The Cage

1366:

The first cage system was built to house the egg-laying bird.  The hen was to become the complete victim of her 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 two or three others), from which she would lay even more eggs than a free-ranging hen would.  This cunning idea was about to revolutionise food production systems.

The cage became an essential component of the industrially-mechanised treatment of animals.  By caging birds, the cage itself came to represent the most cynical suspension of compassion imaginable.  In order to guarantee food supply, humans decided to become thoroughly pragmatic.  The caging system, an emergency response to war-conditions, was a measure taken at a time when many other horrible things were happening, and its introduction was barely noticed.

         

By the end of the war, ‘battery farms’ were already established.  The system was based on the idea of having batteries of life-imprisonment cages.  The hen had been reduced to an egg-producing biological function of her body.  This was as far from caring and welfare as you could get.  Hens and other farm animals had become mere machines enslaved by the food industry.  These cage systems had been deliberately-created for efficient egg-laying, despite their being hell-hole environments.  Who could argue that the 'cage' was not the most anti-altruistic thing humans could have created?  Amongst an alarmingly few people there was outrage, that an animal, any sentient life form, could be reduced by humans to this tortured state; it gave rise to the concept of ‘speciesism’.