Chickens

 https://justiceforanimals.org/?curid=263

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This article is a draft. It will remain in the Staged namespace until it is completed.

General Information

It's commonly thought that the domesticated chickens used for meat and eggs are primarily descended from the Red Jungle Fowl of Southeast Asia. More recent research paints a more complex picture—birds from India, Cambodia, Ceylon, and other areas may also be involved in the lineage.

Early interest in these birds centered around cockfighting, but later the bird became domesticated for eggs and meat. Chickens were used widely in Southeast Asia, India, Tibet, and the islands of the Pacific. By the sixth century B.C. Egyptians were using chickens for religious sacrifices and cockfighting, and by the third century they were being used for their meat and eggs.

Chickens were a common fixture in ancient Greece. After being shown a chicken, Plato defined humans in terms of the chickens as "bipeds without feathers". Their exploitation in the West spread from Greece to Rome and then on to Europe.

Suffering and Violence

Mass Slaughter of Male Hatchlings

Because laying hens are bred specifically to lay eggs, males hatched from the laying hen variety of chicken are not profitable—they don't yield sufficient meat and they can't lay eggs. And because they are not profitable, the males are ground alive in a macerator, gassed, or suffocated, shortly after they are hatched. This industry refers to this practice as chick culling. (Weak and struggling females are also discarded in this manner.)

Hatchlings are about 50% male and 50% female. So statistically speaking, every laying hen has a brother who has been violently slaughtered. This is true even for backyard chickens, as the female hatchlings are sold not only to commercial producers, but individuals keeping backyard chickens.

In the United States, over 375 million male chicks are slaughtered via culling. Worldwide, it's in the billions.

Extra: Lack of progress on the elimination of culling

In June 2016, United Egg Producers (UEP), who claims to be responsible for 95% of egg production in the United States, issued a vague statement about supporting research to end this practice.

Following negotiations with the Humane League in 2016, Humane League executive director David Coman-Hidy stated that the UEP commitment "will virtually eliminate this practice in the American egg industry. … It is clear that chick culling will soon be a thing of the past in the United States".

This was reported by the Human League and in the press as if it were sure thing and an absolute commitment, but the UEP statement referenced above only says that "we encourage the development of an alternative with the goal of eliminating the culling of day-old male chicks by 2020 or as soon as it is commercially available and economically feasible."

As of December 2018, only one grocery store chain in Germany is selling eggs from hatcheries where males have not been slaughtered. There are no reports on the elimination of this elsewhere, including the United States.

Overcrowding and Confinement

The vast majority of layers still live their lives in battery cages, unable to preen or spread their wings. In 2009, 95% of all egg production is from hens kept in cages.

Cage-free chickens are frequently subjected to overcrowding. According to Dan Flynn, who has more than 15 years experience in food safety, writing for Food Safety News, says that "overcrowding and a lack of access to the outdoors are frequently cited at operations billed as cage-free…" As you can see by the abundance of images and videos available with a quick Google. the crowding is severe, restricting or eliminating the chickens' ability to express their natural behaviors of nesting, perching, dust-bathing, and pecking. Undercover investigations at human certified farms show that the standards are not enforced and abuses still occur. One such investigation at Pitman Family Farms revealed that even the lowest level stipulation of "no cages no crowding", which is supposed to be adhered to for all animal foods sold at Whole Foods, is not even close to being enforced. According to one investigator of a Whole Foods certified chicken house they "replaced cages of wire with cages of flesh." The video shows:

• Congestion so bad that in some areas the hens were piled on top of each other.
• In other cases, birds received no more than a square foot of space.
• Chickens that had lost all or most of their feathers from the crowded filthy conditions. You could see the rashes, inflammation.
• Chickens bumping into each other and squawking in agitation.

Filth and Stench

Filth, stench, and feces were everywhere. Many of the birds were covered in feces and so weak that they could not clean themselves. Have to live their entire life in suffocating stench of feathers, dander, urine, and species. Some were stuck in manure so deep it could be described as a manure pit. They were almost buried in their own feces. Some were splayed out on filthy concrete floors barely able to breathe.

Sickness and disease were common. Some we so sick you could hear them struggling to breathe. Some hens didn't have the strength to stand on their own two legs. Some barely able to move or respond to anything around them. Birds were found dead and dying. Chickens that had lost half their body weight.

