Four years of work has led to his moment. When we started this, we knew it would be big. A battle of David versus Goliath as we took the Government to court. But we also knew that it was the right thing to do, to fight for the millions of Frankenchickens that were suffering because of the way that they had been bred. And on Friday 13th December, we got the result we had been nervously waiting for.
Represented by Advocates for Animals, four years ago we started the process to take the Government to court, arguing that fast-growing chicken breeds, known as Frankenchickens, are illegal under current animal welfare laws.
After a loss, and an appeal, in October 2024 we entered the courts once more. And the judgment is now in on one of the most important legal cases for animals in history.
The judges have ruled in favour on our main argument - that the law says that animals should not be kept in the UK if it means they will suffer because of how they have been bred. This is a huge moment for animals in the UK.
A billion Frankenchickens are raised with suffering coded into their DNA each year. They are bred to grow too big, too fast, to make the most profit possible. In light of this ruling, we believe that farmers are breaking the law if they continue to keep these chickens.
However, Defra, the Government department responsible for farming, has been let off the hook on a technicality. Because Defra has been silent on fast-growing breeds of chicken, the judges found they had no concrete policy that they could rule against. This means that our case has been dismissed and the judges have not ordered Defra to act.
It is clear: by not addressing this major animal welfare crisis, Defra has failed billions of animals - and the farming community. This must change.
While this ruling has failed to force the Government to act, it has confirmed our view that farmers are acting criminally by using fast-growing breeds. We will now explore bringing private prosecutions against mega-farms that use Frankenchickens.
The cruel use of Frankenchickens is possibly the biggest animal welfare crisis of our time. With your continued support, we will use this new ruling to do everything we can to bring it to an end.
[Disclaimers: This is more shallow and conclusory than I'd like due to non-EA stuff that has been going on in my life. Although I am a lawyer, I lack professional experience with UK law specifically, although it is a common-law jurisdiction like the US . Still, I thought there was value in me saying something before this got too stale.]
1. The opinion of the Court of Appeals, Civil Division ("CACD") seems to be a mixed bag, and THL UK's post seems overall too rosy. On the other hand, I find VettedCauses' analysis in the comments to be too pessimistic.
2. CACD's interpretation of paragraph 29 seems somewhere in the middle of plausible interpretations of the relevant text. It is certainly more favorable to animal advocacy than the position taken by the lower-court judge below.
3. Paragraph 29 needs to be understood in the context of the broader regulatory scheme, as described in the following excerpt from the judgment (emphasis mine):
I would therefore accept the Secretary of State’s case that Paragraph 29 is a prohibition on the keeping of farmed animals whose genotype and phenotype mean that, regardless of the conditions in which they are kept, they cannot be kept without detriment to their health or welfare. However, this needs some further explanation. There is a difference between detrimental characteristics which are inherent in the nature of the breed and which cannot be mitigated by changing the environmental conditions in which the animal is kept, and those which can be so mitigated.
For example, an animal which, because of the way in which it has been bred, is susceptible to cold will not suffer any detrimental effect on its health or welfare if it is kept indoors with appropriate heating during periods of cold weather. It can reasonably be expected, therefore, that such an animal can be kept without any detrimental effect on its health or welfare. The keeping of such an animal is not prohibited by Paragraph 29, although it may be that other provisions of the legislation would be engaged if the animal was kept outside in the winter, or if adequate heating was not provided. That might constitute a failure to take reasonable steps in all the circumstances to ensure that the needs of the animal were met, contrary to section 9 of the 2006 Act.
(This continues with the language quoted by JBentham in another comment.)
In other words, Paragraph 29 covers cases in which no adequate mitigations are available, while advocates need to look to other legislative provisions to cover cases in which adequate mitigations were available but not employed. I assume that these theories could be charged in the alternative in a prosecution (i.e., the advocates would not have to commit to one theory in advance).
4. THL UK did not succeed in compelling the UK authorities to do anything, and seems to have at least de-emphasized this part of its case on appeal. From a US law perspective, it is hard to compel a regulator to regulate when it doesn't want to -- so I am not surprised by the loss or the court's reasoning. The status quo was that Defra wasn't acting, and there wasn't to my knowledge a viable alternative pathway to compel Defra's action. So this is a loss but does not sound like a worsening of the status quo.
5. So what's the theory of impact here? THL UK's post points to planned private prosecutions as the current plan. The English legal system is unusually friendly to private prosecutions -- but the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) can take over a privately-conducted prosecution at any time, including with the specific intent of discontinuing the prosecution. This includes cases in which it deems the public-interest test for prosecution is not met. Although I have no knowledge of CPS decisionmaking in these circumstances, I would guess that CPS would weigh the view of the responsible governmental agency quite strongly in making this determination.
6. If Defra has pointedly declined to endorse anything remotely near THL UK's view of the facts and the law, then I speculate that THL UK needed a somewhat favorable judicial interpretation of Paragraph 29 to avoid CPS taking over any potential prosecution and discontinuing it. Litigation was and is always a risk, but THL UK may have reasonably concluded that Paragraph 29 wasn't of much use without either Defra support or judicial support.
7. Likewise, I think most Magistrates' Courts would be very unlikely to convict without some official/authoritative source putting farmers on notice with sufficient specificity that they could be violating the criminal law. That makes sense, because this is a criminal statute and Paragraph 29 is written at a very high level of generality. A report written by an advocacy organization is not, in my view, an official/authoritative source. So again, I think it was reasonable to think that THL UK -- having failed to get buy-in from Defra -- needed something from a precedential judicial authority before initiating criminal prosecutions.
8. Defendants convicted before the magistrates can get a rehearing from the Crown Court (the upper-level criminal court). After that, they can seek leave to appeal to . . . the Court of Appeal. So in all likelihood, any successful path to prosecution would be going through the Court of Appeal one way or another (although it would be the Criminal Division).
9. THL UK isn't made of money. I assume it would be much more cost-effective to figure out what the law is, and then build your trial around that legal standard . . . rather than running all the expenses of trial against very well-heeled defendants and then risking everything getting thrown out because the Criminal Division didn't agree with the lower courts on the law.
10. All in all, the choice of litigation strategy seems reasonable to me, and I suspect there is still a potentially viable way forward for THL UK -- even if it isn't the way forward THL UK might have hoped for.