Most of us have seen the commercials: a happy family gathers together within a sunny kitchen to relish a fresh-baked chicken dinner. The scene is idyllic. The smiles, laughter, and excellent place settings create the impression that the companies behind these ads care about general well-being and happiness. But as many secretly- filmed documentaries have demostrated, the horrors experienced by the birds who turn out on our dinner tables are almost unimaginable.
Modern best backyard laying eggs doesn’t look very modern. It seems barbaric. And yes it bears little resemblance to farming.
Birds who’re hatched at modern commercial poultry farms begin their thrives on a conveyor belt. Once they are taken out of their shells, the horrors begin. Newly hatched the male is personally selected in the conveyor belt and tossed alive into grinding machines. Because birds are exempt through the Humane Slaughter Act, this practice is as legal as it’s unethical. Tens of thousands of chicks meet this atrocious fate each day. For that females, their ultimate fate depends on whether they’re being hatched as broilers or laying hens. Both types are taken to environments where they live in impossibly crowded conditions and so are deprived of ordinary pleasures of existence like sunlight and fresh air. The details of their traumatizing lives, however, vary by their intended use.
Broilers, chickens being raised for meat, are stuffed by the tens of thousands into warehouses. The chicks are given artificial human growth hormones that can cause their bodies’ development to outpace the expansion of these legs, and consequently, they are often not able to walk or move when 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 lives are normal or natural.
Laying hens experience different, but equally horrifying, treatment. They’re jammed into cages so small they can not even spread their wings. Their beaks are burned so they won’t peck at themselves out of frustration. This debeaking often ends in severe, chronic pain for the animals. Many are also susceptible to a practice called “force molting” that involves starving the birds-sometimes not providing them with food for two weeks-in to shock their into another egg laying cycle. Once egg production drops, they’re immediately shipped away and off 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 to make it a criminal offence to secretly operate cameras within their facilities. These laws, built to silence whistle-blowers, are referred“ag-gag” laws. Yet it’s largely because of those earlier films the public has become mindful of the terrible conditions where commercially “farmed” chickens live as well as the inhumane strategies by that they die. So the next occasion the truth is one particular commercials in the media, don’t be fooled through the happy family propaganda. Behind the scenes is a horrifying reality those companies will not want that you be familiar with.
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