Page 3437 - Week 11 - Thursday, 19 September 2013
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USA. Sow stalls are also already banned in the United Kingdom and Sweden, and New Zealand will follow from 2015.
Even Australian Pork Limited, the peak pork industry body, acknowledges the consumer interest in animal welfare and is introducing a voluntary phase-out of the use of sow stalls by 2017. This bill continues the ACT on its path to bringing ACT animal welfare legislation up to world’s best practice.
Battery cage farming places laying hens in horrific conditions. It is widely recognised that hens kept in battery cage systems suffer chronically. Hens are kept in cages the size of an A4 piece of paper. They can barely move. They cannot exhibit usual chicken behaviour such as flapping their wings or dust bathing. They cannot lay their eggs in a nest. And they endure these horrific conditions for the whole of their short lives.
The bill that I am presenting today is intended to improve the quality of life of farmed hens by prohibiting the use of battery cages in egg production in the ACT. It does this by inserting a new section 9A into the Animal Welfare Act. New section 9A will create a new offence of keeping a laying fowl for commercial egg production in a battery cage. For the purposes of the Animal Welfare Act, a battery cage is defined as a cage for housing a laying fowl that would prevent the fowl from engaging in natural chicken behaviour such as stretching, perching, accessing litter or laying eggs in a nest. The maximum penalty for a prosecution for this offence is 50 penalty units.
This bill also introduces a clause to prevent trimming or removing of hens’ beaks. This is a cruel practice which has been in place to enable hens to live in stressful, cramped, cruel conditions without injuring themselves or their fellow hens by pecking.
By limiting the offence to commercial egg production, it targets factory farming and not domestic keepers of chickens. With the passage of this bill, commercial farmers will be required to undertake egg production by an alternative method more humane than battery cage farming.
The ACT government has already gone some way to ban the practice of battery cage farming of hens in the territory. Members may be aware that last year the government entered an agreement with the ACT’s only battery cage farm operator, Pace Farm, to destock and convert its operations.
This bill honours that agreement with Pace Farm. A transitional provision in the bill provides that the offence will not apply to any commercial egg producer who is party to an agreement with the territory to convert its facility to a barn system, until 16 May 2016. This is the date by which the government and Pace have agreed that Pace’s Parkwood farm facility would be converted from its battery cage system.
Notwithstanding this transitional provision, commercial egg producers in the ACT are obliged to comply with the commercial egg production provisions in part 6 of the Animal Welfare Regulation 2001, which mandate minimum standards for battery cage operations.
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