Once upon a time.... there was a chicken and it looked like one of these...
| Today for the most part there are just two kinds of chicken: broilers and layers, and they look something like this.. |
 Both the broiler and the layer have been genetically modified, one to produce large meaty breasts; and the other to lay excessive amounts of eggs. Both have as miserable a life as the other. |
This blog is going to look at the 'breed' known as broiler, and at three major problems relating to factory farmed chickens: - animal welfare; human health; and the health of the environment. |
So first the broiler chicken and animal welfare.
Unlike its naturally raised counterpart the broiler is unable to perform its natural behaviours because of the mutilations that are administered to it, and it's constricting environment. Its wings have been clipped, often its toes have been cut, and its beak trimmed. Debeaking does not in any way equate to nail trimming for humans, it is an extremely painful procedure and can cause pain for the rest of the bird's life.
The broiler is confined to a windowless shed that is designed to house thousands of birds at one time. This is a KFC chicken supplier and there will be between 30,000 to 40,000 chickens housed in this particular shed and others like it.
There is only artificial light, no fresh air, and huge fans circulate the stale ammonia filled air. Chicken meat is perfect for our fast food culture. A producer can 'grow' a chicken within a few weeks with super large breasts, and minimizing overheads through economies of scale (a.k.a. animal abuse) and remitting very poor wages to his/her unskilled employees.
Chicken meat became popular during WW II when availability of beef and pork was scarce. According to a USDA government fact sheet, in the 1950s Americans were eating an average of sixteen pounds of chicken per person per annum; in 2006 the average American consumed 73lbs of poultry, 60lbs of which was chicken. Today approximately one million chickens are killed every hour in the U.S. for food - that’s a lot of miserable chickens!! "In the United States, ten billion land animals are slaughtered for [the food industry]. Four out of five of those animals killed are chickens…A total of eight billion birds".
So what does a day in the life of a factory farmed broiler chicken look like - as with all industrialized farm animals it is a sordid, ugly and abusive picture. As I mentioned earlier broilers have been genetically engineered to produce abnormally large breasts at a reduced 'fattening-up’ time - in other words the birds are at their oven-ready weight in half their normal growth cycle. To put the growth rate of today's chickens into perspective, the University of Arkansas Division of Agriculture reports "If you grew as fast as a chicken, you'd weigh 349 pounds at age two". Aesthetically these chickens are mature (lots of plump breast meat) but physically they are still young chicks: their immature organs have a hard time coping with this abnormal weight, and as the birds grow their ability to stand diminishes. Structurally they are unable to support their own body weight and the chickens are forced to spend 76-85% of their lives lying down (watch a pasture raised chicken for a while and see how many times it lies down: not very often). Usually they become lame, their legs collapse under the strain of the weight and splay into excruciating painful contortions and they will stay like this until they are thrown (quite literally) into packing cages to go to slaughter.
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| Crippled Chicken |
The fact that the overweight birds spend so much time lying down means that the chickens also suffer skin problems - breast blisters, dermatitis and burns from lying in ammonia rich chicken faeces ('feces' U.S.). Replacing the faecal (fecal) infested chicken litter with clean litter is not a priority and is usually only performed annually. The University of Maryland in a study paper of chicken manure stated that providing the 'caked' litter which accumulates around the water bowl is removed, the 'dry' litter can remain in sheds up to 3 years before it needs to be cleaned out - that's an awful lot of chicken poop resulting in an awful lot of ammonia fumes which leads to blindness for a good number of the chickens kept in these unsanitary conditions.
By the way don’t be fooled by food labels such as “natural” ,“cage-free”, and the like: labelling can be coercive and is very misleading – I will be throwing the light on labelling in a later blog.
Consequences to human health.
Because of their unnatural and unhealthy lifestyles factory broilers carry a plethora of diseases and bacteria. The birds are so sick when they go to slaughter that the carcasses are treated to a chlorine bath in an attempt to clean up the bird. However, despite the chlorination 99% of birds reach our supermarkets contaminated with 'poop' and, according to USDA findings, have detectable levels of E. coli; and 60% of industrialized chickens sold in the supermarkets are contaminated with bacteria. According to the CDC (Centre for Disease Control) these bacteria along with other food borne pathogens (generally from other types of diseased factory farmed meat) infect over 3 million Americans every year. All processing facilities (slaughter-houses) have USDA inspectors on duty whose job is to inspect the birds to ensure that they are safe for human consumption. Realistically this is a non-starter as a USDA inspector has approximately two seconds to examine each bird inside and out for more than a dozen different diseases and abnormalities.
Journalist Scott Bronstein ran a series of articles in the Atlanta Journal Constitution relating to the chicken industry and, after conducting interviews with USDA inspectors from thirty seven plants, reported that "Every week, millions of chickens leaking yellow pus, stained by green feces, contaminated by harmful bacteria, or marred by lung and heart infections, cancerous tumors, or skin conditions are shipped to consumers". Men's Health magazine ranked supermarket [industrialized] chicken number one on their "10 Dirtiest Foods".
