The Truth about Factory Farming

[Sir Tokyo Sexwale]

Paints an appetizing picture

 

It's hard to get one's head around the magnitude of 25,000 or 30,000 birds in one room. You don't have to see it for yourself to understand that things are packed pretty tight. In its Animal ­Welfare Guidelines, the US National Chicken Council indicates an appropriate stocking density to be eight-tenths of a square foot per bird. Try to ­picture it. Find a piece of printer paper and imagine a full-grown bird shaped something like a football with legs standing on it. Imagine 25,000 of these rectangles in a grid. Now enclose the grid with windowless walls and put a ceiling on top. Run in automated (drug-laced) feed, water, heating, and ventilation ­systems. This is a farm.

 

Now to the farming. First, find a chicken that will grow big fast on as little feed as possible. The muscles and fat tissues of the newly ­engineered broiler birds – chickens that ­become meat, as opposed to ­layers, chickens that lay eggs – grow significantly faster than their bones, leading to deformities and disease. Somewhere between 1% and 4% of the birds will die writhing in ­convulsions from sudden-death ­syndrome, a condition ­virtually ­unknown outside of factory farms. Three out of four will have some degree of walking impairment, and common sense suggests they are in chronic pain.

 

For broilers, leave the lights on about 24 hours a day for the first week or so of the chicks' lives. This encourages them to eat more. Then turn the lights off a bit, giving them maybe four hours of darkness a day – just enough sleep for them to survive. Of course, chickens will go crazy if forced to live in such grossly unnatural conditions for long. At least broiler birds are ­typically slaughtered on the 42nd day of their lives (or increasingly the 39th), so they haven't yet established social hierarchies to fight over.

 

Needless to say, jamming deformed, drugged, overstressed birds together in a filthy, waste-coated room is not very healthy. Eye damage, blindness, ­bacterial infections of bones, slipped vertebrae, paralysis, internal ­bleeding, anemia, slipped tendons, twisted lower legs and necks, respiratory ­diseases and weakened immune systems are frequent and long-standing problems on factory farms. Scientific studies and US government records suggest that virtually all chickens become ­infected with E coli (an indicator of faecal ­contamination) and between 39% and 75% of chickens in retail stores are still infected. Around 8% of birds become infected with salmonella. Seventy to 90% are infected with another potentially deadly pathogen, campylobacter.

 

How good could a drug-stuffed, ­disease-ridden, s***-contaminated animal possibly taste? In practice, the birds will be injected (or otherwise pumped up) with "broths" and salty solutions to give them what we have come to think of as the chicken look, smell and taste.

 

The farming done, it's now time for "processing". First, you'll need to find workers to gather the birds into crates and "hold the line" that will turn the living birds into plastic-wrapped parts. Illegal aliens are often preferred, but poor recent immigrants who do not speak English are also desirable ­employees. Pay your workers ­minimum wage, or near to it, to scoop up the birds – five in each hand – and jam them into transport crates.

 

If your operation is running at the proper speed – 105 chickens crated by a single worker in 3.5 minutes is the ­expected rate according to several catchers I interviewed – the workers will regularly feel the birds' bones snapping in their hands. (Approximately 30% of all live birds arriving at the slaughterhouse have freshly ­broken bones as a result of their Frankenstein genetics and rough treatment.)

 

Load the crates into trucks. Ignore weather extremes and don't feed or water the birds, even if the processing plant is hundreds of miles away. Upon arrival at the plant, have more workers sling the birds, upside down by their ankles in metal shackles, on to a ­moving conveyer system. More bones will be broken. Often the screaming of the birds and the flapping of their wings will be so loud that workers won't be able to hear the person next to them on the line. Often the birds will defecate in pain and terror.

 

The conveyer system drags the birds through an electrified water bath. This most likely paralyses them but doesn't render them insensible. Other countries, including the UK, require (legally, at least) that chickens be rendered unconscious or killed prior to bleeding and scalding. In America, the voltage is kept low – about one-tenth of the level necessary to render the animals unconscious. After it has travelled through the bath, a paralysed bird's eyes might still move. Sometimes the birds will have enough control of their bodies to slowly open their beaks, as though ­attempting to scream.

 

The next stop on the line will be an automated throat slitter. Blood will slowly drain out of the bird, unless the relevant arteries are missed, which happens, according to another worker I spoke with, "all the time". So you'll need a few more workers to function as backup slaughterers – "kill men" – who will slit the throats of the birds that the machine misses. Unless they, too, miss the birds, which I was also told happens "all the time". ­According to the National Chicken Council – ­representatives of the industry – about 180 ­million chickens are improperly slaughtered each year. When asked if these numbers troubled him,­ ­Richard L Lobb, the council's spokesman, sighed, "The process is over in a matter of minutes."

 

that's just a part of the article

[Owen1978]

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[badtodabone]

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[muleskinner]

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[Ostrich Man]

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