Europe Votes to Ban the Battery Cage

On July 19, 1999, the Council of the European Union adopted Directive 1999/74/EC, setting minimum welfare standards for laying hens across the bloc. Its most consequential line banned the conventional battery cage, the barren wire enclosure that had become the default way to house egg-laying hens. Switzerland had outlawed the cages years earlier, in 1992, but the EU directive bound a whole continent of producers at once. The ban did not take effect immediately. The directive set a phase-out running to January 2012, more than a decade to redesign the barns. When the deadline came it changed how hundreds of millions of hens in Europe were kept, and handed campaigners elsewhere a working model to point at.