Contemporary Professional Poultry Farming: The Grim Reality
Most people have seen the commercials: a cheerful family gathers together within a sunny kitchen to savor a fresh-baked chicken dinner. The scene is idyllic. The smiles, laughter, and perfect place settings build the impression that the companies behind these ads care about general well-being and happiness. But as many secretly- filmed documentaries show, the horrors seen by the birds who wind up on the dinner tables are almost unimaginable.
Modern Benefits of food security doesn’t look very modern. It seems barbaric. Also it bears little resemblance to farming.
Birds who’re hatched at modern commercial poultry farms begin their endures a conveyor belt. Once they have been taken from their shells, the horrors begin. Newly hatched these are hand selected from your conveyor belt and tossed alive into grinding machines. Because birds are exempt through the Humane Slaughter Act, this practice will be as legal as it’s unethical. Thousands of chicks meet this atrocious fate daily. For your females, their ultimate fate depends on 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 information their traumatizing lives, however, vary by their intended use.
Broilers, chickens being raised for meat, are stuffed with the tens of thousands into warehouses. The chicks receive artificial human growth hormone that can cause their bodies’ development to outpace the growth of the legs, and as a result, they are usually unable to walk or move by the time they’re only months old. Many chicks get no sleep because lighting is maintained constantly to stimulate unnatural eating patterns that facilitate faster growth. Nothing regarding their life is normal or natural.
Laying hens experience different, but equally horrifying, treatment. They’re jammed into cages so small they can’t even spread their wings. Their beaks are burned in order that they won’t peck at themselves beyond frustration. This debeaking often leads to severe, chronic pain to the animals. Most are also be subject to a practice called “force molting” that involves starving the birds-sometimes not providing them with food for about two weeks-in order to shock their health into another egg laying cycle. Once egg production drops, these are immediately shipped off and away to be slaughtered.
Since the 1990’s, many undercover investigators have secretly filmed the grim and horrifying conditions in these commercial chicken farms. As the films negatively affect sales, the meat industry has fought to restore a criminal offence to secretly operate cameras in their facilities. These laws, designed to silence whistle-blowers, are referred“ag-gag” laws. But it is mainly due to those earlier films the public has grown to be conscious of the terrible conditions by which commercially “farmed” chickens live along with the inhumane strategies by which they die. So next time you see one of those commercials in the media, do not be deceived with the happy family propaganda. Behind the scenes is a horrifying reality that people companies will not want that you be familiar with.
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