January 8

By Alice Shopland, founder of Angel Food

I’m marking Veganuary 2025 by publishing a blog post a day.

As animal lovers we know that animals have feelings and want to live. Society frowns on animal cruelty but somehow grants exceptions when those animals are considered food.

When I was newly vegan, I was invited by the animal rights group Open Rescue to join them on a night-time visit to an egg farm south of Auckland. I took the name of the organisation rather too literally and turned up at the rendezvous in a bright pink cardigan, but someone lent me a more appropriate black hoodie.

There were about a dozen of us. Most of us waited on a hillside above the hen sheds, sitting in the quiet darkness while a couple of people checked that there were no alarms or locks. Then we were given the signal, and we headed down to see the hens. I had seen numerous photos and videos of egg farms, but nothing prepared me for the sheer bleakness of that shed.

Having had bantam hens at home when I was a kid, I knew how curious, busy and downright opinionated chickens are. Seeing these girls crammed into wire cages without room to stretch their wings, with no fresh air, no daylight, no sunshine, no rain, no greenery, nowhere to perch, nothing to scratch and fossick in with beaks or claws, was horrifying. Those wire cages? Even the floor was wire mesh, allowing the excrement to fall through rather than build up. But it means the hens, with their soft fleshy feet, only have wire mesh to stand on. No wonder they will stand on their dead or dying cell mates when they have the opportunity.

We did some filming and carefully lifted a dozen hens into cat cages we’d brought with us. Then we did a brief visit to another hellhole, a pig farm. I saw sows in farrowing crates so narrow they could only stand up or lie down. I saw the despair in their eyes.

We had travelled in several vehicles to the farm and before heading home in the wee small hours we convened at a carpark to debrief. The conversation turned inevitably to food, and I remember thinking how perplexed most people would be that this radical group – considered terrorists by some – were swapping vegan cheesecake recipes.

The following day I saw the rescued hens take their first-ever steps on grass. They stepped out cautiously but with typical chicken curiosity, and they experimented with stretching their wings. It was a total delight to see and I was honoured to be there. But for months and years afterwards, I would often think of the thousands of birds we left behind, and how they would at some stage have been pulled out of their cages, carried in bunches by their legs, crammed into crates to be transported to slaughter. And the cages would be cleaned out and refilled with the next batch.

Since I visited that farm there have been changes to legislation and those types of battery cages are no longer legal in New Zealand. But even in better cages, or in free-range situations, hens that are part of a commercial operation are victims of the food industry.

In 2014 Colin and I were heading from Auckland down to New Plymouth through rural Waikato to visit our baby grandson. It was Colin’s turn to drive, and I was idly looking at the fields we were passing. Suddenly I caught a glimpse of a cow who had just given birth: the afterbirth was hanging out of her and her calf lying on the grass beside her was still wet. It struck me that the new mother wasn't looking at her baby, she was watching a farmer in the same field closing the tailgate of a high-sided trailer. Inside that trailer were half a dozen baby calves. I’m sure she knew that in a few days, her calf would also be on that trailer.

That cow and that calf feel special to me because of that moment I witnessed, but it’s a scene played out millions of times every year in Aotearoa New Zealand. Not everybody knows that a cow, like any female mammal, will only produce milk after giving birth. Dairy cattle are artificially impregnated every year and every year their calf is taken from them within hours or days. They are not machines, they are living beings with maternal instincts, and they mourn their calves.