Most of us have seen the commercials: a cheerful family gathers together in the sunny kitchen to savor a fresh-baked chicken dinner. The scene is idyllic. The smiles, laughter, and excellent place settings create the impression how the companies behind these ads care about general well-being and happiness. But as many secretly- filmed documentaries have shown, the horrors felt by the birds who find yourself on the dinner tables are nearly unimaginable.

Modern best backyard laying eggs 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 lives on a conveyor belt. Once they’ve been taken from their shells, the horrors begin. Newly hatched males are personally picked from the conveyor belt and tossed alive into grinding machines. Because birds are exempt in the Humane Slaughter Act, this practice can be as legal as it’s unethical. Thousands and 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 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 by the countless amounts into warehouses. The chicks are shown artificial growth hormones that create their bodies’ development to outpace the expansion of the legs, and as a result, they are generally struggling to walk or move once they’re only months old. Many chicks get no sleep because lighting is maintained on constantly to stimulate unnatural eating patterns that facilitate faster growth. Nothing about 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 so they really won’t peck at themselves out of frustration. This debeaking often leads to severe, chronic pain for that animals. Most are also at the mercy of a practice called “force molting” which involves starving the birds-sometimes not giving them for up to two weeks-in order to shock their into another egg laying cycle. Once egg production drops, they may be immediately shipped off and away to be slaughtered.

Considering that the 1990’s, many undercover investigators have secretly filmed the grim and horrifying conditions in these commercial chicken farms. Since the films negatively affect sales, the meat industry has fought making it a criminal offense to secretly operate cameras inside their facilities. These laws, made to silence whistle-blowers, are referred“ag-gag” laws. Yet it’s largely because of those earlier films how the public is now aware of the terrible conditions where commercially “farmed” chickens live along with the inhumane means by that they can die. So next time you see some of those commercials in the media, don’t be misled with the happy family propaganda. Behind the curtain can be a horrifying reality that people companies do not want one to find out about.
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