Stuff You Should Know - Selects: The Truth Behind Cage-Free and Free-Range

Episode Date: January 24, 2026

You’d think terms like cage-free and free-range means the chickens we eat are frolicking happily in the fresh air under the shining sun, but you’d be so, so wrong. Cage-free is a huge improvement but free-range is lacking and both have a long way to go. Find out all about both in this classic episode.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Turns out they do mean something, but not what you'd think. This is starting to get kind of tough to follow, so I say just listen to the episode. But this one changed my mind about a lot of stuff, and I hope it opens your eyes too. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of IHeart Radio. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, and there's Chuck, and it's just... Something is going on with Chuck. I'm okay so far. But Jerry's not here because she turned into the chicken lady and is in treatment for that.

Right. Doing the chicken dance. Do you remember the chicken lady from Kids in the Hall? Oh, sure. I was referencing the rest of development. Cuck, cah, cac. Yeah, but you're taking it back even further to the great, great kids in the hall. That's right.

I can just sit here and quote kids in the hall one-liners all day. Yeah, I love those guys. So that's not what we're here to do though, Chuck. Settle down. Settle down. We're going away from the kids in the hall. Yes. And since you mentioned that, what we're also not here to do is shame anybody or make anyone feel bad or to tell anyone how to live their life and eat their breakfast.

But we're here to arm you with information on this one about, and I'm not surprised you picked this one, but I just thought since. I had a somewhat scarring experience in the commercial chicken farming industry as a job. For those of you listening that don't know this, one of my last real person jobs before this job, many years ago, was I worked for a software company that designed software for commercial chicken operations to better track how they lay eggs and how they gain weight and how you're feeding them and kind of everything, how they're killed. And I hated that job. It was soul killing, and I never understood it. I never invested in it as far as understanding the software,

and I was in tech support, and so I was terrible at it. But my friends ran the company, and eventually they fired me because I was so bad at it. Wow. And that's the best thing that ever happened to me, because that led directly to getting this job. It's like Garth Brooks said, some of God's greatest gifts are unanswered prayers.

All right, sure. You know, your prayer to be good at your chicken killing software job was unanswered, and instead an even better prayer that you didn't even know you had was answered. Yeah, I didn't have that prayer. I didn't want to be good at that job. But, yeah, so this is like, all this is probably pretty well known to you because we've been doing this kind of stuff to chickens for a good 70 years by now, right? Yeah.

Yeah, you know, we're going to talk some about factory farming finally. I don't think we've dodged it, but people have, you know, long said, hey, guys, can you get into this? And, you know, we're not touching cattle or swine. We're just starting dipping our toe into it with poultry. Dipping our beaks. Dipping our beaks, our untrimmed beaks. Yeah, I can peck you until the cows come home, which is something that happens on the farm.

That's right. So enough dancing around Chuck. We're talking about today, not necessarily factory farming, although like you said, we have to talk about it. We're going to talk about those labels that you see on your eggs or on your chicken, usually cage-free or free range or something along those lines. And whether it means anything. But one of the great successes of the last probably five, six, maybe even 10 years or longer, came very quietly out of the effective altruism community, Chuck. Oh, really?

Yeah, a group of effective altruists said, you know, we're always looking to maximize our charitable contributions. There's a lot of chickens out there that are not being treated very well. Supposedly there's 7.6 billion egg-laying hens alone worldwide in any given time. Almost 8 billion. So if you could improve the lives of them even by a little bit, you would really be reducing a massive amount of suffering. So they got $3 million together, like, laser focused it on advocacy, lobbying,

getting legislation put through, and then most of all pressuring really, really big companies. They went after some whales to commit to going 100% cage-free eggs within a very short period of time, sometimes 2024, sometimes 2030. But all of these huge companies, everybody from Danone to Burger King to McDonald's to Whole Foods, not surprisingly, but also like Dollar General, all of them have signed a pledge that says all of the eggs that our customers buy, whether it's in prepared food or eggs you buy in the store, are going to be 100% cage-free eggs within the next few years.

And they did it with like $3 million and a lot of elbow grease. I love it. I think all those companies probably said, all right, all right. If they're, geez, if they're cage-free eggs out, there will use them. Stop hassling me. Yeah, that's what the Burger King said. Yeah, the guy in that big costume. He said it with his mind.

Right. Yeah, because his mouth doesn't move. But it was a big deal. I mean, the fact that they got that that's happening, it's a big deal. And it's one of those things. where if you scratch beneath the surface, it's not an intended pun, but if you scratch beneath the surface at a lot of these terms and phrases that the USDA likes to bandy about, things like cage-free and things like free range and stuff like that, it's often really disappointing.

But that's one of the things about cage-free is that it is an actual substantial increase in the welfare and quality of life for egg-laying chickens in the United States. It's a big, big deal. It is. And it's not that they're in these amazing conditions all of a sudden with cage-free. It's that they're in such poor conditions otherwise that this is a huge improvement for them. Yeah, and I think, you know, a lot of people will agree even cage-free isn't all it's cracked up to be. Man, there's a lot of, like, chicken-based idioms that we use.

