QUESTION: Year after year, decade after decade, you alert the legal authorities to cruelty violations and suffering animals in peril, yet nothing ever happens. You know for a fact there are thousands of screaming and suffering hens inside a factory farm and you know the authorities will once again turn a blind eye, so what do you do?
ANSWER: At 4:30 am you get a ladder and climb onto the roof of the factory farm and refuse to come down until something is done!
This is exactly what 15 determined individuals did on Wednesday May 4, 2011 and twelve hours later we were all arrested and charged with trespass. We got what we wanted, a vet to come and inspect the birds. However she didn’t do what was needed - give them some help. The DPI vet spent just over an hour ‘examining’ some 40,000 hens and we found out later she gave the factory farm the all clear. The Police also refused to investigate our concerns of consumer fraud, as half the hens on the property are supposedly ‘free range’ and the other half caged hens, yet the only labels we saw in the egg grading shed were for ‘free range’ eggs.
It all started at 2:00 am when twenty two people gathered in the cold night to discuss plans, get their biosecurity gear and then make their way to the hens in need. The ground crew stood guard while 15 ALV activists, one by one, carefully crawled up the ladder in the pitch darkness.
After daybreak two TV helicopters circled above and throughout the day media coverage of the action was shown on the major commercial news programs and reported by several national and international onlinenewspapers bringing to light the horrendous conditions of caged and ‘free range’ egg farming. And importantly the televised news reports included ALV’s undercover footage taken inside the sheds we were standing on. So the public could see exactly why we were there.
Thanks so much to everyone who took part and who supports the work of ALV.
Channel Ten News Coverage
ALV's Openrescue Video From Caged AND Free Range Sheds
Bertha’s ‘Death’ at National Egg Industry Forum
200 egg producers gathered at the posh Stamford Plaza Hotel in Little Collins Street for the National Egg Industry Forum on May 26. They weren’t expecting to find Battery Bertha, a 185 cm tall hen
laying bloodied and dying at the front door surrounded by mourners with megaphones!
ALV activists staged the sad and untimely death of Battery Bertha to highlight the message that the Egg Industry is a killer. All laying hens, whether they are caged, barnlaid or so-called free range suffer and die. Parent birds are permanently confined in dim, dirty sheds being continually mated and their male chicks are ground up alive or gassed on day one. The Egg Industry wants to change the free range ‘standard’ of 1500 birds per ha and no debeaking to 20,000 birds per ha and allowing debeaking (which often happens anyway). ALV is currently objecting to one such industrial free range egg factory on the outskirts of Seymour that proposes 170,000 ‘free range’ hens in 10 sheds.
