Everyone’s seen the commercials: a cheerful family gathers together in the sunny kitchen to relish a fresh-baked chicken dinner. The scene is idyllic. The smiles, laughter, and perfect place settings create the impression how the companies behind these ads care about general well-being and happiness. But because many secretly- filmed documentaries have shown, the horrors seen by the birds who find yourself on our dinner tables are nearly unimaginable.
Modern Backyard hens doesn’t look very modern. It looks barbaric. Plus it bears little resemblance to farming.
Birds who’re hatched at modern commercial poultry farms begin their thrives on a conveyor belt. Once they are taken off their shells, the horrors begin. Newly hatched these are personally picked in the conveyor belt and tossed alive into grinding machines. Because birds are exempt from your Humane Slaughter Act, this practice will be as legal since it is unethical. Thousands of chicks meet this atrocious fate every single day. For that females, their ultimate fate is determined by whether they’re being hatched as broilers or laying hens. Both types are delivered to environments their current address in impossibly crowded conditions and they are without the benefit of ordinary pleasures of existence like sunlight and fresh air. The specifics of their traumatizing lives, however, vary by their intended use.
Broilers, chickens being raised for meat, are stuffed by the thousands into warehouses. The chicks are given artificial hgh that create their bodies’ development to outpace the expansion of these legs, and thus, they are often struggling to walk or move once they’re only months old. Many chicks get no sleep because lights are kept on constantly to stimulate unnatural eating patterns that facilitate faster growth. Nothing regarding life is normal or natural.
Laying hens experience different, but equally horrifying, treatment. They’re jammed into cages so small they can not even spread their wings. Their beaks are burned in order that they won’t peck at themselves out of frustration. This debeaking often results in severe, chronic pain for the animals. Many are also susceptible to an exercise called “force molting” that involves starving the birds-sometimes not giving them for two weeks-in order to shock their own health into another egg laying cycle. Once egg production drops, they’re immediately shipped off to be slaughtered.
Since 1990’s, many undercover investigators have secretly filmed the grim and horrifying conditions during these commercial chicken farms. Because the films negatively affect sales, the meat industry has fought to make it a criminal offense to secretly operate cameras of their facilities. These laws, built to silence whistle-blowers, are referred“ag-gag” laws. But it is mainly due to those earlier films that this public has become conscious of the terrible conditions where commercially “farmed” chickens live and the inhumane strategies that they can die. So next time the truth is among those commercials on television, do not be deceived from the happy family propaganda. Under the surface is a horrifying reality that those companies will not want one to find out about.
For details about issues in food security see this popular webpage: this