A Shropshire farm has been accused of ‘cruelty’ after an animal welfare organisation saw caged chickens pecking at the corpse of a hen.
Viva! documented the inside of an egg facility at Heal Farms, a family-run business in Shawbury, a village eight miles northeast of Shrewsbury.
Volunteers allege they saw hens in ‘cramped and dirty cages’ in May 2023 and December last year
‘Everywhere I looked were hens,’ Viva! founder Juliet Gellatley told Metro of the roughly five-tier high colony cages stacked side by side in a shed.
‘Tens of thousands of living, feeling animals confined so tightly they could barely move, let alone stretch their wings.
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‘I expected cruelty, but I was not prepared for how grim and overwhelming it felt in person.’
Footage and photographs that Viva! shared exclusively with Metro show hens with mangled beaks, overgrown claws, patchy feathers and raw skin.
‘The noise was relentless,’ Gellatley said. ‘The artificial hum of machinery and the cries of thousands of birds; not soft clucking, but a harsh, distressing wall of sound
‘The smell was overpowering too: choking ammonia from the droppings, hanging in the air and catching in my throat and chest.’
Footage filmed in May 2023 showed what Gellatley said was the dead body of a chicken ‘that had turned black with decay’.
One sight that will never leave her, Gellatley added, was seeing a chicken that had escaped from her cage.
‘She was wandering alone beneath a sea of caged birds, surrounded by metal, concrete and machinery,’ Gellatley said.
‘She looked lost and desperate, with nowhere to go. I kept thinking about my own hens at home – curious, affectionate birds who loved to explore the outdoors.
‘This hen was alone, trapped in an industrial nightmare.’
Photos taken in December show what appears to be a chicken corpse, with cage mates pecking at and walking on top of it.
Another showed an egg lying on the bottom of a ‘filthy’ cage, according to the group.
‘People don’t see the chickens behind the eggs’
Egg-laying hens in the UK once lived in cramped quarters known as battery cages until 2012, when they were banned.
Larger, ‘enriched’ battery cages are legally permitted, with about 7.3 million hens, around two in 10, being kept in one, according to official figures.
Enriched battery cages, also called colony cages or aviaries, must provide 600cm² of space per bird, about the size of a sheet of A4 paper.
Animal rights campaigners have warned that flocks reared in caged aviary systems experience higher mortality rates and more disease.
Chickens with deformed beaks often struggle to eat, while commercial poultry flocks report higher rates of fractured knee bones and parasites.
Many chickens are free-range, also called cage-free, so they can roam a limited outdoor space.
‘People see a carton on a shelf or “egg” on an ingredients list,’ added Gellatley. ‘They don’t see the birds behind it.’
Metro showed Viva!’s findings to Andrew Knight, a veterinary professor in animal welfare at three universities, including the University of Winchester.
He said from the footage, it appeared the hens were either housed in colony cages or a free-range aviary barn system.
When shown the materials showing hens pecking at remains, Professor Knight said chickens peck to explore their environments.
‘In nature, this would be an outdoor, potentially forested environment, with a lot of plant material to manipulate,’ Professor Knight said.
‘In the barren environments visible, there was little to peck other than the corpses and other living hens.’
Given the lack of feathers on some of the hens, Professor Knight said this may be a sign they are not able to move freely enough.
He cautioned that bacteria can also wriggle through eggshells.
‘Birds are highly sentient, and such treatment of them is not ethical,’ Professor Knight added.
‘Unfortunately, such conditions are common within the laying hen industry.’
Metro also showed Viva!’s materials to Uk head of the animal welfare group Compassion in World Farming, Anthony Field.
He said: ‘Cages are cruel, outdated and just plain wrong.
‘As the film shows, seven million UK laying hens spend their lives imprisoned in these so-called ‘enriched’ cages where they each have little more space than a sheet of A4 paper.
‘They can’t forage in the dirt, dust bathe, see the light of day, or fully stretch their wings. This causes immense physical discomfort and mental anguish, which can result in harmful behaviours such as the feather pecking seen in this investigation.’
The government launched a consultation in January on banning caged hens as part of a package of new animal welfare laws. Enriched colony cages could be phased out as early as 2027.
The consultation closes 11:59pm on Monday. Viva! is petitioning for a ban on caged hens.
Field added: ‘This footage shows that a ban on cages for laying hens cannot come soon enough.’
Heal Farms: ‘We take a huge interest in the welfare of our birds’
Heal Farms’ free-range eggs are part of the British Lion assurance scheme, which acts as a stamp of egg quality approval, and is ‘Freedom Food (RSPCA) accredited’, according to archived versions of the farm’s website, which is now down for maintenance.
Heal Farms includes eight laying sites housing 328,000 free-range hens and a 122,000 colony.
The hens have a ‘wonderful view of the South Shropshire hills and Welsh mountains… Alongside this, we also have a multi-tier rearing unit, which housed its first flock in 2015, housing 64,000 birds.
‘The rearing unit has given us the ability to rear our birds in an environment most like our laying houses, this reduces stress to the birds when they are moved and results in happier, healthier hens.’
The farm’s Facebook page adds: ‘We take a huge interest in the welfare of our birds, ensuring they are stress-free, happy and healthy.’
The Animal and Plant Health Agency, which monitors farm animal welfare, told Metro: ‘We take breaches of animal welfare legislation very seriously and investigate every allegation that is reported to us.’
Heal Farms has been approached for comment.
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