Most of us have seen the commercials: a happy family gathers together in a sunny kitchen to savor a fresh-baked chicken dinner. The scene is idyllic. The smiles, laughter, and ideal place settings produce the impression the companies behind these ads worry about general well-being and happiness. Speculate many secretly- filmed documentaries show, the horrors seen by the birds who find yourself on the dinner tables are almost unimaginable.
Modern backyard poultry farming doesn’t look very modern. It’s barbaric. Plus it bears little resemblance to farming.
Birds who’re hatched at modern commercial poultry farms begin their eats a conveyor belt. Once to remain taken off their shells, the horrors begin. Newly hatched the male is hand picked from your conveyor belt and tossed alive into grinding machines. Because birds are exempt from the Humane Slaughter Act, this practice can be as legal as it is unethical. Tens of thousands of chicks meet this atrocious fate daily. For the females, their ultimate fate is determined by whether they’re being hatched as broilers or laying hens. Both types are taken to environments where they live in impossibly crowded conditions and therefore are without the benefit of ordinary pleasures of existence like sunlight and oxygen. The information their traumatizing lives, however, vary by their intended use.
Broilers, chickens being raised for meat, are stuffed with the countless amounts into warehouses. The chicks receive artificial growth hormones that induce their bodies’ development to outpace the growth of these legs, and thus, they are often can not walk or move as soon as 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 their life is normal or natural.
Laying hens experience different, but equally horrifying, treatment. They’re jammed into cages so small they cannot even spread their wings. Their beaks are burned so they won’t peck at themselves away from frustration. This debeaking often results in severe, chronic pain for the animals. Most are also susceptible to an exercise called “force molting” that involves starving the birds-sometimes not feeding them for about two weeks-in to shock their into another egg laying cycle. Once egg production drops, they’re immediately shipped away and off to be slaughtered.
Since 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 making it a criminal offence to secretly operate cameras inside their facilities. These laws, built to silence whistle-blowers, are referred“ag-gag” laws. However it is mainly due to those earlier films that this public is now alert to the terrible conditions in which commercially “farmed” chickens live along with the inhumane strategies by that they die. So the next occasion the truth is one of those commercials in the news, don’t be fooled with the happy family propaganda. Behind the curtain can be a horrifying reality those companies wouldn’t like that you be familiar with.
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