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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1997 Week 9 Hansard (3 September) . . Page.. 2804 ..

MR MOORE (continuing):

They said to me, "We have to be very careful not to turn Canberra into a social laboratory". I said to them, "I understand that argument". I hear it from others and it does not surprise me that it comes from chooks also. I explained to them that, when something is wrong and there is a need for change, then change, by its very nature, will be about experimentation. Effectively, it will set up a social laboratory. I really feel that they ought not to worry about that. After that discussion and my discussion with a few other people, my initial reaction was to be supportive of this legislation because it had always struck me that the notion of battery cage hens is inherently cruel, as indeed is the whole notion of feedlot farming. It is also important to balance the issues that Mr Hird raised about consumer attitudes and people's needs against actions that are cruel. For that reason, I thought it would be entirely appropriate that I visit a number of farms.

The first of the farms I visited was a battery cage farm in Young. I was singularly impressed by that farm. It had been recommended to me because it kept chooks in three different sets of cages that had been manufactured in different eras. The most modern section of the farm was airconditioned and the cages were very large and had fewer birds in them. The oldest section had very small cages with canvas drops that could be lifted to let air flow through and had fairly primitive watering systems for the birds. The middle section I could describe as being closer to the modern one but still with some problems. I looked at each section very carefully. I must say that what I saw shook my view for some time, because what I had seen put out, particularly by animal liberation groups, was a series of pictures of chooks that were basically denuded of their feathers. I saw no evidence of that sort of thing on the farm. I have to concede that I had arranged this visit a couple of weeks before going to the farm. I suppose the farmer, who had hundreds of thousands of chooks, could have taken away any chooks that had been denuded of their feathers.

I asked that one of the chooks be taken from the cage so that I could see whether it could walk, because I had also been told that caged chooks sometimes cannot walk. In fact, my own experience had taught me that this was true. When I lived in a bush town in South Australia, I almost always kept chooks in my backyard. We used to get our chooks from the battery farm. I remember one set of chooks in particular. It took three or four days before they could actually walk around in any reasonable way and quite some time before they began to act as I would expect chooks to act. I had a background of thinking that these farms were inherently cruel. The farmer invited me to choose a chook from the hundreds of thousands around me to take from the cage. I took one from up high halfway down a row. The chook, put on the ground, acted like a normal chook. It looked around to see what it could find to eat and peck. I felt that the picture being painted of an old battery farm was not the reality that exists on modern battery farms. I have not been to Parkwood, so I do not know whether it fits into that category.

I approached Ms Horodny and said, "I would like to see a free-range farm", and she pointed me to one not so far from Canberra. Although I thought it was run particularly well and there were some very interesting things there, the irony was that, if I had taken photos of specific chooks on that farm and put them out and said, "This is what you see in a free-range farm", then people would be saying, "Let us not have free-range chook farms". The battery chooks denuded of their feathers that I see in photos are the same as the chooks - not many of them, just a handful of them - that I saw on that farm.

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