And why SAFE is working to end it.
Factory farming is the industrial-farming of animals, where their lives are shaped around maximising production, efficiency, and scale.
This can look like…
Around 800,000 hens in Aotearoa are trapped in colony cages. A hen will spend her entire life unable to walk freely, dust-bathe in the soil, or fully stretch her wings.
A mother pig may be confined in a crate when she gives birth, unable to turn around or nurture her piglets.
Around 125 million chickens are farmed for meat, and 1.6 million hens are farmed for their eggs in barn systems.
Thousands of cattle confined into overcrowded wastelands made up of mud, faeces, and urine, with little-to-no access to shade or shelter.
Image Credit: Grassroots Campaigns
Farmed fishes are confined in crowded, barren cages where they can suffer from disease, deformities, and heat stress. Denied the freedom to swim freely and express natural behaviours, mass mortality events are common.
A chicken bred for meat is bred to grow so quickly that her body struggles to support her, putting her legs, heart, and other organs under immense strain.
Beaks are cut off to reduce feather pecking. Tails are docked to prevent biting. Teeth may be clipped. Animals can be subjected to painful mutilations because the environment they’re living in makes these problems more likely.
The details look different across species, but the underlying idea is the same:
Animals are treated as units in a production line, valued for what they can produce rather than for the lives they could experience.
The future isn’t fixed.
We don’t have to accept cages, crates, and crowded sheds as part of our food system.
We can build a future where animals are no longer treated as commodities to be produced, confined, and controlled.
We can end factory farming.
Join us.
Build a resilient, plant-based food system that doesn’t depend on animal exploitation.
‘Free-range’ is a term commonly used to describe farming systems where animals can have access to the outdoors. The label ‘free-range’ can create an impression of animals living freely outside, with more natural lives and greater freedom of movement.
In reality, ‘free-range’ describes aspects of an animal’s housing. It
A chicken can be bred to grow so quickly that she struggles to walk and still be raised on a farm certified by a trusted animal welfare organisation. That’s what recent footage from two SPCA Certified farms shows.
Corporate progress and opportunities in New Zealand’s transition away from caging hens