CHICKENS’ LIB is about passion, conviction and how two women, Clare Druce and her mother Violet Spalding, were driven to highlight the intolerable and cruel conditions on Britain’s factory farms. They staged demonstrations inside the Ministry of Agriculture, caged humans in Parliament Square, were thrown out of Wakefield Cathedral by the Provost and pursued by the police. Battery hens were their first concern but later Chickens’ Lib campaigned on a much wider front – from quail to ostriches, and for other, non-feathered, farmed animals. Farmers were, and still are, routinely administering antibiotics to their animals to keep them alive in squalid and stressful conditions while multi-national drug companies continue to profit.
CHICKENS’ LIB is amusing, poignant, disturbing and as a social history essential to the understanding of the animal rights movement and food security. As such it is a pointer to what is happening in the food industry today and recent scandals make Chickens’ Lib an essential read.
Reviews
A compulsively readable book. -- Joanna Lumley