There's suddenly coming to the floor. I hadn't noticed. When I worked for that company, they made everybody at one point, even if you didn't do project management where you had to go to the farms. They made us all go to the farms and tech support at one point. And I know I've told this story before, but it was a pretty awful experience. And it smells really, really bad. It smells so bad that me and my one friend that I worked with Barry were like did sort of the silence of the lambs trick with dabbing some like menthol on our upper lip under our nostrils. just so we could walk through these things.

And I think they thought it would benefit us to sort of just see boots on the ground what happened. I was like I appreciate the field trip, but it did not benefit me in any way except hearing things like, oh man, free range just means there's a door open. They don't even use it. And I heard this back then.

I was like, oh my gosh, is that true? And as it turns out, as we'll see, that's kind of true. Yeah, and we shouldn't confuse free range with cage-free. There are two different things and we'll describe them both. Yeah.

So cage-free is a huge improvement. Free range is as bad as you'd expect it to be because it's coming from the USDA. Yeah, so I guess let's talk about, let's briefly, and big thanks to Dave, Ruse for helping us out with this one. But Dave starts out with a little bit of history and I think that's a good place to start

because you don't have to look very far back in this country. It seems like a long time ago, but the 1940s isn't that long ago. in the lifespan of America. And back then, they were still, like, feeding America their eggs, or its eggs. I don't even know what America is, with backyard chickens, basically. They were big farms, of course, but they weren't like these big massive battery cages that we see today. They were hens living outdoors generally on farms, laid about 100 eggs a year.

And then after a few years, when they quit laying out. eggs, then they would be used for meat. They'd turn into Sunday dinner. They would. And these days, starting in like the 50s, things became a little more industrialized and mechanized, and that's when battery cages came into play, which is the wire cage that you might, like if you have friends that have backyard chickens, you probably built them a large coop, and within that coop, some battery cages.

But if you're a backyard chicken person, you probably have battery cages that are very large for two or three, four chickens. Yeah, these are not the battery cages that they're raised in after farming became industrialized in the 50s. Like, these things are, you usually have, I've seen anywhere between three and seven chickens in there. And usually each one has about the amount of space, about a little lower or a little smaller than the size of a standard piece of paper. And for the teenage listeners out there, it's smaller than the size, or about the size of a size of a, an iPad. Right. Yeah. That's for a chicken. A chicken. They can't move around. They can't flap their wings. They can't do a lot of stuff that we'll find out is a big problem in a minute. They're meant to be

kept basically in one place. And because this stuff has all been industrialized, their whole job in everything about their life is to just sit there and lay egg after egg after egg. So they're kept in these battery cages. The battery cages are kept off the ground. which is good because it means that they're away from parasites and poop-borne diseases. And the eggs are? Yeah. When they poop, it falls onto a conveyor belt that carries the poop away, so it's a little more sanitary. When they lay an egg, the bottom of the cage is slanted downward, so it rolls downward onto a different conveyor belt, thankfully, that whisks the egg away.

So the whole thing is really automated, and because these cages are so uniform, they can be. stacked. It's modular. So you can go upward with chickens as well as outward, too. You can really raise a lot of chickens in these battery cages, which is good if you're a farmer. Not really good if you're a chicken, though. Yes, and these chickens, you know, I said that the backyard chickens of your laid about 100 eggs a year. Today's chickens lay closer to 300 eggs a year because their bread specifically to do so. And just the way beyond being bred to do so, like you said, their setup as such that it's just, you know, they have made it a very efficient operation as far as how much they can extract from each end. Yeah, that was a real quick check.

That was a big part of the industrialization of farming too is breeding practices to where we started selectively breeding types of chickens that either laid a perfectly nice brown egg or ones that gained weight in certain places that we wanted them to. like genetics has been a huge part of that as well. Yeah, we're really lucky because our really, really good friends, Justin and Melissa, I've known Justin since college. You know Justin. Sure. They have chickens. They have these four beautiful ladies in their backyard. Awesome.

And they have a big, wonderful coop. But anytime they're outside and can safeguard them from hawks by keeping an eye on them, those ladies are running around the yard with their dogs. they somehow manage to train these dogs to kind of give them their space. And it's great. And, you know, they give us eggs. And we spend money in their wine shop, and it's a great symbiotic relationship. That is really great, yeah. Yeah, it's a good, we save our cartons and stuff when we do have to buy eggs.

