Jane bids to make cages a charity case

A national charity aimed at seeing off of all types of laying cage is to be set up within weeks.

It is the latest move in the extraordinary one-woman campaign being mounted by Jane Howorth who has already attracted widespread media attention because of her unique cage hen ‘liberation’ movement.

Last year she ‘re-homed’ five thousand layers from intensive units and hopes to double that number this year. But if this sounds like the agenda of just another animal rights campaigner then this one is different.

To begin with there’s not a body piercing, tattoo or dreadlock in sight. Howorth is a slim, attractive, forty something who plans her strategy in the kitchen of a large and elegantly furnished farmhouse in the heart of rural Devon.

But her attitude is also at odds with the regular welfarist warriors. She is determined to establish and maintain good relations with the egg industry generally and with cage producers in particular. She takes hens only from farmers who fully approve of what she is doing and even pays for them (“a nominal sum,” she says). All hens are found new homes with smallholders or in back gardens.

A feature about her unique activities has just appeared on national prime time television—the BBC TV show Inside Out—and The Times, Daily Telegraph as well as a string of country and lifestyle magazines have already found their way to her door. The Sunday Times is on the way.

Journalists can’t resist a wacky yarn about liberated, half naked hens combined with a photogenic and articulate female and Howorth plans to exploit this fact to hammer home her welfare message.

Because her target is the egg consumer and her ambition is to so effectively sharpen public perceptions about cage eggs—in processing as well as in shell—that demand will simply fall away.

“If I just became a bunny hugger I know I could not achieve anything on a wider scale,” she says. “If there’s an opportunity for publicity I’ll got for it.”

In June she plans to liberate three thousand birds and use the resulting exposure to launch The Battery Hen Welfare Trust, the registered charity designed to give her campaign new status, new impetus and a badly needed new name.

Currently called The West Country Retirement Home and Re-Homing Centre for Battery Hens, the operation has grown from the founder’s urge to save a few cage hens from the chop and give them a happy retirement. At one stage she used to turn up at a spent hen plant and persuade the workforce to divert a few dozen birds into the back of her car.

Then a year ago she decided that what she had been doing for so long had a much greater potential. If she could find other people to take hens as well she could not only multiply the benefits to the birds but use the resulting publicity to change consumer attitudes.

She claims to have no difficulty at all finding families anxious to take on a few layers for the back garden—even though they all have to make a financial contribution to the organisation. Her problem is finding cage producers willing to open their doors to the liberators.

“Naturally enough,” says Jane, “they assume that I am planning some kind of raid or that I shall turn up with hidden cameras. Nothing could be further from the truth. I know that if we are to get anywhere we have to see this from the farmer’s point of view.”

So all her helpers are instructed to adopt a polite and considerate attitude to farmers who are assured of complete confidentiality.

But she is also conscious that even if she rescues a thousand birds a day she would still be making no significant impact on the daily lives of the 20 million caged birds in the country.

And neither does she believe she can influence welfare legislation. “I don’t believe I will achieve what I want by attempting to change Government or EU policy which is profit led,” she says. “The great power is with the consumer. Our intention is to diminish the market for battery eggs to the point where the sector no longer has a reason to exist.

“There are so many consumers who already refuse to buy cage eggs but are unaware of how many they are consuming in products, ready meals and so on.”

Her astute operation has already attracted the financial backing of a large supermarket group, which sees an association with Howarth as a way of proving its welfare credentials. An announcement of the details will come later.

“I have major ambitions,” she says, “and I passionately believe we can achieve what we want.” Which means that even if conventional cages are banned in 2012 the campaign will continue against enriched cages.