A few days before the return of the International Agricultural Show, L214 wants to hit hard. Accustomed to videos denouncing the conditions of intensive farming, the anti-species association is preparing to publish new images to alert to cases of abuse linked to industrial agriculture. Chicken farming, trawling, ducks with foie gras, pigs above ground, rabbits in cages… Until the opening of the show, scheduled for Saturday, animal production will be targeted every day in videos calling on citizens to challenge the presidential candidates on their commitments to fight against these practices. Each sequence is also commented on by a specialist in the subject or a public figure. A former breeder who no longer wants to intensively breed chickens, a British scientist presented as a specialist in the suffering of fish for trawlers, vegan chef Alexis Gauthier for foie gras, anti-green algae activist Yves-Marie The Lay for Pigs and Vipulan Puvaneswaran, one of the film’s two protagonists Animal by Cyril Dion, for rabbits. Three complaints for “abuse” Where “bad treatments” will be filed against the duck, pig and rabbit farms implicated in the videos.
The first video, which will be broadcast on Tuesday, was shot in the Sarthe in a chicken farm in buildings, which supplies the Gaulois brand of the poultry giant LDC. Thousands of chickens of the “Ross 308” breed, known as “fast-growing”, are raised for thirty to forty days. The images show many featherless, dead or dying poultry. They recall another video shot in Italy by a Spanish animal defense association and published by the NGO Welfarm. If the images are shocking, the mortality of chickens in buildings, and young animals in intensive farming in general, is a common phenomenon. As the director of the Oeuvre d’assistance aux animals d’abattoirs, Frédéric Freund, explained to Release at the end of last year: “With more than a billion animals slaughtered per year in France, even if the mortality rate in farms was only 2 or 3%, we arrive at enormous figures. And we are well above these percentages. For broilers, it is estimated between 3 and 7% mortality in breeding. In the documents of the Sarthois breeding filmed by L214, we learn that out of more than 20,000 animals bred in this lot, 345 died during growth. Or 1.7%.
“Condemned to work and produce to the maximum”
The images were taken in a so-called “integration” farm: this means that the breeder is ultimately only a subcontractor under contract with the manufacturer, here the LDC group. It is the group that supplies the animals and feeds them (in the case of LDC, through its subsidiary Huttepain Aliments). A situation that places breeders in an intermediary role, where they are under pressure from manufacturers, as told Freed in a survey of poultry collection. This is what regrets, in the video posted online by L214, the Vendean breeder Francis Guilloteau who calls for the end of intensive breeding: “Today, the breeder is a slave. He decides nothing at all, […] it does not even decide its price. He is condemned to work and produce to the maximum.
In another video, which will be published on Wednesday, the association denounces the practice of trawling. Based on images shot by the German animal rights association Soko Tierschutz, which infiltrated on board French and British trawlers fishing in the English Channel, L214 describes “the long agonies of fish and marine animals”. We see tons of fish brought up by the nets, without distinction between species. Out of the water, they seek air at all costs, some are cut up alive, while those that do not interest the trawler are put back in the water with little chance of survival. Trawling has been denounced by a coalition of NGOs as the fishing technique “the most harmful to the environment and the climate”.
“Getting out of this fake fight between intensive breeders and environmental activists”
Cage farming will also be pinned in three final videos released over the weekend. The first shows ducks with foie gras piled up next to each other, with no room to spread their wings, force-fed and moved roughly. The second, which recalls some of the facts denounced in a Herta farm at the beginning of December, shot in a pig farm, shows sows parked in cages and denounces the link between livestock effluents and the tides of green algae which invade the Brittany. The last, finally, takes place in a rabbit farm, and shows many dead rabbits in their cages. According to the association Compassion in World Farming (CIWF), the mortality rate of rabbits in farming is 23%. Commenting on this video, activist Vipulan Puvaneswaran asks for a “moratorium on intensive breeding but also to support breeders who want to get out of these farms” and remember that “the fault is not attributable directly to the breeders, in particular because a large majority [d’entre eux] are in great difficulty today […] We must get out of this false fight between intensive breeders and environmental activists and activists in general to touch the real problem which is agro-industry, cooperatives, etc.
While the European Commission has announced that it will legislate a ban on cage farming by 2027, the European Parliament adopted on February 16 a report by Renaissance MEP and farmer in Saône-et-Loire, Jérémy Decerle, on animal welfare in farming. This calls in particular for support for breeders who will have to make this transition, calls for European harmonization and calls for caution, emphasizing that “certain measures supposedly beneficial for animal welfare may turn out to be counterproductive”.
Several candidates have already taken a stand against intensive farming. In addition to the candidate of the animalist party who intends to put an end to intensive breeding, Jean-Luc Mélenchon plans to “close factory farms” and Yannick Jadot promises “the sorpart of factory farming”.