Indians can now have eggs and milk from stress-free hens and cows. But how popular and viable is it?
If you think “stress-free” is something that describes your holiday in the hills, think again. “Stress-free” is the latest gold standard for “organic” animal produce — primarily, eggs and chicken from hens, and milk and related products from cows. “Stress-free” in this sense, refers to the conditions in which these animals live and includes not just a greater degree of cleanliness and hygiene in their living area and special care that they eat only organic feed free of any chemicals, but also that they are happy and not subjected to pain when the egg/milk is extracted from them.
For instance, the 70 cows at Organic India's research centre near Lucknow live in clean, spacious sheds that are swept regularly, have fans to keep them cool, go for evening walks and have baths at a fixed time; they are milked manually and their fodder is organic grass. A far cry from commercial dairies where the cows are injected with oxytocin (a drug that is banned for use on animals in India) to increase their milk production. “We humans get stressed when we see injections, so imagine how a cow reacts; and mind you, these are large injections!” says Krishan Gupta, managing director of Organic India. Gupta is not being squeamish here — numerous studies in the West have shown that induced overlactation makes cows vulnerable to disease and leads to a drop in fertility rates.
Organic India’s desi ghee is marketed as organic — “from TENSION-FREE cows” the label proclaims — and, priced at Rs 199 for 300 ml, commands a healthy premium over ordinary ghee. It also tastes better, claims Gupta, because it’s “food made with love, it has the power of positive energy.”
Organic, “humane” dairy, poultry or meat products is a well-established trend in the West, catering to the evolved sensibilities about cruelty to animals in the developed world. In the US and UK, there are numerous vendors of such foodstuffs along with organisations such as “Certified Humane” and the European Network for Farm Animal Protection to lay down norms and ensure compliance. In European Union countries, for instance, battery cages for hens will be banned from January 1 next year. Battery cages refer to the wire mesh enclosures in which commercial poultries keep their hens. These allow so little space for individual birds that they cannot even spread their wings, much less dust themselves, forage or nest.
In India, of the 232.2 million egg-laying hens (2008 figures), as many as 200 million live in these battery cages, according to a report of Humane Society International, the US-based animal rights advocacy which has recently opened an India chapter. Battery cages are not banned in India, but now, with a growing middle-class more conscious of cruelty to animals and more attuned to trends in the West, there are a few vendors of cage-free hens. A few hotels such as Crowne Plaza Today in Gurgaon, Ramada Plaza in Delhi and Four Seasons Hotel Mumbai, as well as specialty restaurant Hao Shi Nian Nian and celebrity Chef Mako Ravindran have switched to cage-free eggs — as a statement of their sensitivity to animals, the enviornment, and presumably, humans too.
But for consumer sales of cage-free eggs, there's just one vendor — Keggfarms near Delhi which supplies the Kegg brand of cage-free hens. The birds here are kept in deep litter housing with adequate room to run around, have ready access to feed and clean water, perches to roost on and “even curtains to draw when it is very hot” says Vinod Kapur, chairman of Keggfarms. But it’s expensive —six Keggs eggs cost Rs 50, more than double of what you pay for the normal variety.
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The economic logic is also something that Manjunath Marappan of Happy Hen Farms near Bangalore is trying to work out. Marappan has been conducting a “pilot” for the past year in free range eggs. (Free range refers to the traditional way of raising hens — letting them roam free and forage as they like.) Marappan, who has a garments business, began with 10 hens and cocks. “But it is just not economically viable,” he says. Given that there are few poultry farmers in India attempting to do anything similar, he has been in touch with farmers in Europe running free-range poultries. Even so, it will take him another year to scale up the operation to around 1,000 hens and begin supplying to buyers Marappan says. And then too he’ll have to price them at Rs 10 apiece.
But does the animal cruelty debate make sense in India?
Last month the Animal Welfare Board of India passed a directive against forced starvation moulting, a common practice in commercial poultries where hens are not given food and water so as to stimulate their reproductive systems into laying eggs. Kapur of Keggfarms disagrees that it is cruel. “Don't we all go on fasts to cleanse our bodies or lose weight? And it is not starvation, but controlled feeding, or feeding on alternate days, for four-five days so that the birds who gain a lot of weight during moulting (when birds shed feather) are rejuvenated. It is stress no doubt, but then this is a country where 99 per cent of eggs are produced in battery cages, with a large number of people living in desperate poverty.”
More important, AWBI is only an advisory body. It has no authority to implement any of its directives — either the one against forced moulting or the elaborate amendments on how slaughter houses are to be laid out and mandating that no animal in the flock should see the killing — which are flouted almost universally. “We have no authority to punish offenders,” says R M Kharb, its chairman. “Implementation is up to the civic bodies and state governments.”
It is no surprise, thus, that the apex animal welfare body has not received any response from a poultry farmer on its starvation moulting directive.
