1053:
The first cage system was built to house egg-laying hens. They’d become victim of their own menstrual
cycle. In order to mass produce her
powerful protein package for humans, flock numbers were greatly increased and
each individual animal was locked into a tiny cage (with one or two or three
others), in which she lays an egg a day. Massive numbers of eggs at minimum cost
revolutionised food production at the cost of abandoning welfare
considerations. Here was the application
of industrial-mechanised processes to the treatment of animals. If the ‘caging system’ was an emergency
response to wartime-conditions, it was a measure taken at a time when many
other terrible things were happening. Its
introduction was barely noticed.
The system was based on having batteries of cages in rows,
tier upon tier of them, acting as life-imprisonment cages - the hen had been
reduced to an egg-producing machine, giving rise to the concept of
‘speciesism’.
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