Growing up in the United Kingdom in the 1990s and early 2000s, almost all the eggs in our supermarket came from battery hens, those raised in small wire enclosures.
The living conditions in these cages are terrible. Birds get the space equivalent of an A4 sheet of paper. They don’t have the room to carry out their natural behaviors, such as nesting, perching, or dust bathing.
That has changed in recent decades. You can see this in the chart, which shows the conditions under which eggs are produced in the UK. Free-range eggs have increased from just 10% to 75%.
The use of caged hens has fallen, and the types of caged enclosures have also changed. Battery cages were banned in 2012, so legally, all cages since then have been “enriched” ones, which provide slightly more space.
Still, these do not give hens the freedom and room they’d have in barns or free-range farms. Studies suggest that moving hens from enriched cages to cage-free systems reduces the time they spend in pain by more than half.
And given that most eggs in the UK are now free-range, it’s possible to reduce this pain even further.
Where this page came from
This page was imported from Our World in Data. “Three-quarters of eggs produced in the United Kingdom are free-range” by Hannah Ritchie, Pablo Rosado, published by Our World in Data under CC BY 4.0. Changed here: set as a page, its interactive charts shown as pictures. Data from third parties keeps its own licence.
Nobody has written it yet — it is the source material at a new address, which is why search engines are asked to skip it and why no one earns from it. It is up for grabs: take it on, and it is yours to rewrite and to earn from.
Licence: CC BY 4.0 · Adapted from ourworldindata.org
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