Thank you and farm animal welfare update

Firstly, before I write about a particularly important aspect of our work, I thank would like to thank all the Honey’s staff and customers for your help and support for the last nine years.  Honey’s annual charitable donation to Compassion in World Farming is hugely appreciated.  We are not a big charity, but we endeavour to punch above our weight, and we are proud of the differences we are able to make to farm animals around the world.  Without donations such as yours, we simply couldn’t achieve our aims. Thank you.

If you asked the average person in the street, whether British farm animals are still kept in cages, what would they say?  I am willing to bet that the vast majority believe that the UK’s standards of animal welfare are too high for cages; but they’d be wrong – millions of our farm animals here in the UK are subjected to cage cruelty. 

That includes over 16 million UK hens living behind bars, producing more than a third of Britain’s eggs and over a quarter of a million UK mother pigs who are forced to give birth in cages and raise their piglets through bars. An investigation by Compassion (available on our website), filmed in Spring 2019, revealed the gruelling conditions typical of pig farms all over the UK.

This situation is not helped by misleading pack brands and images. Today, many millions of pounds are spent on designing engaging packaging suggestive of happy farm animals in pretty farmyards and in buttercup fields. Brands and language is used to market the products under terms like ‘farm fresh’ and ‘country fresh’, in an attempt to convey a romantic ‘Old MacDonald’s’ farm image so it is hard for customers to understand the life of the animal behind the plastic box and to make an informed purchase choice.

Tragically, across the world today, billions of animals are farmed in cages. That includes pigs, hens, rabbits, ducks and quail – all subjected to cage cruelty. Sows are forced to nurse their piglets in crates, rabbits and quail endure their whole lives in barren cages, and ducks and geese are caged for force feeding to produce foie gras. These systems confine, restrict, and prevent animals from expressing their natural behaviours.  

In Europe alone, hundreds of millions of animals are forced to spend most, if not all, of their lives in cages. 

That’s why in 2019, here at Compassion in World Farming, we set ourselves an enormous challenge: to mobilise over a million people across a Continent to sign a Europeans Citizens Initiative (ECI), calling on the European Commission to ban all cages for EU farm animals.  It was a hugely ambitious objective and I did wonder at times if we would make the target of a full one million.

Yet, I need not have worried.  

Thanks to the support of 170 different organisation a staggering 1.6 million signatures were achieved. In October, I joined other NGO leaders, supporters and MEPs in Brussels to celebrate achieving a record-breaking European Citizens’ Initiative (ECI) petition and inspiring a continent to stand up for an end to cages. This achievement has sent a resounding message to the European Commission that cage cruelty must stop. 

It’s important to remember that an ECI is not just another petition. It is more than that. It is a mass petition mechanism by which Europe’s citizens call on the European Commission to propose legislation. One that puts a legal requirement on the Commission to respond.

Of course, now that the UK is set to leave Europe it is not clear to what extent the British government will support an end to cages, but it is to be hoped that they will see Brexit as an opportunity to improve all farm animal welfare.

Ending cage cruelty is only one of our targets, our work is very varied but fundamentally, our aim is to campaign peacefully to end all factory farming practices. There are however, still many challenges we have to face if we are to realise our vision of a world where all farm animals are treated with compassion and respect and where cruel factory farming practices end.