Investigation leads to chicken rescue by Gloucestershire animal activists.

Glouces­ter­shire Ani­mal Action press release — For imme­di­ate release
Sun­day, June 03, 2007

Five month inves­ti­ga­tion leads to chick­en res­cue by Glouces­ter­shire ani­mal activists.

Five months ago activists from Glouces­ter­shire Ani­mal Action learned of a farm in Glouces­ter which had been vis­it­ed by DEFRA after the rot­ting car­cass­es of chick­ens and pigs were left caus­ing a stench which had affect­ed the local com­mu­ni­ty.

Local press cov­ered the inci­dent in which the farm own­er had claimed that around one hun­dred ani­mals die per week at the facil­i­ty. Activists vis­it­ed the farm at Lit­tle Wit­combe in Glouces­ter with the inten­tion of doc­u­ment­ing the con­di­tion in which the ani­mals were housed which have result­ed in the deaths of so many ani­mals.

With our inves­ti­ga­tion footage we hope to high­light the real­i­ty of mod­ern non caged “barn” egg busi­ness­es to show that free-range and barn eggs are in no way a guar­an­tee that your food is eth­i­cal­ly pro­duced in many cas­es barn egg sys­tems are worse than bat­tery cage sys­tems and if you wish to be a tru­ly eth­i­cal per­son you real­ly need to go veg­an. The gov­ern­ment has main­tained that veg­an­ism is a very healthy way to live, you can almost half your car­bon foot­print in most cas­es and you can live a cru­el­ty free lifestyle know­ing that no ani­mals or humans are being exploit­ed for your diet!

The fol­low­ing is the account from one activist involved in the inves­ti­ga­tion:

“We entered one of the long sheds which hadn’t been secured prop­er­ly late one evening, mak­ing sure to pro­tect the ani­mals inside we dis­in­fect­ed our feet and cloth­ing before enter­ing. To be hon­est I was expect­ing to have to search for ani­mals in a bad con­di­tion but the real­i­ty was it was more dif­fi­cult to find ani­mals that looked healthy, maybe one in fif­teen chick­ens weren’t in a bad con­di­tion. The air was acrid and filled with ammo­nia and dust par­ti­cles and the fans didn’t seem to be work­ing prop­er­ly. The work­er chart on the wall had said that 6 deaths had occurred in one day in a sin­gle shed and there are four­teen sheds on the farm. It would seem that this is the norm for a facil­i­ty that holds more than 70,000 chick­ens.”

Dur­ing the fol­low­ing months the activists returned to check the con­di­tions which didn’t seem to be improv­ing. After suf­fi­cient evi­dence had been gath­ered in order to high­light the plight of the hens inside a col­lec­tive deci­sion was made by those involved that we would attempt to res­cue and give vet­eri­nary care to a small amount of the chick­ens (Thir­teen in total).

The res­cue took place dur­ing the ear­ly hours of a warm night in May, three activists entered a barn with ani­mal car­ri­ers and record­ing equip­ment, footage was record­ed and pho­tos tak­en, the ani­mals were then care­ful­ly loaded into ani­mal car­ri­ers and into a con­vert­ed laun­dry bag, they were then trans­port­ed to a house for the night for food and water. The next morn­ing they were tak­en to live out their lives at a sanc­tu­ary. It should be remem­bered that these ani­mals have nev­er expe­ri­enced sun­light or fresh air and to see these intel­li­gent crea­tures being giv­en a chance to live with real food and fresh water in fan­tas­tic con­di­tions brought those involved to tears. We can only hope that the remain­ing thou­sands of ani­mals and bil­lions of ani­mals breed each year for our ani­mal diet expe­ri­ence the same lux­u­ry one day.

Glouces­ter­shire Ani­mal Action are a peace­ful group of indi­vid­u­als, we con­sid­er our actions to be total­ly jus­ti­fied and are will­ing to accept any reper­cus­sions as a result of our actions. Dur­ing our vis­its we saw no signs which indi­cat­ed that the prop­er­ty was pri­vate. We are aware that we have caused dam­age to a lock on the farm dur­ing our last vis­it and we will be send­ing a pay­ment to cov­er the cost of replac­ing the lock how­ev­er we will not be pay­ing for the chick­ens tak­en. We how­ev­er wel­come dona­tions via our web­site towards trans­porta­tion costs and vet bills.

Note: The activists wear face cov­er­ings dur­ing the res­cue to pre­vent iden­ti­fi­ca­tion this is for per­son­al safe­ty and to pro­tect their free­dom, ani­mal activists have been impris­oned for years after res­cu­ing ani­mals from facil­i­ties such as this one.

For infor­ma­tion about Glouces­ter­shire Ani­mal Action you can vis­it their web­site at www.stopanimalcruelty.co.uk or you can watch the full video of the res­cue online via YouTube www.youtube.com/watch?v=JllgcO0f_Gg