Great article, thanks very much George. We can't stress enough how cruel it is what we do to caged chickens. I must say I cringe every time I see a pile of boxes with cage eggs. Knowing the torture these animals have to go through, it is disgusting that cage eggs still haven't been banned.

I simply try to tell everyone who wants to listen what George says in this article: Buying cage eggs means that you buy a product produced by animals that are in a continuous state of pain. It's about time the RSPCA sstarts working towards a ban on cage eggs.

Given a choice between a cage with access to a food supply but a cage with a equal access to a great big chook playground…. The chicken will stay close to the food supply and ignore the playground.

So the chook speaks, by her actions.

What dear old George is peddling is sentimentality.

He is promoting the notion that chooks care and are motivated by the same sentimental tish which motivates dear George.

If one ever saw chooks at play you would notice one of them is skinny with half its feather missing… chooks have a literal "pecking order" and the one at the end of that order gets picked on.

When chooks stop pursuing this terrible victimisation of one another (the “pecking order”), then we might consider applying the same values to them as George is twittering on about but until that time we should assume they are motivated by different standards and expectations to the bleeding hearts who see them as the emotional equivalents to humans.

thanks, col. that was the single most idiotic defence of battery cages, or of pretty much anything, i've ever read.

I reckon that's pretty spot on Col. Hey did you know a dog got a medal recently for jumping up and down on it's owner (performing CPR)? I'm sure the dog was so proud.

Well said George, too much animal advocacy is concnered with esoteric concepts of rights when what should really matter is the morality of carelessly treating another living being as if it were an inanimate object. As humans we have become blind to the terror we inflict on all other animals.
An aspect of egg producing which I find particularily dissapointing is what happens to the male chicks. The female chicks go onto a life of producing eggs but the male ones dont end up at kfc. The breed has been bred to lay eggs not produce meat and so they are "destroyed" within a couple of days of being born.

People are so thoughtless. I cringe when I think of the gut bacteria that get exploited so cruelly everyday, and the widdwe a-ants that get stood on when thoughtless *people* walk down the stweet.