They're just stupid little animals asking for cages.

They makes cages in all sizes and shapes, you know.

The bloody cages, the idleness, but this riot won't change it.

The cages, the desk for the manager and the woman clerk.

In between wars, they ought to be locked up in cages.

IIs there an ornithological reason for keeping them in separate cages ?

On the first day of 2012, keeping hens in such cages became illegal, not only in the United Kingdom, but in all 27 countries of the European Union. Hens can still be kept in cages, but they must have more space, and the cages must have nest boxes and a scratching post.

You see most people feel that female doctors should be seen only in cages.

Will you please tell us who is guilty and who is innocent in those cages?

No, you just lock up the cages and help throw the food to the wild animals.

All right, come out of those cages and keep your hands where we can see them.

PRINCETON Forty years ago, I stood with a few other students in a busy Oxford street handing out leaflets protesting the use of battery cages to hold hens. Most of those who took the leaflets did not know that their eggs came from hens kept in cages so small that even one bird the cages normally housed four would be unable to fully stretch and flap her wings.

Their living conditions are deplorable, especially in traveling circuses where cages have to be small so that they can go on the road. Training animals to perform tricks often involves starvation and cruelty.

And I want to show you a few of the technological interfaces that have been developed under the moniker of OOZ which is zoo backwards and without cages to try and reform that relationship.

To the surprise of many, it gained the approval of 55 of those voting. Last month in Arizona, despite well funded opposition from agribusiness, the ban on small cages for sows and veal calves also passed, with 62 support.

In China, which, along with the US, confines the largest number of hens in cages, an animal welfare movement is only just beginning to emerge. For the sake of the welfare of billions of farmed animals, we should wish it rapid growth and success.

If a comparison of the conditions of these prisoners is possible, then it can only be made with the animals in a zoo ... which are better placed as they have no bar fetters inside their cages and they are provided with better facilities. quot

With the ban on battery cages, Europe confirms its place as the world leader in animal welfare, a position also reflected in its restrictions on the use of animals to test cosmetics. But why is Europe so far ahead of other countries in its concern for animals?

Individual stalls for sows, already outlawed in the United Kingdom and Sweden, will be banned across the entire EU from 2013. Measures to improve the welfare of laying hens, which are typically kept crammed into bare wire cages with no room to stretch their wings, are also being phased in.

If you can nourish yourself adequately without eating meat, isn t buying meat needlessly causing, or at least being complicit in causing, the death of an animal? Isn t buying eggs from hens who have led a miserable life, jammed into small wire cages, needlessly causing, or being complicit in causing, the suffering of animals?

Apart from noise problems, research animals are often housed in small cages with no source of enrichment, such as wheels, shelves, or tubes. Such devices enable animals to exert some control over their environment, such as escaping an attack from a cage mate by moving to another level in the cage or hiding.

Often, researchers are unwilling to include such items in their animals cages because other researchers do not. However, rigorous standardization of the environment, particularly if it leads to barren surroundings, increases the risk of obtaining results that, being specific to a narrow set of conditions, cannot be compared with other researchers results.

But if we are pointing the finger at Sea World for what it does to its captive animals, we should also look more broadly at the way we confine performing animals. In most countries, it is possible to visit zoos and see bored animals pacing back and forth in cages, with nothing to do but wait for the next meal.

Today, however, about 90 of US breeding sows the mothers of the pigs that are raised and killed for pork, bacon, and ham spend most of their lives locked in cages that measure about two feet by seven feet (0.6 meters by 2.2 meters). They are unable to turn around, lie down with their legs fully extended, or move more than a step forward or backward.