Chickens' Lib

CHICKENS' LIB is about passion, conviction and how two women, Clare Druce and her mother, Violet Spalding, were driven to highlight the intolerable and cruel conditions on Britain's factory farms. They staged demonstrations inside the Ministry of Agriculture, caged humans in Parliament Square, were thrown out of Wakefield Cathedral by the Provost and pursued by the police. Battery hens were their first concern but later CHICKENS' LIB campaigned on a much wider front - from quail to ostriches, and for other, non-feathered , farm animals. Farmers were, and still are, routinely administering antibiotics to their animals to keep them alive in squalid and stressful conditions while multi-national drug companies continue to profit.

Auteur

Clare Druce trained at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama in London and went on to teach the clarinet in Cambridge and London. In the late 1960's the treatment of intensively farmed animals, graphically exposed in Ruth Harrison's Animal Machines, came to her notice and Clare and her mother co-founded the pressure group CHICKENS' LIB. Clare has two daughters, four grandchildren, is married to musician Duncan Druce, and lives in West Yorkshire