The species still legally farmed in cages within the European Union today are rabbits, hens, quails, ducks, sows and calves. These are more than 300 million animals that every year are forced to live within a system that does not allow them to express even the most basic natural behaviours, such as moving or turning around. On 30 June, however, the European Commission chose to put a stop to this injustice by committing to eliminate cages entirely from farms across the EU by 2027.

The European Union's steps towards change

As Animal Equality and other animal protection organisations have documented through numerous testimonies and investigations, intensive cage farming means nothing but suffering. The use of cages is an archaic and cruel method responsible for confining large numbers of animals in confined, enclosed spaces, also making the massive use of antibiotics necessary.

In the face of this injustice, 1.4 million European citizens chose to call on European institutions to put an end to this farming method. Launched in October 2018 and delivered to the European Commission in October 2020, the European Citizens' Initiative (ECI) End the Cage Age was the first successful ECI in favour of farm animals, as well as the third ECI by number of signatures collected.

On 17 March 2021, the EU's leading food companies also sent a joint letter to the European Commission and Members of the European Parliament calling for the gradual phasing out of the use of cages in animal farming, starting with enriched cages for laying hens.

Following the hearing of 15 April 2021 at the European Parliament, during which the End the Cage Age European Citizens' Initiative was discussed, 101 Members of the European Parliament sent a letter to the European Commission expressing their support for the initiative and calling for the gradual elimination of the use of cages in farms across Europe. In the letter they drafted, the MEPs called on the Commission to revise Directive 98/58 on the protection of animals kept for farming purposes "in order to put an end to the unnecessary cruelty of cage farming, as soon as possible".

What the European Commission's decision establishes

The choice made by the European Union on 30 June represents a genuine turning point for animal welfare rights and is the fruit of the efforts of 170 European NGOs, 21 of which are Italian.

The Commission plans to ban cages for more than 300 million animals per year in the EU through a gradual but total phase-out by 2027. European Commissioner for Health Stella Kyriakides and Commission Vice-President Věra Jourová announced this at a press conference on the Commission's response to the End the Cage Age ECI.

The Commission announced that it intends to "present a legislative proposal by the end of 2023 to gradually phase out and definitively ban the use of cages for all the species and categories of animals mentioned in the initiative". The decision will also address the issue of products imported from non-EU countries. The commitment is to study "the introduction of rules or standards for imported products that are equivalent to those of the EU".

The Italian associations that promoted the Initiative declared: "This represents the greatest change in the system of animal exploitation in terms of the number of animals involved". The announcement also represents "a historic step towards the abolition of cages and lays an important foundation for overcoming the exploitation of animals for food purposes".