But before I finish this section I want to point out one very important factor - relatively speaking we are still in the early years of genetic engineering - only time will tell what the far reaching consequences will be of messing around with the genes of an organism. Every time you eat a factory farmed chicken you are taking part in a scientific experiment. Still fancy that KFC bucket of chicken for lunch?
So what about the damage to the environment caused by these intense chicken factory farms? Factory Farming concentrates animals into small areas resulting in extremely high levels of manure in a very limited space. In the case of broiler chickens, just short of half a million chickens can be housed in less than a square mile. According to Factory Farm Map there are 205 million industrialized chickens in Georgia (that equates to 22 chickens for every one person living in the state). In Georgia alone industrialized chickens will produce twenty times more untreated manure than the sewage produced in the Seattle metro area. So what happens to all this manure, where does all the chicken litter go? Well some of it goes into industrialized cattle fodder (but that is a whole other blog!!!!); the remainder is piled and stored and eventually spread onto the land to use as fertilizer.
Now apart from the obvious what else is in the chicken litter that is used to fertilize crops for human consumption (and remember that whatever is in the growing soil gets into the heart of the plant and can’t be washed off)? An arsenal of drugs gets into the growing soil from those that have been fed to factory chickens – some of these include antibiotics to prevent the sick birds from dying before they get to slaughter, and an arsenic based drug to promote growth and give it a ‘healthy’ colour. Arsenic is arsenic whichever way you look at it and is definitely not good for a person’s health! However, the good news is that the FDA has finally agreed that feeding arsenic to our chickens is not a good idea and its use was scheduled to be banned in June 2011 (how sick does our nation have to get before the FDA bans the use of other drugs and additives in the food chain?). So back to our piles of chicken poop: before it is utilized these mounds can reach the height of a three-story building - this means that when it rains, the run-off gets into streams, rivers and ditches polluting our water supply, "Water samples taken from streams and drainage ditches near many poultry CAFOs [Concentrated Animal Feeding Operation] contained high levels of arsenic, E. coli, faecal coliform bacteria, nitrogen and phosphorus". Tyson et al have been fined millions of dollars for river pollution (but I guess the fines are not much more than a slap on the wrists - otherwise why else would they keep on doing it).
To end this section - ask anyone living near a CAFO, whether it be for chickens, hogs or cattle, and they will tell you that not only is the stench sickening many folks suffer from a host of illnesses including respiratory problems, headaches, dizziness, gastroenteritis, persistent nausea, and a general malaise.
Now here’s the thing: you only need to be concerned about JUST ONE of these three items to take a stand against industrialized farming. Whether it be animal welfare; human health, or the health of the environment FACTORY FARMING IS DEVASTATING AT EVERY LEVEL.
SO, what is the solution? The large producers/retailers of chicken (e.g. Perdue and Tyson) need your dollars to survive, as do the fast food chicken restaurants such as KFC and Chick-Fil-A (and don't be fooled by the standards set out by the National Chicken Council on the Chick-Fil-A website, they are hardly worth the paper that they are written on). So we need to use our hard earned dollars to demand change - this is how we speak out collectively. Use your dollars to demand higher standards in food production - support humane, sustainable, and responsible poultry farmers and end your support for the industrialized chicken producers. When we stop supporting them with our food dollar these companies will be forced to change… or go under!
So how do we support sustainable and humane chicken farmers, how do we find them? There are a number of websites that provide information on pasture raised poultry farms; these include Animal Welfare Approved, Eat Wild, and American Grassfed Association.
For Georgia folks we have a chance to make a change through the work of Georgians For Pastured Poultry. In a detailed expose the devastating destruction of Georgia's industrialized chicken production has been revealed, and the findings of GPP is available on their website. It is the combination of months of work from a team of experts – including amongst its eminent panel, Compassion In World Farming, pastured poultry farmers Will Harris White Oak Pastures and Daniel Dover from Darby Farms, along with legal expertise from GreenLaw Sign the pledge proffered on the website for GPP and help them make a difference in how poultry is raised and produced.
For those living outside of Georgia (and for Georgians too!) you can keep abreast through this blogsite and our posts on Facebook.
Make sure that the poultry you buy has been pasture and humanely raised; check out the above websites, and visit your local farmer's market and get to know your farmers.
Together we can make a difference. – THE ACTIVIST
References
-Weeks CA, Danbury TD, Davies HC, Hunt P, and Kestin SC, “The Behaviour of Broiler Chickens and Its Modification by Lameness,” Applied Animal Behaviour Science 67 (2000): 111-25
-http://www.chickenout.tv/about-campaign
-Poultry Diseases, Ed. W Jordan, Baliere Tindall 1990
-http://ezinearticles.com/?Supermarket-Chicken-Found-to-Be-Grossly-Contaminated-With-Illness-Causing-Bacteria!&id=3942124
-http://www.menshealth.com/mhlists/foodborne_illness
- http://www.upc-online.org/fouling.html
