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The petition started by animal welfare campaigner Pauline McLynn last week passed 10,000 signatures this Tuesday and is addressed to the Musgrave Group, which owns the Centra, SuperValu, Daybreak and Musgrave Marketplace chains. It calls on the company to publish “a timeline to stop sourcing eggs from farms that cage hens”.
The text of the petition concludes: “Musgrave, in the words of Mrs Doyle... ‘Ah, go on. Go on, go on, go on,’ stop using cruel cages!”
McLynn claims that “other leading retailers in Ireland including Tesco, Lidl, Aldi, and Iceland have made commitments to phase out and stop selling eggs from caged hens”. While those multiples have issued promises to remove caged hen eggs in the next nine years following similar petitions in the UK, most of those statements refer specifically to British stores. Industry sources told The Dealer that they do not apply to Ireland.
This also leaves out Dunnes Stores, Ireland’s joint largest grocery chain with SuperValu. Singling out the Musgrave Group and asking it to “join its competitors” in banning caged hen eggs seems a bit of a stretch.
’Suffering’
McLynn also denounces the “suffering” of hens kept in “cruel colony cages”: “They will never get to experience the sun on their back or grass between their toes,” – fair enough – “let alone carry out natural hen behaviours”.
IFA poultry chair Nigel Renaghan disagrees. Since old cages were phased out in 2012 and replaced with so-called “enriched colonies”, he argues that cages have offered “a perfect environment” for hens. “The bird has a lot more freedom to move about, flap her wings and exhibit natural behaviour,” he told The Dealer.
Having worked under both the old and new regime, Renaghan said cages now featured permanent monitoring of temperature, ammonia and CO2. “People who are campaigning against caged colonies haven’t seen them,” he added, citing the lack of information on the efforts made by poultry farmers to improve animal welfare in recent years.
“Musgrave takes animal welfare very seriously and we are committed to ensuring best practice is adhered to at every stage of the supply chain,” the company said in a statement to The Dealer. The retailer added that it also offers free-range eggs and sources all of its eggs from more than 100 Bord Bia quality-assured Irish farmers.
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