By Krissy Moreau
Three animal welfare protesters have been arrested after suspending themselves from a seven-metre-high tripod outside the gate of a huge Otago chicken farm.
Police moved on the group because of safety concerns about predicted gale force winds.
They were protesting mid-air and refusing to come down on their own.
“If we elevate the staff and cut the chain are you prepared to come down, if we go to that stage?” asked Inspector Alastair Dickie of Dunedin police. “All right then, we'll try that.
“The two of them up there are fairly hard-nosed. I offered for them to come down earlier but they said ‘no, if you want us down you'll have to get us down’.”
So with a cherry-picker in place and bolt cutters in hand, that's exactly what police did.
They say they were forced to bring the protesters down because of forecast gale force winds.
It brought to an end a protest to stop certain farming practices that the Coalition to End Factory Farming is calling immoral.
“It really is a moral crime inside these farms,” said activist Deirdre Sims.
“These hens are living animals. They feel; they suffer in these farms, in these cages; they don't have sunshine; they can't express basic behaviours like walking or scratching; they can't even stretch their wings.”
The coalition says they have shocking footage from inside the Mainland Poultry facility.
The organisation’s video is a stark contrast to the vision Mainland Poultry put in their promotional video.
“They put out what they want the public to see,” said Ms Sims. “They put out the best of the best. We had to go in there to show the reality of what they're hiding behind closed doors.”
But Mainland Foods says the evidence looks the way it does because the filmmakers snuck up on the birds in the middle of the night.
“We're very open about taking people into it,” says Michael Guthrie of Mainland Foods. “What we've done is the hard side of the filming and we're happy to take journalists inside. We've got nothing to hide.
“We've had head of SAFE, head of SPCA [through]. We're not hiding from anybody.”
In the end, protestors spent 10 hours on the scaffolding, which is coming down now just as easily as it went up at 3am this morning. Now they have to deal with police pressing charges.
While the coalition has told 3 News all charges have been dropped, the fate of the layer hens is still in the hands of the Government.
3 News