BREAKTHROUGH: Eyes on Animals launches humane poultry catching method and reduces suffering on a large scale!
|
|
|
Today’s modern poultry barns which house laying hens have easily 20,000 plus birds in them. Imagine the scene inside the barn the night it is to be emptied, when thousands of hens are to be caught and loaded for slaughter. Catchers under extreme time pressure are grabbing at any body part possible. Four to five hens are caught per hand, hanging upside down by only one leg. The hanging birds often hit the installations when moved across to the stacked transport crates. Birds’ legs and wings are often bruised or broken when stuffed into the small transport crate openings. The level of noise from the terrorized hens is horrible to hear. Sadly, this is the way in which hens are caught in every country where these large factory farms exist. But Eyes on Animals has been working hard on changing this !
|
|
For the past two years we have been filming and exposing this rough handling and initiated a pioneering project in The Netherlands. In 2016 Eyes on Animals introduced the 'Swedish catching method', a method of catching birds upright and maximum two at a time, to the Dutch poultry industry. It is called “the Swedish Method” because it was written up in a Swedish animal science report, but was not yet anywhere in large-scale commercial practice. We successfully convinced 5 chicken-catching companies in the Netherlands to attend the chicken-catching welfare course we created and now, in April 2018 we have had a breakthrough! We have convinced the first large-scale commercial egg and poultry-meat company to make the switch; The Dutch company "Rondeel"!
Peter Koelewijn, owner of Rondeel remarked: "The Swedish-catching method fit our company philosophy. Namely that we have to adapt our husbandry system to the animal, instead of the other way around. We think that for our company capturing by the Swedish method is the right thing to do."
Now in Practice
On April 11 and 12, Eyes on Animals together with the Den Ouden Oirschot catching team (trained by Eyes on Animals a few months earlier) put the 'Swedish catching method' into commercial practice while emptying a Rondeel laying-hen barn with 36,000 birds.
|
|
During the Swedish method of catching it was almost silent in the barn, what a difference it made compared to all those inspections we made in the past.
We also met with the poultry company “Kipster” and they are planning in the future to now also only catch their birds using the Swedish Method. The interest is building and Eyes on Animals will not stop until the cruel conventional method of catching poultry is condemned to the history books.
And more good news, our work regarding this pioneering project was published in the Dutch media. TROUW, the daily Dutch newspaper published an article as did the agricultural newspaper Boerderij and Pluimveeweb.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
