Most people have seen the commercials: a pleasant 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 make the impression how the companies behind these ads love general well-being and happiness. But as many secretly- filmed documentaries show, the horrors seen by the birds who wind up on our dinner tables are almost unimaginable.
Modern backyard poultry farming doesn’t look very modern. It appears barbaric. Also it bears little resemblance to farming.
Birds that are hatched at modern commercial poultry farms begin their endures a conveyor belt. Once they are taken from their shells, the horrors begin. Newly hatched the male is personally selected from the conveyor belt and tossed alive into grinding machines. Because birds are exempt in the Humane Slaughter Act, this practice will be as legal as it is unethical. Thousands of chicks meet this atrocious fate daily. To 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 are missing out on ordinary pleasures of existence like sunlight and outdoors. The details of their traumatizing lives, however, vary by their intended use.
Broilers, chickens being raised for meat, are stuffed through the thousands into warehouses. The chicks are given artificial growth hormones that create their bodies’ development to outpace the growth of the legs, and thus, they can be struggling 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 life is normal or natural.
Laying hens experience different, but equally horrifying, treatment. They’re jammed into cages so small they are unable to even spread their wings. Their beaks are burned in order that they won’t peck at themselves out of frustration. This debeaking often leads to severe, chronic pain to the animals. The majority are also susceptible to an exercise called “force molting” involving starving the birds-sometimes not feeding them for approximately two weeks-in to shock their own health into another egg laying cycle. Once egg production drops, they are immediately shipped off to be slaughtered.
Since 1990’s, many undercover investigators have secretly filmed the grim and horrifying conditions of these commercial chicken farms. For the reason that films negatively affect sales, the meat industry has fought to restore a crime to secretly operate cameras in their facilities. These laws, designed to silence whistle-blowers, are referred“ag-gag” laws. However it is largely because of those earlier films how the public has become conscious of the terrible conditions by which commercially “farmed” chickens live and the inhumane means by that they can die. So the very next time the truth is one particular commercials on television, don’t be misled with the happy family propaganda. Under the surface can be a horrifying reality that those companies will not want one to find out about.
For more information about Components of food security have a look at this useful web portal: read more