So they have cartons to give out to their friends because these ladies are laying a lot of eggs lately. So Justin has chickens in a wine shop now. He's living the life. I know, man. It's the American dream realized by my British import friend. Well, good. So he's doing what you could call the right way, I think, which is to say not necessarily the profit maximizing way,

but the chickens are, you would guess, much happier than the ones that are in these battery cages. And one of the reasons why we would say the chickens are not so happy in the battery cages is because, like, again, they can't. move. If you put a chicken on a piece of paper, it's going to take up most of that piece of paper or iPad, right? So when you visualize that, you suddenly get like this is for the whole, for its whole life, usually somewhere around 70 weeks. This is how it spends almost all of that time in this little cage, just laying eggs, laying eggs, to an unnatural, at an unnatural pace. And because it's kind of

stuck in this one small place. There's a lot of things that it can't do that people who have studied chickens say, chickens need to do this or else they're going to go insane and have a really horrific life. And that is kind of what the basis of creating like cage-free setups or like genuine free set-ups is it comes from, giving chickens a better life while during those 70 or so weeks that they're alive. Yeah, I mean, I think it's easy.

for somebody maybe who doesn't think about it much, to think of a laying hen as just this sort of organic egg machine, like a living egg machine, not organic in the sense that it's sort of organic, but a living machine that just pumps out these eggs that we love to eat for breakfast or add on top of a hamburger or, you know, is a nice topping. Or a bowl of rice Krispies? A good meal. Ooh, I don't know about that.

But that's not the case. These birds have personalities and they have behaviors that they want to do and that they normally do. Like, just a handful of them, they love. And, you know, you can see this when I go over to Justin and Melissa's house. When they're out doing their thing, they're preening and they're cleaning their feathers and they're flapping their feathers around and flapping around. And they take a little dustbass, which means they roll around on the ground and they're absorbing oil for their feathers. and they're getting rid of their dead skin

and they're shedding feathers that they don't need and little feather mites and they love to nest. And then here's the big one. And I've seen it happen and I've tried to guard my eyes because I know what's going on. They don't like a lot of attention

when they're laying these eggs. They're giving birth. It's a private matter to them, you know, giving birth in the figurative sense. But it's like they're doing their business. they don't want a lot of attention. They like to do this instinctively in private. And they're not able to do that.

It's called the laying act, and it's on full display, and they can get so upset about having to do this without any privacy in battery cages. Not can. They do. They get so upset, they peck at other hens, and they fight each other. And that's why they end up clipping their beaks,

because the other hens are getting injured from being henpecked, because they're stressed out from living on an iPad. Yeah, Dr. Conrad Lorenz, who starred in our animal imprinting episode, I think he's popped up elsewhere. He had a quote, he said, the worst torture to which a battery hen is exposed is the inability to retire somewhere for the laying act. For the person who knows something about animals, it is truly heart-rending to watch how a chicken tries again and again

to crawl beneath her fellow cage mates to search there in vain for cover. Yeah, because they don't get what's going on, too. It is. It's heartbreaking. Yeah. So, like, that is an enormous thing. Like, not only are we forcing them to have 200% more eggs every year, we're forcing them to do it against their instinct basically every day. And they really suffer a tremendous amount of distress for that.

And then one of the other ones, one of the other behaviors that's really, really big, is roaming, their freedom to roam. Yeah. Chickens are very social animals. They like to hang out. They like to mess with each other. They like to preen one another, not just preen themselves. But they also need space to get away from one another.

And when they can't do that, that's when things like hen pecking to an injurious degree or cannibalism or all sorts of terrible zucosis can happen when chickens are stuck together in a very small area for their entire lives. And that is the basis of battery cages. And you said it's like, like it makes sense from a mechanized industrial. standpoint, but back in the day when they figured this out, these are the same people who resisted putting seatbelts in cars and got us into Vietnam. You know what I mean? Like, these aren't exactly the most moralistic generation that we've ever produced. They were very sensible and, like, rational-minded and didn't take a great deal of humanity into consideration when it came to profit

maximization. Yes, this is a segment we like to call. Gen X speaks to millennials and Gen Z about about boomers. That's right. You got that straight. But it's true. They also, you know, alter their diet and lighting to maximize their output. They don't move around. So they're obviously, you know, what's going to happen when an animal is just sort of stuck in this small, tiny thing.

They're going to have no muscle. They have muscle loss because they can't move around and do their thing. And they basically become what I described, which is these living egg laying machines, is exactly how the industrial egg complex, if that's our term, wants it. But things are changing a little bit. And we're going to walk you through some of, you know, a lot of these are marketing terms, but some of them are legitimate terms that the USDA allows them to use. In addition to these great pictures that you see on your egg cartons of chickens like, you know, smiling under the sunshine on a rolling pastoral scene,

they're allowed to do stuff like that, but the words that they use are regulated to an extent. And if you really, really, really want to do your due diligence, though, you got to know what all this stuff means and then even do a little more investigation. Yeah. Typical USDA-type stuff. But let's take a break and then we'll get into cage-free.

How about that? Let's get out of the cage. If you want to know, then you're in luck. Just listen up to Josh and Chuck stuff you should know. What if mind control is real? If you could control the behavior of anybody around you, what kind of life would you have? Can you hypnotically persuade someone to buy a car? When you look at your car, you're going to become overwhelmed with such good feelings.

