Kingsland Caged Egg Facility
Investigated by activists in May 2013 - footage provided to and released by Animal Liberation ACT in December 2013. Kingsland Egg Farm, owned by the Langfield Pastoral Company (LPC), is a 6 tier, 6 shed battery hen facility with approximately 400,000 hens crammed into wire cages. While the cages are larger than at many other facilities, more birds are packed into each one (10-20 in each cage). LPC also owns a free range farm just up the road from the caged facility (which is not yet visible on Google Maps, but can be seen on Apple Maps).
The majority of the hens in the cages had lost most of their feathers and had very white/pale combs, indicating poor health. Others were found dead and rotting in the cages.
The farm made headlines in October 2013 following an outbreak of bird flu which forced the owners to kill all the remaining birds. It is believed that the virus started in the free range facility after the birds came into contact with wild ducks carrying the disease, and it later spread across to the caged facility. The outbreak of the virus is unrelated to the filming of the material, which took place 5 months before the outbreak, and the free range facility was not entered by activists.
After the outbreak and "culling", the farm was quarantined. Media coverage focused heavily on the toll the incident has taken on the business and the family that owns it, along with the resulting shortage of eggs on Australian supermarket shelves. The suffering of the millions of birds who have, over the 11 years of the farm's operation, been confined, abused and sent to slaughter at 18 months old, was conspicuously absent from these reports.
