For three days in early January, the UK farming community, and invested NGOs and businesses, head to Oxford for two important conferences – the industry-orientated Oxford Farming Conference, a key fixture for politicians, farming groups and food business, and the Oxford Real Farming Conference, a rallying point for the environmentally focused food and farming movement.  

The good news from both conferences is the very stark realisation by farmers that we cannot continue sleepwalking down the well-worn pathway of habit. Farmers have been a bellwether for the impacts of extreme weather events and changing climate in the UK, and the extent to which they have embraced the need for change was very evident. So, nature-friendly farming, regenerative agriculture and sustainability were the buzzwords of the week. And not just from the farmers, but from their backers (the banks) and their buyers (the supermarkets).    

We’ve repeatedly heard intensive farming advocates infer that ‘If animals weren’t happy, they wouldn’t produce milk, or lay eggs or produce litters of piglets, so they must be doing OK’. But this is a fundamental misunderstanding about the difference between animal health and animal welfare. Just because a caged animal is healthy, it does not mean its happy.

A new dimension to this got an airing at the conference. A scientist gave a presentation about gene-editing in livestock, explaining how technological developments had made it possible to edit out an entire disease affecting pigs worldwide. This would, he excitedly explained, “..represent a paradigm shift in animal welfare improvement and livestock farming globally.”  

Although being free from disease is of course a good thing, I’m far from convinced it is the single biggest transformation that we could make for farmed animals.  

We’ve selectively bred ‘Frankenchickens’ and gargantuan Holstein dairy cows to a point where they are pathologically unhealthy from the moment they breathe, and then, because it is cheaper and more manageable, they are farmed in cages or in intensive systems. It’s unlikely that any sentient animal in such a system has a ‘good’ life.    

The caged keeping for farmed animals must end. There’s nothing to be gained by propping up a system that consumers are turning their backs on and everything to be gained for the 16 million animals that continue to suffer in the misery of that system in the UK. Only once we move away from these outdated systems can we begin to have a discussion about what gives a farm animal a truly ‘good’ life.    

That’s why we won’t stop campaigning for an end the cage age once and for all. Keep your eyes glued to our channels on how you can help make this change a reality.