Investigators were overwhelmed by the constant cries of distress.

Source

Dibilitating Selective Breeding

A laying hen produces more than 300 eggs a year, but the jungle fowl from which they are bred lay less than 10 eggs in a year. This causes both physical and physiological stress. The large increase in the number of eggs laid is from a combination of selective breeding as well as the tendency of the hen to lay more when eggs are removed in order to follow her instinct to form a proper brood.

Laying hens are also bred to lay large eggs for which they have not evolved, stressing their reproductive system, and causing such problems as osteoporosis, bone breakage, and uterus prolapse.

The modern broiler chicken is unnaturally large and has been bred to grow at an unnaturally fast rate and have large-sized breasts. This selective breeding comes with serious welfare consequences, including leg disorders, skeletal, developmental and degenerative diseases, heart and lung problems, breathing difficulty, and premature death.

Debeaking

Debeaking is painful, causes lasting suffering, impairs feeding, eliminates exploratory pecking, and contributes to lice from impaired preening.

Meta

This page was originally authored by Greg Fuller. The contents may have been edited since that time by others.

Notes to be deleted after integrating and before publication

Mutilations including de-toeing, clipping, beak trimming and other surgical procedures performed without anesthetic.

• A group of veterinarians and other experts appointed by Parliament to look into farming practices concluded, "There is no physiological basis for the assertion that the operation is similar to the clipping of human fingernails. Between the horn and bone [of the beak] is a thin layer of highly sensitive soft tissue, resembling the quick of the human nail. The hot knife blade used in debeaking cuts through this complex horn, bone and sensitive tissue causing severe pain."

Only at Step 5 are chickens allowed to perch.

• USDA Definition of Free Range for Chickens
  • Free range chickens are only required to have access to the outside, without reference to size or conditions of the space..
• What free range means in practice
  • A tiny door leading to a small concrete slab beside a chicken house holding hundreds of chickens.
  • The term free-range does not carry any other conditions such as the number of chickens, space per chicken, or environmental quality.

Cage-free is also meaningless.

• It just means they are not in a cage. It doesn't mean they are not crowded to the extent that they cannot engage in natural behaviors, such as

Audits are infrequent, done by outside contractors, and announced (not suprise), and do not result in decertifications.

• Research reveals no loss of certifications.
• GAP audits are required every 15 months.
• PETA sued Whole Foods Market on the grounds that the program deceived customers into paying higher prices for certified products.
  • According to the complaint, "the entire audit process for Whole Foods' animal welfare standards is a sham because it occurs infrequently and violations of the standards do not cause loss of certification...Standards that are not actually enforced create a false impression of ensuring a more humanely treated, higher quality animal product — when in fact they ensure no such thing."
  • The case was dismissed on a technicality, not because the deceptions were proven false, but because the complaint did not raise a consumer safety issue.
• The Open Philanthropy Project confirmed these suspicions.
  • For most animals on the program, GAP offers only offers small improvements over standard factory farming.
  • Standards are not properly audited and enforced.
  • Source
    • "In our view, the most credible criticism of GAP is that its standards are not as strict or rigorously enforced as they might be. In particular, a large portion of the 290 million animals covered by GAP standards are chickens and turkeys kept in Step 2 facilities, which represent only a slight improvement on standard factory farming conditions. We also think there have been issues with GAP’s contract auditors failing to properly enforce GAP’s standards. However, we believe these concerns are outweighed by the value of bringing new large producers into a regulatory scheme for the first time, under which they can be audited, regulated, and pushed toward higher standards. We are heartened to see that GAP is strengthening its broiler chicken standards,13 and we hope that this grant will allow it to improve its standards and enforcement of those standards further."

Under the requirment that farms be profitible, animals are still treated as units of production, not as living, breathing, sentient beings.

Humane labels are designed to make us feel better about what we are eating, and to pay more. They seem to be more about marketing than about compassion.

Some of the harms are systemic to the system.

• Some of the cruelties are systemic to the production processes such that removing one or more of the cruelties would raise the price of the product, often to such an extent the product would no longer be affordable except to the richest among us.
• No matter which kind of harm we are talking about, conscious beings, beings that have a life they value, are hung up to bleed, passed around on conveyor belts, dragged through electrified water, sliced up into different products, and packaged in cellophane because we like to eat them.
• In the end, they are all slaughtered and lose a life they value.