Cruel to be caged: Calling ‘fowl’ on Big Egg

South Osborne

This past weekend a group of concerned consumers gathered outside a Winnipeg Sobeys to urge the company to get cracking on cage-free egg sourcing.

One of 10 such protests across Canada on Nov. 29, the event drew attention to the intensive confinement of laying hens in Sobeys’ supply chain and served as a renewed call for the retailer to honour its commitment – made nearly a decade ago – to go cage-free by this year, 2025. According to national animal advocacy organization Animal Justice, over 80 per cent of the eggs Sobeys sells to Canadians still come from caged hens.

“Millions of birds in Sobeys’ supply chain are forced to live in horrifying conditions,” Animal Justice stated in a July blog post.

To be fair, Sobeys is just one of several Canadian retailers that made the cage-free pledge in 2016 and have failed to deliver. In fact, no major retailer in this country has come close to fulfilling its commitment – or even published a clear plan for doing so, according to Mercy for Animals, an international organization working to end factory farming.

Chickens are more intelligent and sensitive than people realize. Yet most of Canada’s 27 million laying hens are kept in stacked wire cages their entire lives. The space each hen has – about the size of a standard piece of paper – leaves them unable to move around or even spread their wings, let alone engage in natural behaviours essential to their welfare like perching, foraging, or dust-bathing.

To those interested in thinking globally and acting locally: know that while Canada is falling behind on improving hen welfare – the European Union and several states in the US have outlawed battery cages – one need not look far for more humanely produced eggs.

A good place to start is Fireweed Food Co-op, the non-profit group that runs the South Osborne Farmers’ Market. It runs a year-round buying club, which enables members to place bi-weekly orders for fresh produce, eggs, and other foodstuffs from local producers. One such producer is Nature’s Farm in Steinbach, a small family outfit that raises its hens in a “Swiss free-run aviary that allows ample nesting space and free access to scratch, dustbathing, roost, and perch areas,” according to its website.

Numerous other local alternatives to commercial egg production exist, many of which can be found on Direct Farm Manitoba’s online directory at directfarmmanitoba.ca

Another option, of course, is to choose from the growing selection of plant-based egg alternatives.