this thread has been useful. They are expensive, though.

Some meats and eggs are expensive though, however some meat and egg products are reasonably affordable, as affordable as some vegetables and pulses, so that's anot really a good argument. Also some people, or some people's children have conditions which lead to a more restrictive diet, and they cannot simply 'eat vegan' tonight.

There, corrected it for you.

My mum and dad buy theirs from a free range farm. The hens don’t look like that at all.

It’s terrible , I feel bad as just buy the cheapest eggs as have a lot of dc to feed and it’s one of the few things they’ll all eat . Poor chickens 😔

These girlies came out of a barn last weekend. They are supposed to be white and they smell awful. Their poo is far more watery than it should be. They've spent a couple of days learning how to "chicken", as when in the barn there would be no substrate on the ground to scratch around in,only layers of their own faeces.
Notice how their faces are really pale, this is not normal, and is due to having never seen natural daylight before. They will pink up over the next couple of weeks.

You are buying what you can afford to best feed your children.
Ignore those trying to pile the guilt on.

how Much hassle is keeping my own chickens? I have the space but worried about the amount of work / rats. I really and trying to minimise my diary intake, but eggs are my fussy child’s main source of protein so we get through a lot.

The recommended minimum is 2 square metres per bird, they will probably have to be in wild bird proof housing over winter to help prevent the spread of avian flu. Once you have the housing sorted they are very easy pets to keep. Have a look at The various FB groups for chicken keepers, lots of experienced people will be very glad to advise, lots of pictures of various set ups too

Rats aren't a problem if you do t keep exposed food out. Mine have a feeder they have to step on to open it, rats aren't heavy enough to do it.

They are pretty easy to look after, don't cost much once you have the set up etc.

Hens are so individual and have amazing personalities. I love my girls.

Vegans will often argue why meat eaters eat cows and chickens, but not dogs, and argue that all life is equal and should be valued the same - it's not morally right to kill any animal.

Yet all vegans care less about insects and small mammals, even some birds, than they do about cows, sheep and chickens - large-scale crop farming kills millions of them every year. The truth is some animals somewhere on the food chain will die to allow humans to eat, whether directly or indirectly, whether they will be eaten after or not.

That may be a more comfortable moral position for you to sit in than actually eating them. You can argue, although the evidence is sketchy, that less creatures die than in animal farming, but a dead animal is a dead animal by your own logic, and if your only moral position is that killing animals is ok as long as it's probably fewer of them than it's a dodgy place to be judging others from.

Nobody keeps chickens for their sparkling personality or companionship. (Some can be very charming though). If people worldwide didn’t eat chickens or eggs, there wouldn’t be any chickens to care about.

This is one of the five supposedly free range chickens I adopted roughly 3 weeks ago. Terrified of everything.

For all the talk about buying organic, the issue with the whole sector is that it's so vulnerable to fraud; countless examples exist and doubtless there'll be many more

With there being no reliable way to test it comes down to following the paper trail, and unfortunately that falls to government authorities who aren't exactly known for their rigour or accountability

I always buy Clarence Court eggs as I assume their welfare standards are pretty high. I love eggs, so giving them up isn’t an option for me.