Colorado Has Just Banned Caged Eggs – New Zealand Should Be Next – SAFE
Colorado’s cage ban will free six million hens from a lifetime of confinement in cages. The State’s Governor signed the bill into law yesterday. Colorado joins Washington, Oregon, Michigan and California as the fifth state in the United States to ban cages.
SAFE Corporate Campaigns Coordinator Jessica Chambers said New Zealand’s political leaders need to follow suit.
“Colorado has nearly double the number of hens that New Zealand has. If they can ban cages then we can too.”
There are an estimated 3,941,000 hens used for egg laying in New Zealand, of which, approximately 2,735,000 spend their lifetime in cages so small, they cannot stretch their wings.
The Labour and Green parties have previously committed to banning the caging of hens. “We want all parties to commit to this goal by this year’s election,” says Chambers. “Hens deserve a life worth living.”
Battery cages will be illegal in New Zealand from 2023. Colony cages will remain legal despite three-quarters of Kiwis wanting to see hens freed from cages.
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- On 1 January, 2023 – battery cages will be illegal in New Zealand and will be replaced by colony cages.
- A 2020 Colmar Brunton poll found 76% of New Zealanders were opposed to colony cages.
- In 2014 the Labour Party committed to banning the caging of layer hens. The Green Party’s current policy is to phase out intensive farming, which includes the caging of hens.
- Colony cages are already being phased out in parts of Europe, including Switzerland, Luxembourg, Germany, the Walloon Region of Belgium and Austria. Some US states including Washington, Oregon, Michigan, California and Colorado in the United States, have legal bans on the sale and production of cage eggs and farms are changing to cage-free systems.
- SAFE’s cage-free campaign work will lead to over two thousand business locations no longer purchasing cage eggs. Over the next five to seven years we will see 650+ supermarket locations, 200+ café locations, 350+ hotels, 800+ restaurant locations, three leading foodservice groups and 300+ sites including rest homes, schools and university dorms ditch cage eggs. Some have already met their commitments.
- The Open Wing Alliance has collectively secured cage-free policies from around 2,000 companies from around the world.
“If you actually want to create global pandemics then build factory farms.”
Those are the words of Michael Greger, author of Bird Flu: A Virus of Our Own Hatching.
He wrote, “When we overcrowd animals by the thousands, in cramped football-field-size sheds, to lie beak to beak or snout to snout, and there’s stress crippling their immune systems, and there’s ammonia from the decomposing waste burning their lungs, and there’s a lack of fresh air and sunlight — put all these factors together and you have a perfect-storm environment for the emergence and spread of disease.“ <a href=" Pandemic Risk from Factory Farming
Frog, the Rooster 🙂 🙂
His Facebook Page
He runs down to the bus stop every day to meet the kids home from school:
Waiting for the bus
That new ‘swine flu with pandemic potential’ that they’re worried about, …”its core is an avian influenza virus, to which humans have no immunity”.
Excerpt:
When multiple strains of influenza viruses infect the same pig, they can easily swap genes, a process known as “reassortment.” The new study, published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, focuses on an influenza virus dubbed G4.
The virus is a unique blend of three lineages: one similar to strains found in European and Asian birds, the H1N1 strain that caused the 2009 pandemic, and a North American H1N1 that has genes from avian, human, and pig influenza viruses.
The G4 variant is especially concerning because its core is an avian influenza virus—to which humans have no immunity—with bits of mammalian strains mixed in.
“From the data presented, it appears that this is a swine influenza virus that is poised to emerge in humans,” says Edward Holmes, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Sydney who studies pathogens. “Clearly this situation needs to be monitored very closely.” Science Magazine 20th June 2020
December last year: Nearly 200000 Chickens Die at NZ Poultry Farm
Almost 200,000 chickens were found dead after suffocating when a power failure hit a poultry farm. Stuff was told a power cut impacted the poultry farm, on the outskirts of Auckland, and equipment that was pumping air into the sheds stopped working as the backup generator failed.
So, we’re not only potentially hatching our own future avian coronaviruses, we are allowing the cruelty of gross factory farming here as well?
Oh, it must be that this is an NZ-owned poultry farm, right? Foreign owners would not be allowed to carry out this kind of ugly practice here in Aotearoa, surely?
So, the owners of Tegel at this time are …Affinity Equity Partners, “one of the largest dedicated Asian private equity firms”.
Affinity operates as a Pan-Asian firm focusing on investment opportunities in Korea, Australia and New Zealand, Greater China and Southeast Asia.
The firm is led by Kok-Yew Tang (Founding Chairman and Managing Partner), Young-Taeg Park (Chairman and Managing Partner) and Chul-Joo Lee (Managing Partner). It has over 60 employees with offices in Hong Kong, Singapore, Seoul, South Korea, Sydney, Australia, Jakarta, Indonesia and Beijing, China.
More information here