If you’re reading a blog on a site called welovelocal, then you may have watched Hugh’s Chicken Run on Channel 4 over the past few nights. If you didn’t, the programme was about Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall getting the town of Axminster in East Devon to become the UK’s first free-range chicken town. He also showed the locals the large differences between the conditions of battery-farmed and free-range chickens. By the end of the experiment, the battery-farmed chickens were weak and full of pox marks due to their cramped conditions (one chicken per A4-sized piece of land), whereas the free-range chickens were strong, healthy and tasted better.

Hugh’s experiment was to get the public to think about the way they consume chicken and the environment that they live in. From the programme, it seemed like a lot of the Axminster locals didn’t know the process of how a chicken comes from egg to plate.

The welovelocal team are big fans of Hugh’s campaign, and like Hugh, we know that everyone can’t shop at local shops all the time for chicken and they will go to supermarkets, so we’re urging everyone to get behind the Chicken Out campaign and buy free-range and organic chicken. If you do buy it at a supermarket, it will send out a message to the supermarket buyers that there is a demand for ethically sourced poultry. Yes, it is a bit more expensive, but it is worth it, not only for the chickens, but the farmers and your taste buds too.

Hugh has a petition over at his great Chicken Out site that we would recommend signing.