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Listen to Therapy for Black Girls on the Iheart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. Stuff your shoe. Okay, so we're talking cage-free, and I think I already let the cat out of the bag, although hopefully not in the chicken coop. Yeah. That cage-free actually does have some meaning. Like, it actually, if you look at it compared to the battery cage operations of your, or actually, I shouldn't say of yours, there's still most. Most chickens in the United States at least are still in battery cages. I think something like 70%, which amounts to 230 million hens are currently in battery cages.

So it's still going on. It's still happening. But if you compare the battery cage to the cage-free operation, it is a substantial difference for sure. Yeah, like the more we describe this stuff, there are levels of getting better, for sure. And cage-free is better. it is greater than it means, and this is a direct quote from the USDA, it means the eggs must be produced by hens

housed in a way that allows for not only unlimited access to food and water, and you might think, well, duh, but they used to keep food from hens so different things would happen with their production, and they were like, you can't do that at all anymore. Yeah, that's good. And then the rest of it goes, but unlike eggs from caged hens,

also provides them freedom to roam during the laying cycle. That's huge. But here's the deal, is there aren't any guidelines about what that access to outdoors means. It doesn't say how much space there needs to be. And so basically what you're still seeing is a big, long barn with a bunch of laying hens packed inside there. They're just not in those wire cages. No, they have now, instead of about an 8x8 square, of space available to them like they do in the battery cages.

Typically, a hen in a cage-free situation has about a 10-5-inch by 11-inch space available to them per bird. And it's not like it's designated. But they can move around at least. They can move around these giant barns. The problem is there's tens of thousands of hens also in these barns, and they just don't have that much room to move. If they had a ton of willpower and they decided they were going to go to. to point B, they could conceivably make their way there, but it's not going to be easy. And it's not like they're just roaming around and they have a bunch of free space to move around in or do much in.

Again, compared to the battery cages where they had no chance of moving away from their little cage, it is a huge improvement. But then when you see a picture of what a cage-free barn looks like, it gets a little depressing again. Yeah, and you know, some of these egg producers are not the hens, but the operations. Obviously, there's only one egg producer in the scenario. They do have some perches that are built up, and they do have some nesting areas, so they can hop up there, they can stretch their wings, but they're not required to. That's not part of the USDA requirement. If you want to look for requirements that you could look for a label from the United Egg producers,

they have a different certification guideline for cage-free that's a little more, I guess, open than the USDA's, or restrictive, I guess, if you're a farmer. They must allow hens to exhibit natural behaviors that we talked about and include enrichments such as scratch areas, purchase, and nests. So they have to have those. And then they must have access to litter. And litter is just like the stuff on the ground that they like to roll around in. It's not like beer cans and old back. batteries and stuff. Not the crying, ironized Cody kind of way.

Right. They must have protection from predators and be able to move through a barn in a manner that promotes bird welfare. So that's a little hazy, but that generally means not as crowded. But I don't think that that even specifies what that means. No, and that is much better than the USDA standards. And the United Egg producers are an industry group of. like egg operators. Like, I think there's maybe 150 in the United States,

which is way less than there used to be. So it's a... They produce, like, almost all the eggs, right? Yes, yeah. And we export a lot of them, too, surprisingly. So it's a cartel, like a lobbying group, basically, for the egg producers. Yeah. And, you know, at the risk of sounding, like,

suspicious of them, like, I would, guess that they created these standards to get ahead of this problem that was growing all of a sudden and costing them money. So by doing better than the USDA, you know, that's great. Like their hens are genuinely like, what's the word? What's the opposite of suffering? Benefitting from that. But it makes me suspect, and actually I know from research, it can be much better than that. Right. And a big one is density. It's a huge part. of it. It's density. How, like, there should be much greater limits on on how many hens you can have per barn. And then also another one is even under these, these better, more stricter standards

for hen welfare, their lives are very much artificially controlled still because they're kept in this barn. They're still in a barn. They don't go outside. To be cage-free, you still don't go outside if you're a hen you spend your entire life in one single barn until you stop producing enough eggs fast enough and then they turn you into pet food that's right uh sometimes feeding yourself back to your fellow chickens uh i looked a little bit into what chicken feed is mainly made of and because i remember at the time when i took this tour someone said something about you know there's chicken parts in the chicken feed uh this was a someone telling me to I didn't find that in my research, but there has been a movement away from things like fish meal

because fish meal is obviously the oceans are being depleted too. So using fishes to feed chickens isn't a great idea. And I think just a few years ago there was final approval to use, and it sounds gross, but like fly larvae. And you might think like, that's good. That is good because that's what chickens would eat if they were just roaming the countryside. They would eat things like that. Yeah, so they're starting to be fed things they normally would eat otherwise, which is good. Their food is still very much controlled and portioned and everything, but they're starting to be fed things that more resemble their diet,

whereas before it was just whatever was cheapest and most abundant that you could feed a chicken like soy and fish. Yeah, that's not natural. And you, as the person eating the egg, should be like, I don't want an egg from a chicken that's been eating fish its whole life. Chickens don't eat fish. This egg probably tastes way different than it should. Right. And that's another thing, too. There's a lot of health benefits that have been documented in eggs that come from well-treated chickens.

