Most people have seen the commercials: a contented family gathers together within a sunny kitchen to enjoy a fresh-baked chicken dinner. The scene is idyllic. The smiles, laughter, and ideal place settings create the impression that the companies behind these ads love general well-being and happiness. But as many secretly- filmed documentaries have shown, the horrors experienced by the birds who turn out on our dinner tables are almost unimaginable.
Modern advantages of food Security doesn’t look very modern. It appears barbaric. And it bears little resemblance to farming.
Birds who’re hatched at modern commercial poultry farms begin their lives on a conveyor belt. Once they are taken out of their shells, the horrors begin. Newly hatched males are hand picked in the conveyor belt and tossed alive into grinding machines. Because birds are exempt in the Humane Slaughter Act, this practice is really as legal since it is unethical. Hundreds of thousands of chicks meet this atrocious fate every single day. For the females, their ultimate fate depends upon 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 fresh air. The information their traumatizing lives, however, vary by their intended use.
Broilers, chickens being raised for meat, are stuffed by the countless amounts into warehouses. The chicks receive artificial human growth hormones that can cause their bodies’ development to outpace the expansion of their legs, and thus, they are usually not able to 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 lives are 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 in order that they won’t peck at themselves away from frustration. This debeaking often ends in severe, chronic pain for the animals. The majority are also at the mercy of an exercise called “force molting” which involves starving the birds-sometimes not feeding them for two weeks-in order to shock their health into another egg laying cycle. Once egg production drops, they are immediately shipped off to be slaughtered.
Considering that the 1990’s, many undercover investigators have secretly filmed the grim and horrifying conditions over these commercial chicken farms. As the films negatively affect sales, the meat industry has fought to really make it an offence to secretly operate cameras of their facilities. These laws, meant to silence whistle-blowers, are referred“ag-gag” laws. But it’s mainly due to those earlier films how the public has grown to be conscious of the terrible conditions in which commercially “farmed” chickens live and the inhumane strategies they will die. So the next time the thing is that among those commercials in the news, don’t be misled from the happy family propaganda. Behind the scenes is often a horrifying reality those companies wouldn’t like that you know about.
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