Does this little chick... - Animal Aid

Baby chicks are ‘sexed’ and the males destroyed...deserve better?Battery Cages• More than half of all UK egg-layinghens are kept in battery cages.• With four or five in a cage, eachbird has an area less than an A4sheet of paper. They can barelymove, let alone stretch their wings.• To prevent the stressed birds fromharming one another, the ends oftheir beaks are sliced off using ared-hot iron. This practice is prohibitedonly under organic standards.Once hatched, inside industrialincubators, chicks go through anautomated processing system. Malechicks, considered useless because theycannot lay eggs and are too scrawny atype of chicken for meat, are gassed orshredded alive in giant mincing machines.Females are selected to be rearedfor egg production.‘Battery’ chickensBarn Eggs• Hens keptin barns arestill confinedto dirty, overcrowdedsheds. They never see daylight,behave naturally or breathe fresh air.Freedom Food• The RSPCA’s Freedom Food schemecan only ever have a marginalimpact on bird welfare. Animals maystill be kept permanently indoors infactory farm conditions.The barn systemFree-range• On free-range farms, thousandsof hens can be packed into hugesheds with many unable to reachthe pop holes that allow themto exit and re-enter.• Because free-range birdsare essentially the samehighly-bred strains asthose raised moreintensively, those whodo get outside struggleto cope with pathogensand weather conditions.As a result, free-rangebirds suffer a highmortality rate.Organic• Organic farming is not a crueltyfreeoption. Hens can still be housedin groups of up to 9,000 and deniedaccess to the outside for two-thirdsof their lives.Slaughter• All egg-laying hens end their shortlives with a traumatic journey to a killingfactory.• At around 72 weeks old they are nolonger able to produce the amount of eggsrequired. Considered worthless, they are killedand their worn-out bodies go into cheap meatproducts such as soups, pies and baby food.Chickens who perished in their shedPlease help to STOP animal suffering...