It seems to be that the better you treat a chicken, the healthier the egg it produces is. You can just get a – and, you know, if you don't have a friend that has a backyard chicken, there's probably some local farmer's market where some fish fan will sell you their eggs. And you need only look at them from the outside at first to what they look like in the pan to what they taste like. It is a stark difference. It just is. Yeah, totally. You eat one and you can take on like five cops.

Yeah. There's that nutrient dent. These cage-free chickens, whether they're United Egg Producer standard or just USDA standard, they still have their beaks trimmed when they're 10 days old. They're still force-multed. Moulting is a natural process, but they do something called force molting when, and this is where they used to take away their feed entirely to force molting. Now they just withhold some feed to force the molting. It's when they shed those feathers and molt, and that extends their layer life by, you know, it's pretty substantial. It can be like 25 to 40 weeks.

So, again, they're just, they're wringing every last egg out of those chickens cage-free or not. I saw that the forced molting is not actually in and of itself harmful and that it might actually be beneficial for the chickens because they live their life indoors. And one of the ways that they do that is through adjusting the length of the light, the artificial light. But the problem is if they're withholding... No, it's not naturally happening,

but it's not going to naturally happen during their lifetime anyway. And it actually is good for them to go through a mold. but they wouldn't without this induced or forced molting because they aren't subjected to natural light. They don't get natural light. It's all artificial. They spend their entire lives basically indoors almost entirely cut off from natural light,

if not entirely cut off from it. See, I thought hens molt by being a hen. No? No, I think they take their cues from a shorter duration of days, and then they stop eating quite as much then they go through the molting process, stop laying eggs as frequently. But that happens naturally, though, is what I'm saying. Yes, it does, but it's queued by changes in natural light.

And if they're not exposed to natural light, they're not going to undergo the mold. Right. Unless you force it artificially. Yeah. But like Justin Melissa's eggs molt, because they, like, it can be the shorter day of the natural light cycle of a year. Right, right. Yeah. Yeah.

And that's a natural thing. I'm just saying, like, they can induce it through artificial light, changes in artificial light. And it's not necessarily bad that they induce it artificially. It's probably better than just not doing it at all. Right. Okay, I got you. Okay. I thought you're saying they don't molt normally.

No, no, no. I would never say something like that. Now we can move on. Those are hens that lay eggs. Now we can move on to hens that are raised for meat. They are called broilers. in the industry. And it's kind of the same deal.

99% of American broiler chickens never see light in this country. They are in those from the moment they're born as little chicky chicks. They are in a barn and they live about six weeks and they are pumped up as fast as they can be pumped up

to get the biggest breastmeat possible. I think there was Dave, this is pretty startling. Dave found a calculation that if you sort of transferred their growth rate to like what a human baby would look like, it would be a 349-pound baby by their second birthday. Like baby Huey. Yeah, that's baby Huey, all right. Yeah. So the way that they did this is through basically selective breeding, selecting chickens that grow in their breast area.

but they've basically surpassed any point where you would normally stop because it's now very harmful for the chicken. These chickens that we eat, the broiler chickens, not necessarily a whole chicken. It can also be like drumsticks or breasts or thighs or whatever. All that comes from a broiler chicken. Any chicken you eat is a broiler chicken. So these broiler chickens are usually selected for their breasts,

and their breasts are so heavy that they can't really walk, because their legs aren't developing the way that they should. But then in addition to that, their legs can't develop the way they should because the breast is so heavy. So they end up with metabolic diseases. They end up with muscle atrophy. And they don't do much of anything except eat and rest because that's basically all they have the energy to do. Yeah, six weeks is their lifespan. Yeah.

Again, I just want to reiterate that. So over the six weeks, yeah, they go from like chicks to slaughtered adults in six weeks. So they're growing that fast, but they're also growing way bigger than any normal chicken would, right? Any normal breed. So during that six weeks, they're stuck in this litter if they're in a situation where they have litter available to them. And they're just pooping and peeing in this litter and they're not getting up enough to not get like blisters from the ammonia in the litter. It's a problem in and of itself. Like that's how basically obese these chickens are.

that they cannot move much at all, and they end up getting sores from exposure to all the urine they're sitting in. Yeah, this was the hardest part of that tour for me and the one where my buddy Barry and I actually left the building after, and I'll go ahead and we probably should have issued a trigger warning, period, but hopefully the title of the episode would scare off any, like, vegans who really don't even want to hear about this.

