Uncaged eggs
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As part of the national Chicken Out! initiative, Vancouver city council resolved to support the sunnier side of the egg-laying industry when it passed a motion requiring all city-run food-serving facilities to use cage-free eggs. Now when you chow down on eggs Benny at Kits Beach’s Watermark restaurant or snarf omelette before teeing off at McCleery Golf Course, you can rest assured that the chickens that laid the eggs are as free to frolic as you are.
Is "free-range" good enough?
Guest blogger Glenn Gaetz thinks not.
More on chickens
Backyard chickens in Vancouver – Read bcliving's comprehensive coverage of the debate.
Chicken Out! was hatched by the Vancouver Humane Society to raise awareness about egg-laying “battery hens,” which are kept in small wire cages. Vancouver is North America’s second city to commit to going cage-free, and it is dishing out a challenge to residents, restaurant and retailers: choose certified organic, free-range, or free-run eggs.
“It’s about making more humane decisions,” says Debra Probert, Vancouver Humane Society executive director. “And dropping eggs from caged hens from your shopping list is a really easy way to take action for animals.”
North America is well behind Europe, where a number of countries have already banned the use of battery cages. The European Union aims to be cage-free by 2012. What about B.C.? When Whistler resolved to go cage-free in September 2007, it also encouraged its Union of B.C. Municipalities counterparts to get cracking and Chicken Out!
Did you know?
Less than 3 percent of the eggs sold in Canada are laid by roaming hens, according to the Canadian Egg Marketing Agency.
To learn more about Chicken Out! visit www.chickenout.ca.
Grass finished edible creatures of any variety are healthier and happier during their lifetimes. As a direct result of that, they are more resistant to yucky diseases like avian flu and mad cow. Again, they are also vastly more nutritious as food, in fact so much that our bodies require us to eat less of them in order to benefit nutritionally. Eating our BC grass fed beef/ chicken/ pork etc, requires less fossil fuels to deliver it to our door which decreases our local pollution as well as our involvement in politically unstable land, keeps our dollars local which has a wonderful snowball effect, requires less grain growth for animal feed so grains can be redistrubuted amongst the hungry (ok - this is likely wishful thinking, with my understanding that we already have enough food to feed the world over and over again but can't for political reasons) and gives our bodies what they need at a fair price.
John Bucher
Editor, Granville Online
to frolic as you are." While cage-free chickens are not confined to battery cages, they are far from free. There is no law stating that they must be allowed outside; instead, they are crowded by the ten thousands into enormous sheds and, like their caged counterparts, debeaked. Free-range and free-run eggs are the same; they are not regulated legally and there is no guarantee whatsoever when it comes to welfare. Your readers should know that the only label that legally requires chickens to "have access to the outdoors" is the organic label, and even it has its welfare problems.
The Vancouver Humane Society, whom you profiled in your article, has this information on their website, http://www.chickenout.ca .
You can also find more information on this topic here:
http://www.liberationbc.com/issues/organic
Thank you.
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