Everyone’s seen the commercials: a cheerful family gathers together in a sunny kitchen to relish a fresh-baked chicken dinner. The scene is idyllic. The smiles, laughter, and perfect place settings produce the impression that the companies behind these ads care about general well-being and happiness. Speculate many secretly- filmed documentaries have shown, the horrors experienced by the birds who end up on the dinner tables are nearly unimaginable.
Modern food security indicators doesn’t look very modern. It appears barbaric. And yes it bears little resemblance to farming.
Birds that are hatched at modern commercial poultry farms begin their endures a conveyor belt. Once they have been taken from their shells, the horrors begin. Newly hatched males are hand selected from your conveyor belt and tossed alive into grinding machines. Because birds are exempt from your Humane Slaughter Act, this practice can be as legal since it is unethical. Thousands and thousands of chicks meet this atrocious fate daily. For your females, their ultimate fate is determined by whether they’re being hatched as broilers or laying hens. Both types are come to environments where they live in impossibly crowded conditions and therefore are deprived of ordinary pleasures of existence like sunlight and oxygen. The details of their traumatizing lives, however, vary by their intended use.
Broilers, chickens being raised for meat, are stuffed from the thousands into warehouses. The chicks get artificial human growth hormones that induce their bodies’ development to outpace the increase of their legs, and as a result, they can be can not walk or move as soon as 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 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 so that they won’t peck at themselves beyond frustration. This debeaking often results in severe, chronic pain for that animals. The majority are also at the mercy of an exercise called “force molting” involving starving the birds-sometimes not providing them with food for approximately two weeks-in to shock their health into another egg laying cycle. Once egg production drops, they are immediately shipped on be slaughtered.
Considering that the 1990’s, many undercover investigators have secretly filmed the grim and horrifying conditions in these commercial chicken farms. Because the films negatively affect sales, the meat industry has fought to restore a criminal offense to secretly operate cameras in their facilities. These laws, built to silence whistle-blowers, are referred“ag-gag” laws. Yet it’s largely because of those earlier films that the public is becoming conscious of the terrible conditions where commercially “farmed” chickens live as well as the inhumane strategies by they will die. So next time the thing is among those commercials on TV, a lot of the from the happy family propaganda. Behind the scenes is really a horrifying reality that those companies will not want that you know about.
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