But trigger warning right here. One of the, you know, and this is what they do, when one of the broilers or any of the chickens are injured or, you know, winged in some way that isn't, I don't know. I'm not going to put, I'm not going to label what exactly is wrong with the chicken when they pick it up by the neck and sling it in a little circle real quick to snap their neck and then throw it back on the ground. But that's exactly what happened in front of us when we saw a chicken that apparently wasn't doing well. and the guy is literally in mid-conversation. And I know this is the job that they do, and I don't expect him to hold a funeral.

But that's when Barry and I stepped out, and we're like, we're going to be out here for the rest of the tour. I can imagine. I don't smoke, but I'm about to start. Yeah. I had five cigarettes at the same time. So there's this writer from the New Yorker named Michael Spencer who went to a poultry farm,

and he wrote that there must have been 30,000 chickens sitting silently on the floor in front of me. They didn't move. They didn't cluck. They were almost like statues of chickens living in nearly total darkness, and they would spend every minute of their six-week lives that way. Yeah, it's pretty sobering. And those are the broilers.

Those are the ones we eat, right? So, again, they're bred to grow this way, and it's totally unnatural. Chickens don't normally get like that. And when they do interact with people, which is not obviously a requirement for a chicken to have a good life, but it's for what you just said. It's to harvest or kill a sick or just a sick chicken or get the carcass of a dead chicken out of there.

And if you want to see just how little humans, how little of a role humans have in chicken farming today, there's a video that Dave found. It's actually like a trade video that I think is kind of like to sell all of these different machines. It's called Inside the Million Dollar Chicken Farm, Amazing Modern Chicks Poultry Farming Technology. It's on YouTube. And it's like 16 minutes long.

I didn't watch it with the volume, so I don't know if there's narration. But if you watch it on mute, it's just mesmerizing. And it's also like, I really hope humans don't end up like this in the next 100, 200 years, you know? Like it's really, really weird and unsettling. But then also at the same time, deeply fascinating. Yeah. So the answer then would be free range. That is seemingly the solution.

So what does that mean? We talked about cage-free and what that means. For the USDA, any egg or poultry product that can be classified as free range means the housing for the birds must provide continuous free access to the outside through their normal growing cycle. And again, this is sort of like that story when the guy said it just means there's a door. they don't go out there because their food and water is in here. USDA doesn't say how big this door has to be, where it has to be placed.

They don't require them to go outside. Like they don't shuttle them outside every day for some sunlight like you would like in a prison yard or something like that. All that matters is that they have continuous access. That door stays accessible and open. And so you've got your big barn again. you've got your small door, and if they want to go outside, they can. But then even if they do go outside,

it doesn't say like, and you've got to have this much area for this many chickens to roam around if they want to. It can be anything. It can be a pretty small little area, and it still qualifies as outside. So those huge dark barns

with artificial light filled with tens of thousands of chickens, if you popped a hole, the size of a breadplate into the wall of that barn, you could call your operation a free-range chicken operation now. That's it. Yeah, I didn't see that small, to be fair, but technically you're right.

Yeah. And, like, yes, it is technical that I'm right, but from the research into just how much of a finger that USDA has on what constitutes free range and who meets those requirements, it's entirely possible that somebody's just cut a little hole inside of the barn and now is saying free range and could argue that.

If an inspector did come out and argued it with them, they would probably, the egg producer would probably win that argument in court. Right. I mean, the doors I saw were bigger and chickens could easily fit more than one chicken. Like, they were sizable, but again, the whole point is their food and water is inside. Right. And so chickens are generally, and especially when they're still pretty crowded in there, they're still going to stay where their food and water is generally.

It's not like they're saying, hey, we're going to put the water out. We're going to have outdoor class today, guys. Right. We're going to put the water in the food outside. That'll really encourage you to go outside. They don't care if they go outside or not. So we should say the EU has much better standards for what constitutes free range. They've been working at free range and cage-free stuff since.

like 99 and have really made some big gains since then. But then even in the United States, Chuck, there's plenty of people like Justin who are saying like, no, I actually want my chickens to be free range like you would think free range actually is. And so there's another kind of designation called pasture raised, which people tend to use when they're to kind of separate themselves from free range because I think enough people have picked up on the fact that free range is kind of meaningless. So pasture rage seems to be more legitimate or most people who do legitimately raise chickens outdoors would call them pasture raise. So they're like wheeling them around from place to place. They have an enclosure that they can go to and inclement weather. But for the most,

most of their lives, they're spending their time outdoors, doing what chickens do, given plenty of space for being chickens. And that's typically pasture raised. Unfortunately, as far as the USDA is concerned, pasture raised is the same thing as free range. So again, if you have a shed that has all these chickens and you cut a hole on the side, you can now call that pasture raised too if you want. Yeah, you can't. And if you're saying, well, if you're saying that some places use pasture raised or raged,

that'd be quite a party. It's like anthrax is loose in your pasture. If you're saying that some farmers are doing it right, smaller operations, and when they say pasture raise, they mean it. But technically the U.S. D.A. doesn't make a distinction. What am I to do? That's where you have to, like, do your homework. You can't just make, if you want to, if it matters to you, you got to look up this farm and see what they're doing. And a lot of times these smaller farms will say, hey, come on.

out if you care, and we'll show you our operation, because we're proud of it. Like, you can, they generally have websites where you can, and it's all there, you know, I think the USDA even demands, not demands, but requires a, I demand a URL. They take their shoe off and bang it on the desk. They require a URL where you can look this stuff up if you want to. Yeah, for sure. Yeah, the USDA is all over that, which is good, because, I mean, we've got third-party certification who, you know, who could be illegitimate.

