I've been following the European Citizens' Initiative to ban cages in animal farming for a while now, and wondered why it's taken six years to go nowhere. Some clues have finally come to light.

Each year, more than 300 million farm animals in the EU live in cages. Europeans overwhelmingly want that to change: 84% think the welfare of farmed animals should be improved, and 60% are even willing to pay more for it, according to a 2023 Eurobarometer survey. The European Food Safety Authority also recommends avoiding the use of cages for broiler chickens and laying hens to improve animal health and welfare.

In 2021, the European Commission committed to ending caged farming following the European Citizens’ Initiative (ECI) “End the Cage Age”, which gathered more than 1.4 million signatures and support from over 170 organisations for a complete ban on cages for farmed animals.

The European Parliament voted in favour of the initiative with overwhelming support, and the Commission promised to propose legislation by the end of 2023 to “phase out, and finally prohibit, the use of cage systems” for the animals mentioned in the initiative: hens, rabbits, quail, ducks, geese, pigs, and calves.

The Commission missed its deadline and dropped the ban on caged farming from its 2024 work programme. In response, the organisers of the ECI started a case with the Court of Justice of the EU to hold the Commission accountable. That case is still pending.

Why didn’t the Commission do what it set out to do? We may find a clue in the meetings of the person now responsible for it: health and animal welfare commissioner Olivér Várhelyi, in office since December 2024. He promised to take action on the initiative, and has held 60 meetings about animal welfare since entering office.

Investigative outlet Follow the Money found that only 15% of those were with civil society, including the organisers of the ECI and other NGOs with no commercial interest in ending caged farming. That's nine out of 60 meetings.

The rest were mainly with the livestock industry: meat, dairy, and poultry producers set to face the consequences and costs of ending the cage age. After those meetings, high-level attitudes towards the legislation became “extremely negative”, an official told Lighthouse Reports.

What those meetings were about remains a secret. The Commission rejected a request for access to details by animal rights lawyer Anna Mulà Arribas. It argued that revealing information about the meetings could put the decision-making process at risk of “external influences”.

“Six years on, we can see clearly who has had access to this process. What we still can’t see is how the Commission is weighing that against its commitment to the millions who signed the ECI – and the result, so far, is a legislative file that keeps being delayed,” Arribas told us.

“If animal welfare is genuinely a priority, Europe’s first animal welfare commissioner must listen to animal welfare organisations and compassionate, nature-friendly farmers, who have time and again called for getting rid of cages in Europe. Not only to profit-driven, polluting agribusiness lobbyists,” said Debbie Tripley, global campaigns director of Compassion in World Farming, the organisation that spearheaded “End the Cage Age”.

The Commission recently put the issue back on its agenda, and plans to review animal welfare rules for hens and broilers in 2026 and pigs in 2027, as detailed in its livestock strategy. A draft bill for chickens is expected by the end of this year.

“The Commission's current plans focus only on ending the use of cages for laying hens and sows. For the millions of other animals still confined in cages – including ducks, geese, quail, rabbits, and calves – there is no concrete timetable or proposal,” Anja Hazekamp, member of the European Parliament for The Left, pointed out. “It is very obvious that Varhelyi has close ties with the industry. He shows virtually no ambition to improve animal welfare in Europe.”

While the Commission refuses transparency on its decision-making out of fear of “external influences”, the real external influence had already been in Várhelyi's office 50 times. The fox didn't need to break into the henhouse; it was invited in.