When arriving at a battery farm early in the morning, the last thing you want to hear or see is workers singing as they go about their duties, talking about smoko and carrying dead chickens. Unfortunately that was what greeted us on our farm tour this morning. Twelve of us sat in a paddock being watched by sheep as we in turn watched the workers and started to think that our farm tour was over before it even began. After discussing briefly we tried our luck and waltzed down the driveway into the first shed, unseen.

When we entered the shed we were met by scenes typical of the battery hen industry. There were about five thousand hens confined to small cages with the average of five hens per cage. These hens will spend eighteen months confined to the barren cages where they are forced to live on wire cage flooring which causes physical deformities to their feet and legs. In addition these cages prevent the hens from exhibiting natural patterns of behaviour including nesting, foraging, dust bathing, scratching, stretching their wings and forming social hierarchies. All this ends when they start to produce fewer eggs and they are taken to slaughter. The cycle then begins again with new hens.

Upon seeing these conditions many people on the tour were shocked by what they saw as they were forced to discover what these hens have to suffer through each day. This experience also left people with many questions which we answered while we walked through the rows of hens pointing out different aspects of the intensive production system.

We filed out of the shed one by one and made our way towards the road. As we came out we startled a worker carrying a dead hen in one hand. He seemed not to realize at first what was happening as people don’t often see what they don’t expect. When he finally realized that we were there he started calling after us to find out who we were. We chose to ignore him and walked to the car. As we pulled out of a side road the worker had been joined by others, including someone in a car who followed us to the motorway on ramp.

After a mini car chase we met up at a park to have a debrief. At the debrief we discussed how people felt about meeting the hens in person rather than just seeing pictures or footage of them. We gave the farm tour participants a chance to ask questions about the industry and share their own knowledge. While it was an emotional experience, those who came along came away with a greater understanding of what goes on in the layer hen industry. Everyone seems to be looking forward to the next farm tour which will be in May.