I think that like the industry would police third party certifiers because they don't want to like give away their money unnecessarily. Because getting getting things like pasture raised or free range, like these are these are like it's not required. You can opt to have it done to be certified like that, but you're going to pay for it. So if we had like phony, you know, certifiers running around, I guess, yeah, the big producers would probably co-opt it and use it to their gain. But luckily, there are some really legitimate third-party certifiers, and the one that seems to have bubbled to the top as far as I can tell is called Humane Farm Animal Care. A fact, I think, is the way that you say the abbreviation. Yeah, I think that's a good cliffhanger.

Okay, yeah. And let's take our final break, and we'll talk about them and generally how the USDA determines if it qualifies as cage-free or free range to begin with. If you want to know, then you're in luck. Just listen up to Josh and Chuck. Stuff you should know. What if mind control is real? If you can control the behavior of anybody around you, what kind of life would you have?

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You see like grade A eggs. It is a voluntary thing you have to pay for. so you can, you know, you do it so you can put it on your label so you can charge more, obviously. And, you know, maybe you care about delivering a higher quality egg, who knows. But the USDA doesn't, like if it's certified organic, they're not out there doing that certification. That is completely done by USDA approved certification bodies. And those seem to be a little more feet on the ground as far as actually going to farm. in looking at them.

The USDA does not require, and they can't. There are too many, you know, I don't think they even had the staffing to do that if they wanted to, to go out and actually photograph farms and check it out. If you want that descriptor and label, you have to send in a detailed written description, explaining how it meets the standards, along with an affidavit that's signed,

that it's not false or misleading. But that's kind of it. That's all the proof they need. So that's for free range. Cage-free, they take way more seriously. That's where they do have inspectors go out and check. So, like, if it says cage-free, it has been verified that this meets those cage-free standards. So that's a good thing.

That's another reason why cage-free is a big step up. But, yeah, free range is, you say, yes, my operation is free range under USDA standards. No, I'm not lying. And the USDA says, good enough. You can put free range on your labels. now. Yeah, they did, I think Dave found a study from that Animal Welfare Institute that examined records from the FSIS, and they found that only one producer out of a hundred actually

submitted photos of the barn showing the access. Like, I think 83 out of the 100 provided evidence, I guess not photographic evidence, but affidavits and third-party kind of certifications. and then 17 of them just had zero substantiation at all. And they dug in a little bit and found in 44 cases they had no detailed written description at all, which is supposedly what's required. But they still got approval from the USDA to label their stuff as free range.

Yeah. I don't want to say the words rubber stamp, but it seems like it might be that way. For sure. And again, just buyer beware, free range is synonymous as far as the USDA is, is concerned with free roaming, pasture fed, pasture grown, pasture raised, and meadow raised. And again, just want to drive this home, it means that there's a hole in the side of this

giant barn filled with tens of thousands of chickens who may or may not be going in or out of that hole on any day, or if ever during their entire lives. And on the other side of that, it might just be a concrete pad is what they could be free ranging on. Like, that's it, as far as the USDA is concerned. So we have a long way to go with free range, in particular because Chuck, like you, me, and basically anyone listening to this podcast has a totally different conception of what free range means, right? And there was a survey that was done, again, by the Animal Welfare Institute. They did it in 2015, and they went out to people, just everyday people, and said, hey, what do you think free range should entail? And they came

back with some pretty interesting stuff. Yeah, they, you know, as you would expect, 65% of people people thought that free range should mean that there's enough space outside for every bird to be out during the day, during daylight hours that they want to be. And 62% of consumers said they thought the outdoor area should be at least partially covered by grass. Right. Like the expectation from consumers is, well, you put a picture on your carton of a hen rolling around this beautiful pastoral scene.

So that's kind of what I expect. Or am I just being hoodwinked? And the answer is, you're being hoodwinked. Well, to be fair, these are the same people that believe that those barbecue signs where a pig is actually cooking the barbecue, they think that's going on as well. So we've got to really kind of keep this in perspective. I never understood that one. Those are so disturbing.

It really is. This is my brother, Lou. We're eating him later. We had a falling out. So like I said, all of this is just frustrating and confusing. all you have to do is do a little legwork or, you know, obviously go to those local farmers markets because that's where you're really getting into good stuff and talk to them. I guarantee you that fish fan is going to invite you out to their farm to check out what's going on.

