The global shift from enriched cages to cage-free egg production presents both opportunities and challenges for laying hen welfare. Understanding the transition process helps navigate its complexities.
The cage-free transition is one of the most important ongoing shifts in farm animal welfare policy, but it is not without complexity. Moving to cage-free systems eliminates the most severe behavioural restrictions of enriched cages but introduces new welfare risks including disease, injurious pecking, and keel bone fractures from falls. The welfare outcome depends heavily on management quality — a well-run cage-free system provides dramatically better welfare than an enriched cage, but a poorly managed one may not. The transition challenge is ensuring that welfare commitments translate into genuine welfare improvement rather than just a label change without management quality improvement.