Asda has been singled out as the supermarket to avoid if shoppers care about the welfare of the animals they are about to eat.
Britain's second biggest grocer was named and shamed in a report published today by Compassion in World Farming (CIWF), which campaigns for higher standards of animal welfare. Supermarkets were scored out of five based on the standards they set their suppliers on a range of categories, from transport and slaughter of animals, to fish farming. Tesco, which is the UK's most powerful retailer, was also rapped for not using its huge influence to do more to improve conditions for farmed animals.
Many supermarkets are still selling meat from veal calves reared without bedding, pigs that have been confined in stalls so small that pregnant sows cannot even turn round and mutant chickens bred for their ability to grow quickly but which suffer skeletal problems, lameness and heart failure during their short lives.
The biggest exception is Marks & Spencer, which won the compassionate supermarket award for 2007 at a ceremony last night. It stole the crown from Waitrose, which came second. Sainsbury's, which has been turned around under its current chief executive, Justin King, also did well. It was highlighted as both the best of the Big Four chains and the supermarket that had done the most to improve its animal welfare standards over the past 24 months.
Sainsbury's was the first of the Big Four grocers to pledge to sell only cage-free eggs by 2010. It will also stop using battery eggs in all its own-label products by 2012. But it has stopped short of making a similar promise to use only free-range chicken in its ready meals.
CIWF's Anna Fraser, who wrote the report, said Asda had been placed at the bottom of the caring supermarket league in eighth place based on its attitude towards animal welfare two years ago. This year Asda was the only supermarket that refused to complete CIWF's survey. The chain was recently condemned for selling chickens for 2.
"We see Asda's approach as a measure of its commitment to animal welfare and believe that companies willing to reveal their animal welfare standards are ones with less to hide," she said.
Asda, part of Wal-Mart, the world's biggest supermarket group, slammed the charity's survey as "subjective". It claimed its refusal to co-operate "does not mean that we don't take animal welfare seriously".
The vast majority of the 60 billion animals farmed worldwide for food every year are reared intensively. Broiler chickens, which are used for meat, ring the biggest alarm bells for being the most intensively produced species: more than 90 per cent sold in the UK are factory farmed. Ms Fraser said: "People are not aware of how chickens are bred. These are not what you think of as a chicken."
The celebrity chefs Jamie Oliver and Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall will highlight the plight of intensively reared poultry in two programmes for Channel 4 in January. "When it comes to animal welfare, broiler chickens are in the front line. Many supermarkets are still fighting price wars on chicken. It's time they started to compete with each other on who can produce the most contented, natural and best-tasting birds instead," Fearnley-Whittingstall said.
Andrew Joret, a chicken farmer who has supplied M&S with cage-free eggs for the past decade, said M&S had led the market in terms of chicken welfare. But he added that other supermarkets should "not necessarily" follow suit and stop selling battery eggs because "some people don't give a damn about animal welfare one way or another". He added: "Demand for better animal welfare has got to come from the customer."
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