The hens must stay indoors until the end of this new month, unless DEFRA issues new restrictions to combat avian flu.  Our birds seem happy and warm, with plenty of room to roam and they are laying four eggs a day.  As six of them are cockerels this is an impressive number for the time of year. They are no longer “free range” as they are in a poly tunnel.  What about the eggs you buy at the supermarket which are usually labelled “free range”.  See below for the “con” that this is, irrespective of the present DEFRA constraints.

The exert below is from The Guardian newspaper published on Monday.  If you have the heart (and a strong stomach) you can read the full article https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/jan/30/free-range-eggs-con-ethical

Of all their cons, the “free range” egg is perhaps the most audacious. You’d need Disney-level imagination to believe the UK can produce more than 10bn eggs each year without inconveniencing any chickens. But by slapping “free range” on the label, and perhaps a nice pastoral scene with a few chickens roaming free, most consumers never realise how the eggs came to be in the box.

The question of the ethical egg is back on the agenda after the government ordered that, in the face of bird flu, poultry must be kept indoors until at least the end of February. This means “free range” eggs may have to be renamed “barn eggs”. Yet whatever they’re called, few shoppers realise what “free range” means and what routine horrors are allowed under its reassuring banner.

Beak trimming is commonplace in the UK. Almost all young hens have part of their beaks burned off without anaesthetic to stop them pecking at the other hens in their cramped, traumatised flocks. Free range sheds can contain up to nine birds per square metre – that’s like 14 adults living in a one-room flat. Some multi-tier sheds (still “free range”) contain 16,000 hens. So while these poor birds can theoretically go outdoors, they can also be too crammed in and too traumatised to find the few exit holes.

What hell we put them through: hens in the wild lay just 20 eggs per year but modern farms with high protein feed and near-constant lighting push them to lay closer to 500 eggs annually. Their exhausted bodies are then discarded within months – routinely sent to slaughter having lived less than one-tenth of their natural lifespan.