ABSTRACT
This chapter explains that the introduction of the battery cage to Norway was a slow, in many ways troubled, and anything but predictable, process. There was nothing automatic or inevitable about the spread of the cage, nor was there anything like a "rhetorical showdown" from which the battery cage emerged as victor. Instead, the introduction of the cage on Norway's egg farms only gradually became a new premise for the debate a premise that at the same time began to be challenged from the outside. The history of the battery cage illustrates, the increasing distance geographical, sociological, and rhetorical between producers and consumers of agricultural products. The chapter explains that the battery cage is an example not so much the evils of industrialized agriculture, but of a particular form of agricultural alienation that plagues our time. One aspect of the battery cage system that seems to have almost uniformly fascinated the poultry community, however, was the massive scale it made possible.
