Eating Animals III: Chooks

Ok, I think we all already know this, deep down. But it's easiest to forget about it!

There are two types of chook (used in factory farming, I mean), broilers and layers.

1. What happens to male layers?
They are killed asap. There are many ways. On Jamie Oliver (I hear) there was a farm visit once. The farmer drafted the males and females, and the males he put in a container and they all dropped dead. Gas. Other ways:

• They are placed in a tube, fall through a series of pipes until they reach an electrified plate. Apparently this is the most common method (in the US at least)
• They are placed in a container without gas, and left to suffocate, those on the bottom first, and slowly, eventually, those further up. 
• They are sent through macerators (great word!) = a mulcher.

So almost half of all layers are killed asap after birth. Without such ridiculous selective breeding, the males could just be broilers right? But who wants to pay for a chook that takes a long time to reach maturity, eats a lot in the meantime, and then doesn't provide big fat thighs and breasts?

Oh, and they're de-beaked. This protects the farmers, and other chooks. With the treatment they get, a lot of chooks go a bit crazy, and even cannibalistic. So better to de-beak them eh?

2. Who raises chicks?

Obviously layers can't raise their own chicks, they must keep laying. And broilers are killed on about day 40 of their life. And anyway, raising one's own chicks is inefficient. 

Chicks are placed in the tens of thousands in big permanently light rooms (light encourages eating) with little warm lights spaced evenly about. They crowd around the heaters, because it's kind of like mum's warmth, and are fed drugs and food through a tube. The drugs I'll get to.

3. Then what?

Once they reach maturity, at about 18 weeks, layers are put in a dark barn (sometimes completely dark 24/7) and a very low protein (almost starvation) diet for 2-3 weeks. Then the lights are cranked up, 20 hours a day, and the diet is turned to high protein. And she'll immediately begin to lay. A layer will lay 300 eggs a year, which is 3X the number she does in nature. This is because of selective breeding and the unnatural manipulation outlined above. 

4. Battery and Free-Range (US - is Australia better? I don't know)

Whether battery or free-range, layers will tend to have about an A4 page of space to themselves. Broilers have more like a square foot. Free-range can mean a vast barren yard with the chooks packed in side-by-side. Literally it requires 'access to the outdoors', which if you use your imagination, and remember they're farmed in lots of several tens of thousands, could mean anything at all. 

Safran says 'I could keep a flock of hens under my sink and call them free-range'. 

5. Grotesque

Broilers are not fit for this world. If they're allowed to live beyond adolescence they lose the ability to walk, and they eventually die from their incredible growth rate. They have been selectively bred not for their own health, but for farming benefits, and this is appalling. 

It's good that they're killed at 40 days then right?

Well, the problem is that life sucks for those 40 days. By the time they reach day 40, they're all having trouble walking (and so presumably are in pain), and apparently a percentage of them can no longer walk or are having so much trouble that it's obvious they're in a significant amount of pain. They're drugged so as to avoid infections, because their living conditions are so cramped and disgusting. In fact, they're given antibiotics, daily.

If you go to the doctor, they will be hesitant to prescribe antibiotics unless you really need them. The reason, of course, is that bugs adapt to the drugs. Farm animals are given drugs when they're ostensibly healthy! This is a significant problem for the control of disease.

6. Death

Layers are killed at one year, because they stop producing eggs at such an alarming rate. There's probably a layer rescue program near you, where you can get your hands on a retired layer. 

Broilers are killed at 40 days for their meat. In the US, poorly paid (think illegal or fresh immigrants) scoop up the chooks 5 at a time by their legs and jam them into transport containers. 30% of these chooks arrive at the slaughterhouse with broken bones. The turnover for these workers is >100% per year, because the job is terrible and plays havoc on your body. If you do it for a lifetime you'll lose the adequate function of your hands, and you may need pain relief to sleep.

What happens at the slaughterhouse is for another day. 

The life of a chook is crap. We have absolutely no respect for life when it comes to these guys (well, girls mainly). This is all fuelled by our hip-pocket, and that's something I'm pretty ashamed of. Ally and I are not eating chicken at home any more, unless the animal is family-farm, transparently raised. But we can't afford that kind of chook, so I think that's it.

This is torture. I don't see what else it could be called. I'm no animal lover. I just believe we have a basic requirement of respect, and this is lacking... completely lacking.