Fine Dining With Quail (Quail Farming)

The quail industry in Australia is thriving; farmers can’t keep up with demand. Quail eggs and meat are highly sought after delicacies. Quail is the largest game bird industry in Australia with 6.5 million quail slaughtered each year with a value of over AU$35 million.

Quail are a small ground-nesting game bird in the pheasant family Phasianidae. They are brilliant flyers so keeping them in an area that is not enclosed means that they will fly away. The quail industry concentrates on two aspects of quail’s bodies – eggs and meat. Quail meat and eggs are seen as a delicacy to be enjoyed in by affluent individuals and fine dining lovers.

Quail are the smallest animal to be instensively farmed. These sweet little birds are put in to cages, 50 to a cage. They have basically no room to move, cannot stretch their wings, cannot fly and cannot dust bathe. Their confinement means that they never see the sun, the earth or the sky. Quail used for egg laying are slaughtered at 6 months of age. A farmer can breed three generations of quail within one year and quail who are not laying prolifically and are over 6 months of age are not worth the feed to a farmer and are slaughtered very quickly.

Quails are bred, eggs are incubated and quails are raised very quickly in quail farms. Quails are hatched and raised in sheds. Half are sent to the laying cages and sheds to produce eggs, the other half are sent to the meat grower sheds. The meat quails reach slaughter weight within a 2-month period and are then collected for slaughter. Many quail farms slaughter their own quail’s onsite. Many use scissors or secateurs to cut the heads off the quails as a slaughtering process. I witnessed the slaughtering of quail in a farm in Victoria. Slaughtering of quail at this facility required very few people and one pair of scissors (or secateurs). One person grabbed the conscious quail out of the crate, cut their head off, and threw the head in one bucket and the body in the other bucket. The body flapped around for what seemed like an age after decapitation. The bodies are then moved to the blue bucket and they await washing. They are then washed and put in to the de-feathering machine, which spins the little bodies around removing all feathers. They then go down a shoot where two workers cut out their organs from their bodies and get them ready for packaging. Their bodies are on the shop shelves that week.

In a nutshell, quails that are reared for meat and for egg production live miserable, short lives that end in an awful death. These sweet little birds deserve so much more.

The short video below is a look in to an Australia quail meat and egg farm.

The photographic images below are from my 2017 investigation in to a quail farm in Victoria, Australia.