Managing welfare during the industry transition from battery to enriched colony cages for laying hens.
The transition from battery to enriched colony cages represents genuine welfare progress that, while falling short of cage-free standards, provides meaningful behavioral opportunity improvements for hens. The welfare hierarchy - battery cage below enriched colony below cage-free - is well established, but the transition welfare gap between different systems is variable depending on management quality. Poorly managed cage-free can create worse welfare outcomes for individual hens than well-managed enriched colonies, making system type an incomplete welfare proxy. The trajectory of welfare improvement, driven by corporate commitments and consumer pressure, is clearly toward cage-free as the minimum standard.