Help the hens that make pancakes possible!

08.03.11

The RSPCA is urging people not to forget about animals when they are mixing up the pancake batter today.

The unpalatable truth is that many of the eggs available to make our pancakes come from hens that have lived out their lives in wire cages.

The good news is that latest figures from Defra show more people than ever are choosing higher welfare eggs. In fact, for the first time the UK is producing 50 per cent of eggs from cage-free systems!

However, this does mean that half of all UK eggs still come from hens kept in cruel battery cages, where the usable space for each bird [in barren as well as so-called ‘enriched’ battery cages] is less than the size of a piece of A4 paper.

That’s  about 17million hens kept in cages, unable to move around or move away from each other freely or express other natural behaviours, like dustbathing, properly.

“It’s so easy to do your bit to keep moving hen welfare forward, by only choosing cage-free eggs for your pancakes. Just look for ‘barn’ or ‘free-range’ written on the box,” said Alice Clark, senior scientific officer, RSPCA farm animal science department.

“And if you choose ones with the Freedom Food label this means they have come from hens that have been kept on farms assessed to the RSPCA’s detailed welfare standards,” she added.

Whether you decide to have yours with lemon and sugar, chocolate spread or syrup - please think about the hens too and make your pancake a higher welfare one.