Voters may decide chicken coop controversy

A fight over how much room hens have to lay their eggs is brewing in Oregon and Washington, and the issue could be placed before voters.

Most consumers probably don’t think about where the eggs they eat come from or how the chicken is treated. But animal welfare groups want every hen to have enough room to spread their wings and turn around – essentially cage free – but local farmers say it’s unrealistic and would shut them down.

The Humane Society of the U.S. captured video of farms in Iowa that show chickens crammed in cages with almost no room to move.

“Inside of these (wire) battery cages, each bird has less space than a single sheet of paper on which to live for more than a year before she is slaughtered,” said Paul Shapiro with the Humane Society. “It really is difficult to imagine a more miserable existence.”

But the cages at Willamette Egg Farm in Canby don’t look like the ones in the Humane Society video. The chickens aren’t tightly packed in and they can move around. Each cage is about four square feet and holds eight hens.

“Clearly, it’s a very efficient way to produce eggs,” said Greg Satrum with Willamette Egg Farm. “The hens do stay clean and healthy.”

But if voters in Oregon and Washington opt to give hens twice the space – freeing them from cages – Willamette Egg Farm’s cages would be against the law.

Willamette Egg Farm does have hens that are cage free but they make up only 5 percent of its hen population of about 2 million. Satrum said that’s all customers buy so far.

“It’s quite a bit more expensive,” Satrum said which goes for switching over the rest of the farm to cage free.

“The egg industry did its own economic analysis on what it would cost for egg farmers to switch from cage confinement to cage free,” Shapiro said. “And what they found is that it would cost less than a penny per egg more.”

“To convert completely to a nice cage-free system that we would be proud of, we’re probably looking at 80 to 100 million dollars,” Satrum said.

As a compromise, farmers came up with requirements for bigger cages that have twice as much space and allow the chickens to turn around a flap their wings.

But animal welfare groups say the cages aren’t big enough and want all Northwest hens and their eggs cage free within eight years.

“They’re really proposing a pretty extreme measure, I think, to try to put Oregon farmers out of business,” Satrum said.

“All animals, including animals raised for food deserve protection from cruelty,” Shapiro said.

The Humane Society says this is not just about cruelty but also about food safety. It says tests found higher levels of salmonella in confined chickens.

This is not about chickens running free in a field. Those are free-range chickens.

If the initiatives make the ballot, Oregon voters would have their say on the issue during the November 2012 election while Washington residents would vote on it this November.