Having led a successful campaign to ban barren battery cages for hens in the EU, it’s particularly galling to find yet another animal being widely forced to live in similar conditions. Our investigators looked into this appalling industry in France, Italy and Spain. This is how they described what they found:
‘Dripping urine and rabbit faeces had built up underneath the wire mesh battery cages…mounds piled knee-high in several sections. It’s a truly filthy business.’
‘The intensive rabbit farms I saw were the dirtiest and most squalid farms I’ve ever visited – one was literally ramshackle, falling apart at the seams, exposing tiers of caged rabbits to the elements.’
This is why Compassion is calling for an end to factory farming for rabbits. It’s estimated that over 300 million rabbits are farmed in the EU, the vast majority of them in cages. Despite this incredible number of rabbits – in fact they are the second most farmed species in Europe, second only to chickens – we cannot find one single piece of EU legislation that specifically protects them from cruelty, injury or pain. Rabbits have even been left out of the new EU slaughter regulations for 2013.
That is why we’re looking for a Rabbit Revolution! We want an urgent end to caged rabbit farming in favour of group housing and free range farming. We also want to see rabbit meat labelled according to method of production so that consumers can know whether the meat is produced humanely or not. If we can get chickens and pigs out of cages, then, we must also free rabbits from factory farms. Please join with me today to make rabbits in factory farms illegal.
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