VIDEO: Battery cages still operating in France

Animal welfare group FOUR PAWS has uncovered an illegal egg farm using conventional battery cages in Brittany, France.

Film footage and photographs received by the organisation show dead, injured and mistreated birds on a farm which, the group says, is part of a co-operative that supplies a company that exports the eggs to other EU countries, including the UK.

The footage, it says, was filmed at the end of February, in the same week that the French poultry sector announced that all conventional battery cages had been phased out.

According to Véronique Gonnier, secretary general of the National Committee for the Promotion of Eggs (CNPO), “100% of French producers have responded since 1 January to the new European rules on animal welfare”. “This is still not the case with others,” she told Le Parisien, pointing to Spain and Poland in particular.

But FOUR PAWS says this is not backed by their evidence, which shows that in some of the cages each hen gets only 464sq cm, with nine hens squeezed in a 4176sq cm cage. New welfare rules for enriched cages stipualte that each hen should have 750sq cm.

“FOUR PAWS calls on the French authorities to take control of the situation and shut down all farms using conventional battery cages,” said the organisation’s president, Helmut Dungler.

France is one of 12 member states still not complying with the EU conventional cage ban that came into force on 1 January 2012. At the start of the year the French government estiumated that some 80 or 90 units, with 10% of production, were still non-compliant.

On 26 January, the EU Commission began proceedings against Belgium, Bulgaria, Cyprus, France, Greece, Italy, Hungary, Latvia, The Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Romania and Spain, sending letters of formal notice about their non-compliance.

FOUR PAWS says it has since learnt from official sources that Romania has solved all its battery cage problems.

* What do you think of the continuing use of battery cages in France and elsewhere? Have you say on our Poultry Platform