Big flocks are less aggressive

Keeping free range hens in large flocks makes them less aggressive, one of the nation’s leading welfare experts has declared.

Bristol University’s Prof John Webster, who has just completed a welfare audit of laying systems for the RSPCA, said he believed that in larger units hens are unable to create the peck orders that they develop in small groups. As a result all the birds they encounter are strangers.

“So they are forced to be polite,” he told the BBC Radio 4 Food Programme. “There is very little aggression, in fact often less than you will find in a back garden flock of hens.”

The professor was asked if 10,000 birds units could therefore be a better environment for layers than small groups.

“They are not bad at all,” he replied, “certainly not as bad as I feared. Particularly as free range farmers are recognising hens as sentient beings and supplying them with improved environments such as cover on the range areas.”

He said that the growth of free range would mean there was no future for the enriched cage. Although it gave the hen opportunity to carry out some of its basic behavioural instincts it was still the equivalent of an eastern European soviet flat.

“Personally I do not think it will ever take off,” he said, “with the growth in the sales of free range eggs we can see that consumers are voting with their feet.”

The half hour programme dedicated entirely to hens and eggs declared that the keeping of small garden flocks was now the fastest growing pastime in the country. It said there was a “national revulsion” against cages.