Furnished colony cages for laying hens — an improvement over battery cages but still controversial — and the ongoing debate about cage-free transitions.
Furnished colonies represent an ethical halfway house in egg production: better than barren battery cages, but still a compromise that prevents full expression of natural behavior and causes welfare costs through space restriction. The transition to cage-free systems has gathered significant momentum globally, driven by corporate commitments and consumer pressure, but cage-free systems are not without welfare challenges of their own — particularly keel bone fractures from flying and landing in aviary systems. The welfare science increasingly supports well-managed cage-free systems as superior overall despite these specific challenges, and the trajectory of regulation and corporate commitments is clearly toward cage-free as the new minimum standard.