Yeah, but you might walk away with more than eggs, you know what I'm saying? That's right. Might be a nice trip. So literally and figuratively. So if you do want to figure out like where to get good eggs, or what eggs you can trust. And it's because you don't trust a fish fan. There are organizations that say, like, let's not get fish fans involved in this at all.

Let's keep them at bay. And everyone says, yes, agreed, agree. How can we move forward without the fish fans? Let's keep them on the couch where they belong. So, again, the humane farm animal care, fact, they, from what I can tell, at least in the United States, they definitely are legit. And they've come up with some definition. for their certified humane labels.

So if you see certified humane on a like a poultry or some sort of food product, it actually has met some really good standards. Yeah. And they were basically like the USDA's definition of free range and pasture raised are so terrible. We're just going to create our own definitions. And they did.

So they created their own standards. And to be certified humane free range certified humane pasture raised, the producers have to meet those standards, and they're good ones. Yeah, they're really good, or, you know, comparatively speaking, at least. For free range, the hens must be outside

for at least six hours a day, weather permitting, obviously, and that that outdoor space must have a minimum of two square feet for every bird. And again, that doesn't sound like much, and it's not, but the difference between being able to move around freely when you have two square feet per bird and when you have an iPad per bird is pretty huge.

Like you can actually move around, and it's not just like being at the worst party you've ever been to. Paster raised, certified humane is even better than that. The hens must be outdoors year-round with mobile or fixed housing where the hens can nest or rest for the night, get out of bad weather, and they get about 108 square feet per bird, a thousand birds for 2.5 acres. A bird doesn't even know what to do with that much space.

No. They're like, hey, can I build a wing onto my little in-house? That's right. And Chuck, one of the big things that they're doing at Hafeck is they employ veterinarians, people with advanced degrees and animal studies. Those are the people that go out and visit these farms to certify them. People who know what they're talking about. People are not going to be bought off.

people with the animal's welfare in mind to verify that everybody's meeting these standards before they get that certification. So that's a good one. There are plenty of other ones out there too, but that's just based on our research and from what Dave came up with too. It's like that's a good one to start with. But it's like you said, do your homework, you know? It doesn't take long either. It's not like you've got to invest hours and hours into this chicken research. Like I guarantee you, wherever you live, you can find some pretty good options with, you know, 15 minutes of research online. That's right. Near you.

Yeah. So there you have it. We just need to get on the USDA to increase, to basically say, no, they have to spend a certain amount of time outdoors to be free range. And then we'll go from there because the USDA will probably say 15 minutes to start. Yeah. If you want to know more about free range chickens and cage-free eggs, there's a lot of stuff. out there that you can read and we hope that you will and since I said we hope that you will it's time for a listener mail that's right this one is called egg on

Chuck's face because I misspoken a big way on our National Parks episode when I touted dispersed camping wherever you want in national parks I meant I was thinking of national forests oh that's where you can do dispersed camping wherever you want and boy I said it a bunch so I you can't camp anywhere you want in national parks Okay. And I feel terrible for that being out there so much that we might even have to edit that. But greetings from your friend in National Park Ranger. Your episode of National Parks was excellent.

And we heard from quite a few Park Rangers, by the way. I like to address a statement made by Chuck. Some national parks may still allow dispersed camping. It's commonly allowed in National Forest, though. National Parks and National Forest are similar, but have different missions and are therefore managed differently. National parks tend to regulate recreation a little more strictly. In fact, many national parks now have permit systems in place for backpackers. Yeah, that's very, very true.

And those who successfully acquire permits, even then, are often restricted to camping and designated backcountry campsites. This prevents overcrowding and popular destinations, which lessens the amount of abandoned gear, garbage, and food scraps, and heavily left behind by certain visitors. Certain visitors. I wanted to address this because though regulating where people camp and how many people can camp in a certain area may seem extreme to some. It helps preserve

the wilderness, character, and solitude. So many visitors are seeking when they visit a national park. Additionally, visitors who disperse camp in a park that requires a designated campsite and or permit may be subject to fines. That's very important for all visitors to research regulations for any park,

forests, or wilderness that they're visiting. Happy hiking. And that is from our no-named Park Ranger. This Park Ranger wish to remain anonymous, which is we're always happy to do. Thank you, Anonymous Park Ranger. Happy hiking to you as well. That's right. And I even had one park ranger say, don't make fun of our green shorts.

And to be clear, I don't think those shorts are the same color as those trucks. Oh, really? That's the color I was really making fun of. Okay. Maybe they are, but I don't know if there's a, if you could even make a fabric that color. Right. They just kind of appear. It doesn't adhere to textiles. Well, thank you very much again, Anonymous Park Ranger,

and to all the Park Rangers and everybody who wrote into correct Chuck, who, by the way, took it with a plumb. So where you go, Chuck. If you want to get in touch with us via email like your friendly anonymous Park Ranger did, you can send it to Stuff Podcasts at iHeartRadio.com. Stuff you should know. is a production of IHeartRadio. For more podcasts My Heart Radio,

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