Prisoned Chickens, Poisoned Eggs – Essential Reading

“For the Activist an Invaluable Tool”

Review by Clare Druce, Director of Farm Animal Welfare Network (UK)

Prisoned Chickens, Poisoned Eggs is an outstanding expose of modern intensive poultry production. The author, Karen Davis, displays a respectful, tender appreciation of the birds she writes about, yet unflinchingly takes the reader through every abusive aspect of industrialized chickens’ lives, frequently quoting from research by the world’s leading poultry scientists. The deprivation Dr. Davis describes is all the more poignant in the light of her accounts of birds’ intelligence, the devotion shown to their young, and their undoubted capacity for enjoyment, given a natural environment.

She tells how the mother hen communicates with chicks still in the shell, and how later she’ll periodically shelter them under her wings for up to eight weeks - longer than the entire “lifespan” of a modern broiler chicken. Davis writes of ancestral memories, citing research indicating that in battery cages, hens go through the motions of dustbathing (vacuum dustbathing) on the bare wire of the cage floor, so dispelling the myth that “what they’ve never known they don’t miss.”

Veterinarians, poultry industrialists and, yes, physicians too would do well to read this painstakingly researched book. For the activist, it provides an invaluable tool.

Clare Druce is the author of Minny’s Dream, the story of a battery hen’s desperate effort to be liberated, available from United Poultry Concerns for $10.

To order your copy of Prisoned Chickens, Poisoned Eggs, send check or money order for $14.95 to United Poultry Concerns, PO Box 150, Machipongo, VA 23405 USA, or order by credit card at www.upc-online.org/merchandise/book.html.