Why Banning Cages Isn’t Ending Confinement
The government’s announcement that hen cages and pig farrowing crates will be phased out is being sold as a moral breakthrough. Headlines talk about bans. Campaigners celebrate progress. Ministers declare the most ambitious animal welfare strategy in a generation.
But strip away the congratulatory noise and the question becomes unavoidable: what is actually changing, and what is being preserved?
Because this is not a challenge to animal use. It is a recalibration of how efficiently, quietly, and acceptably animals are confined, bred, and killed.
And that matters now, because the welfare narrative is doing political work it was never meant to do. It is stabilising an industry under pressure, not dismantling it.
What Is Being Banned, and What Is Not
Hen cages and pig farrowing crates are not marginal practices. They are central tools in industrial farming.
Colony cages still hold around one fifth of laying hens in England. Each bird lives her entire life inside a wire enclosure, allocated roughly the space of an A4 sheet of paper. She never dust bathes, never forages, never leaves. When she stops producing at the required rate, she is killed.
Farrowing crates confine mother pigs so tightly they cannot turn around. They exist to protect piglets from being crushed, not because pigs require immobility to give birth, but because the system demands high litter sizes and minimal labour costs. The sow pays for that efficiency with weeks of immobilisation, repeatedly, until her body gives out. Phasing these systems out sounds like progress. And compared to the status quo, it is a change.
But the policy does not end confinement. It transitions it. It does not challenge the premise that animals exist as production units. It adjusts the conditions under which that premise remains politically tolerable.
That distinction is everything.
The Welfare Frame Is Doing the Heavy Lifting
The language around these reforms is telling. The government speaks of transitions, consultations, and balance. Industry bodies warn about competitiveness and imports. Welfare organisations talk about suffering reduction and humane standards.
What nobody says plainly is that the system itself is untouched.
Welfare reform operates on a narrow assumption: that the problem is how animals are treated, not that they are used at all. Once that assumption is accepted, everything else becomes a technical discussion. How much space. How many days before slaughter.
This is why welfare policies are politically attractive. They allow governments to appear morally responsive without confronting the economic structure that creates the harm. They allow industry to adapt without shrinking. They allow consumers to feel reassured without changing behaviour.
And crucially, they allow exploitation to continue under a new label.
We Have Seen This Before
There is a reason experienced campaigners are wary of celebration.
When battery cages were banned in 2012, they were replaced by colony cages. When outrage over fast-growing chickens grew too loud, the solution was not abolition, but choice.
Fast-growing chickens remain the dominant model across the industry. What welfare reform offers instead is an alternative tier: slower-growing breeds, marketed as ethical progress rather than structural change.
The problem is not that slower-growing breeds exist. It is what their promotion conceals.
Slower-growing chickens may experience fewer acute deformities, but they live longer, eat more, require more land and feed (killing more free living animals), and to maintain the same volume of flesh, more individuals must be bred and killed. The system does not contract. It expands.
Neither option questions the premise that chickens exist to be engineered, multiplied, and slaughtered.
This is not a flaw in implementation. It is the logical outcome of welfare logic applied inside a growth-driven system.
Imports Are a Distraction, Not the Core Problem
Industry responses have focused heavily on imports. If British farmers must meet higher standards, the argument goes, foreign producers should be held to the same rules.
This framing conveniently avoids the real issue. Even if every imported egg and pig product met identical welfare standards, the injustice would remain intact.
Matching exploitation across borders does not make it ethical. It just equalises the terms of harm.
The obsession with imports also reveals the true priority. The concern is not animals. It is market share. Welfare becomes a bargaining chip in trade negotiations rather than a moral boundary.
If the system collapses without cages, that tells us something important about the system.
Why This Is Not a Moral Victory
Supporters of the reforms point out, correctly, that millions of animals will experience different conditions if cages and crates are phased out. That difference is real at the level of lived experience.
But moral clarity requires looking beyond relative improvement.
A hen in a barn is still property. A sow in a larger enclosure is still bred into existence to be used and killed. A system that ends in a slaughterhouse cannot be redeemed by better interior design.
This is the fundamental contradiction welfare politics refuses to face. It treats exploitation as a given and focuses on smoothing its roughest edges. In doing so, it entrenches the idea that animal use is normal, inevitable, and negotiable.
Once that idea is locked in, abolition becomes unthinkable. Reform becomes the ceiling, not the floor.
What This Strategy Really Achieves
The government’s animal welfare strategy will almost certainly reduce the most visually disturbing forms of confinement. It will also extend the lifespan and legitimacy of animal farming at a time when its environmental, ethical, and public health costs are under increasing scrutiny.
By presenting welfare reform as moral leadership, the state absorbs pressure that might otherwise force deeper change. Outrage is redirected into consultations. Demands for justice are translated into timelines.
This is not a failure of intent. It is a political success.
The Line That Is Never Crossed
At no point does the strategy question whether breeding animals for food is justified. At no point does it ask whether killing sentient beings for discretionary products is acceptable. At no point does it consider that the only way to end cage suffering is to stop putting individuals in cages at all.
That silence is not accidental. It is the boundary welfare reform exists to protect.
As long as animals are framed as units of production rather than individuals with interests of their own, policy will only ever adjust the terms of their use, never end it.
The Uncomfortable Conclusion
Ending hen cages and pig farrowing crates may reduce certain forms of confinement. It does not end confinement. It does not end killing. It does not end the logic that animals exist for us.
If the measure of success is fewer bars and more space before slaughter, then this strategy delivers. If the measure is justice, it does not.
We can acknowledge the change without mistaking it for transformation.
Because the real test is simple, and it is one welfare politics will never pass:
No cages still means captivity.
No crates still means ownership.
No reform can make exploitation ethical.
Until that is confronted, every ban is just a redesign.