Meet the Parents is a campaign that exposes the hidden truth about parent/breeder farms in the egg, backyard hen and meat industries. This is an area of factory farming that remains largely invisible to the public.
You might have heard about battery cages and broiler sheds, but what about the parents of those chickens? In parent farms, hens and roosters are crammed together and used for breeding. Their chicks supply the meat, egg and backyard hen industries, while the parents themselves end up in the slaughterhouse.
What we’ve uncovered:
- Hens are constantly mated by multiple roosters with no way to escape.
- Severe feather loss leading to exposed red and sore skin prone to infection.
- Overcrowding that causes stress, fighting and injuries.
- Roosters forced to fight for space, often resulting in terrible wounds.
- Inadequate food, water and absolutely no medical care.
WHAT IS A PARENT FARM?
Parent farms are factory farms that house hens and roosters together for one purpose: to produce fertilised eggs. The birds are crammed into sheds where the hens are constantly mated by multiple roosters with no way to escape. Their eggs are collected and moved to hatcheries for artificial incubation. Once the eggs hatch, the chicks are moved into a factory farming system or sent to feed supply stores or other backyard hen suppliers.
Egg Industry Parent Farms
Most of the female chicks will endure painful debeaking. They are then raised in either caged, barn raised or aviary/free-range systems. Once they reach approximately 17 weeks old they are transferred to a laying facility.
What about their brothers? The male chicks are considered “waste products” since they can’t lay eggs and aren’t the right breed for meat. They’re killed on their first day of life – either ground up alive in macerators, suffocated or painfully gassed to death.
See our Truth About Eggs page here for further information.
There are also parent farms that specialise in supplying the backyard hen industry. When someone buys young hens from a feed store or pet shop, they probably think they’re making a humane choice. But the truth is the parents of those birds were most likely kept in factory farm conditions and will be slaughtered when they stop producing as many eggs as the farmer wants. The mother hens never get to meet their chicks and the boys will still be killed on day one.
Meat Industry Parent Farms
In the meat industry, parent birds suffer in different ways. These birds have been selectively bred to produce offspring that grow at three times the natural rate, but this means the parents themselves must be kept on severely restricted diets to prevent them from growing too large to mate.
I’ve seen firsthand how these birds are starving and desperate for food. If they survive the harsh conditions in parent sheds, they’re typically sent to slaughter at around 18 months old.
The fertilised eggs produced by the parent birds are incubated in hatcheries with machinery that mimics the brooding mothers by turning the eggs every hour in a temperature-controlled environment. Once hatched, these chicks are transferred to grower sheds where they’re forced to grow at such an unnatural rate that they suffer from respiratory conditions, skeletal problems, and painful burns from sitting in their own waste.
After this brief, painful existence, they’re sent to slaughter at just 4-8 weeks old – still babies, with blue eyes and peeping like the baby chicks they are even as they’re loaded onto slaughter trucks.
And please don’t be fooled by “RSPCA Approved” labels. We’ve seen these farms, and the reality bears little resemblance to the marketing. A video from Animals Within uncovers the harsh truth behind the marketing and media spin. You can watch this investigation here.
Meet the Parents
At NSW Hen Rescue, liberation has always been at the heart of what we do. We don’t just talk about the horrors of parent farms – we rescue real individuals from these places and give them the lives they deserve.
Watch the videos featured below to meet some of the members of our Hen Rescue family saved from the horrors of these farms. You can also watch their progress as they experience love, freedom and compassion for the first time, via our YouTube playlist here.
A Rooster named Martin
Martin was a wise and determined boy. Found languishing on the floor of a factory farm in November 2023, Martin was unable to reach food or water. He had painful wounds from urine burns and from being attacked by the roosters he was crammed in with. Despite our hopes for Martin, we weren’t sure if he would survive after rescue, let alone stand and walk again. We promised to give him love and care for whatever time he had.
If there’s one thing we learnt from Martin, it’s how determined he and all animals are to live their best life when given the chance.
After weeks of rehabilitation including time in his wheelchair, leg massage and hydrotherapy, Martin started off 2024 by letting out his first crow. He kept pushing himself and to our surprise he was soon standing and walking again. Whilst he continued to struggle with the way he’d been bred, including continuous respiratory and mobility issues, his determination was remarkable and he spent 13 months with us before passing away peacefully on his favourite rainbow blanket.
Martin is still loved by so many from all around the world who joined us to celebrate his many triumphs. We are grateful for every day he had with us and the love we all shared for him. You can watch Martin’s rescue and progress below.
A Girl named Suzie
Suzie is one of the mother hens we saved from a parent farm in late 2023. Suzie and five other girls had huge balls of faeces, feathers and egg shells stuck around their feet. The faeces ball on Suzie’s foot was about the size of a coconut and as hard and heavy as concrete. After 2 days of soaking we were finally able to free her foot as well as the other girls Amanda, Gillian, Lacie, Monica and Mildred.
Poor Suzie was left with a broken toe and her skin was red raw, but much like Martin and the other girls, she was slowly able to heal from all the trauma of being used to breed chicks for the backyard hen industry. She now adores her days exploring with Claude the rooster and the girls.
You can watch Suzie’s rescue in the videos below.
TAKE ACTION!
You can be the change you’d like to see in the world and make a difference to the lives of animals like Martin, Ash, Sophie, Lily, Sabrina, Mamita, Jin and all the other parent birds featured in this campaign by taking animals and their secretions off your plate.
This campaign and the stories of the individual hens and roosters rescued, highlights how the daily decision to consume animals and their secretions only serves to support these industries that inflict such harm upon animals.
The animals deserve better, and their fate is in your hands!
We have partnered with the Vegan Easy Challenge, a grassroots campaign which promotes veganism as the ethical, rational, and earth friendly lifestyle that it is. You can sign up to the 30-day challenge via our unique link here and the VE team will help guide you in adopting a plant-based diet through daily emails, recipes from their dieticians, and access to their Facebook group where you can engage with other people doing the challenge.
If the challenge doesn’t appeal to you there are a range of resources available via the Vegan Australia website here where you’ll find vegan cheat sheets, and shopping guides for everyday items at major supermarkets like Woolworths and Coles. You can also go to their own website and type ‘vegan’ into the search engine and find an array of plant-based options from pantry items, dairy substitutes and plant-based meats. Watch Dominion, Earthlings, Cowspiracy (available on Netflix) and What The Health (available on Netflix) and The Game Changers (available on Netflix). You can find links to all these here and we urge you to further educate yourself on the benefits of adopting veganism for the animals, the environment and for your health.
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Sources:
https://kb.rspca.org.au/knowledge-base/how-are-layer-hens-farmed-in-australia/
https://kb.rspca.org.au/knowledge-base/how-are-meat-chickens-farmed-in-australia/