TAKOMA PARK, Md.—Miyun Park cradled a nearly featherless hen in her arms while cooing to a playpen filled with several more hens she had stolen from a nearby egg farm, an act of protest she calls a “rescue” from inhumane conditions.
The henhouse raid in November was the second for Ms. Park, 32, and an animal advocacy group called Compassion Over Killing. Members of the group court arrest by entering chicken sheds at night and filming the rows of hens crammed 10 to a cage the size of a file-drawer cabinet. They get close-ups of swollen eyes, infected skin and shattered wings entangled in cage wire.
“This is the next antioppression movement,” Ms. Park said after the raid, in which the group took 10 chickens from an egg farm in Millington, Md.
“Birds feel pain just as strongly as cats and dogs,” she said, “but it’s perfectly legal to inflict pain on egg-laying hens every day. If those sheds were filled with kittens, there would be an uproar.”
After focusing for years on fur coat manufacturers and researchers using animals to test cosmetics and other products, the animal welfare movement has a new target: farmers who raise millions of chickens, cows and pigs in closed, confined areas—what activists call factory farms.
Compassion Over Killing, based in Washington, is one of more than a dozen animal welfare groups making life uncomfortable for the egg industry. Other groups, among them Mercy for Animals in Ohio and Compassionate Action for Animals in Minnesota, have performed similar “rescues.”
Earlier this year the United Egg Producers, a trade group representing 85 percent of the country’s egg producers, issued revised guidelines in response to the complaints of animal welfare groups. The industry promised to increase gradually the size of the enclosed wire cages it uses, known as battery cages, by 30 to 40 percent; improve procedures for trimming chickens’ beaks; and figure out how to force chickens to molt, which induces them to lay more eggs, without starving them for several days.
“This is a serious issue, and we’re taking it very seriously,” said Al Pope, the president of the trade association.
Both animal rights activists and the industry point to Europe as the model for their moves. European animal welfare advocates in recent years have won sweeping changes, including a ban on forced molting and a gradual ban on the battery cages used in the United States.
Mr. Pope said he tried to head off such sweeping changes by establishing less radical guidelines. This summer he visited several European countries to look at alternative ways of raising hens.
At issue is the welfare of the hens and the cost of raising them. The more hens in a battery shed, the lower the cost of producing eggs.
“We will live or die on what’s best for the bird and best for the consumer,” Mr. Pope said.
The activists want more, especially after several recent victories in their dealings with major corporations that push standards for hens further than the industry has.
McDonald’s has agreed to buy eggs only from producers who do not starve their chickens to force molting and who raise them in cages of at least 72 square inches for each bird, nearly double the current United States average of 40 square inches.
“Europe is far ahead of us in providing basic humane living conditions for animals living on farms,” said Wayne Pacelli, senior vice president of the Humane Society of the United States.
The Humane Society sponsored an initiative, approved by Florida voters last month, that bans small gestation crates on hog farms, calling them restrictive and cruel.
“That is a watershed—the first state law to limit the means of keeping animals in agriculture, and it won’t be the last,” Mr. Pacelli said.
For Ms. Park and Paul Shapiro, the 23-year-old founder and leader of Compassion Over Killing, legislative action has been too slow. Legislators, they say, need to be jolted by what they call investigations and rescues—and industry officials call breaking and entering.
The activists say that while they do not expect modern producers to return to the days when most eggs came from hens raised on small family farms, a variety of changes can be made. These include enlarging cages so that the birds can flap their wings, allowing them to exercise outside the cages, giving them care from a veterinarian, allowing them to molt naturally and keeping them protected from manure piles and clean of manure drippings from one another.
“Chickens have a right to be chickens,” Mr. Shapiro said. “To walk on the ground, scratch the earth, spread their wings, roost, take dust baths.”
As the two activists sorted out their chickens after Ms. Park had brought them from the raid, they gave them names—Jane, Phoebe, Harriet, Gabrielle, Lola—and lifted them from their pet carriers.
Mr. Shapiro, who eats no animal products, was a sophomore at a private high school in Washington when he started Compassion Over Killing as a small club in 1995. It now claims more than 2,000 dues-paying members and an annual budget of $88,000.
Ms. Park began questioning how farm animals were raised while at Middlebury College in Vermont, where she wrote her senior honors thesis in philosophy on the need for a new animal rights ethic.
In this new phase of fighting for hens, Ms. Park says her greatest ally is public opinion. “Most consumers still think eggs come from hens who walk around with their little chicks following in a row,” she said.
The group has found adoptive homes for the 10 hens in the countryside around Washington. Mr. Shapiro will not say where. He would be willing to go to jail, he said, but does not want the hens returned to their cages.
Before the hens were carted off to their new homes, Ms. Park and Mr. Shapiro picked them up from the playpen and let them walk on the earth for the first time.
