We’ve all seen the commercials: a happy family gathers together in the sunny kitchen to take pleasure from a fresh-baked chicken dinner. The scene is idyllic. The smiles, laughter, and excellent place settings create the impression the companies behind these ads value general well-being and happiness. But as many secretly- filmed documentaries show, the horrors seen by the birds who wind up on the dinner tables are nearly unimaginable.
Modern Backyard hens doesn’t look very modern. It appears barbaric. Also it bears little resemblance to farming.
Birds who are hatched at modern commercial poultry farms begin their eats a conveyor belt. Once they’ve been removed from their shells, the horrors begin. Newly hatched the male is personally picked in the conveyor belt and tossed alive into grinding machines. Because birds are exempt through the Humane Slaughter Act, this practice will be as legal as it is unethical. Hundreds of thousands of chicks meet this atrocious fate every single day. For that females, their ultimate fate depends upon whether they’re being hatched as broilers or laying hens. Both types are delivered to environments where they live in impossibly crowded conditions and they are missing out on ordinary pleasures of existence like sunlight and oxygen. The more knowledge about 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 receive artificial hgh that cause their bodies’ development to outpace the expansion of the legs, and for that reason, they are often can not walk or move when they’re only months old. Many chicks get no sleep because lighting is maintained constantly to stimulate unnatural eating patterns that facilitate faster growth. Nothing about their life is 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 won’t peck at themselves out of frustration. This debeaking often brings about severe, chronic pain for your animals. Most are also subject to an exercise called “force molting” that involves starving the birds-sometimes not feeding them for two weeks-in to shock their into another egg laying cycle. Once egg production drops, they are immediately shipped away and off to be slaughtered.
Since 1990’s, many undercover investigators have secretly filmed the grim and horrifying conditions of these commercial chicken farms. Since the films negatively affect sales, the meat industry has fought to make it a crime 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 the public is now alert to the terrible conditions where commercially “farmed” chickens live and the inhumane strategies that they die. So the very next time you see some of those commercials on television, don’t be fooled with the happy family propaganda. Under the surface is a horrifying reality that those companies don’t want one to be familiar with.
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