We’ve all seen the commercials: a contented family gathers together within a sunny kitchen to savor a fresh-baked chicken dinner. The scene is idyllic. The smiles, laughter, and excellent place settings build the impression that the companies behind these ads worry about general well-being and happiness. But as many secretly- filmed documentaries show, the horrors gone through by the birds who find yourself on our dinner tables are almost unimaginable.
Modern issues in food security doesn’t look very modern. It looks barbaric. And it bears little resemblance to farming.
Birds that are hatched at modern commercial poultry farms begin their eats a conveyor belt. Once they are removed from their shells, the horrors begin. Newly hatched these are hand 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 since it is unethical. Thousands of chicks meet this atrocious fate daily. To the females, their ultimate fate depends upon whether they’re being hatched as broilers or laying hens. Both types are delivered to environments their current address in impossibly crowded conditions and so are lacking ordinary pleasures of existence like sunlight and fresh air. The specifics of their traumatizing lives, however, vary by their intended use.
Broilers, chickens being raised for meat, are stuffed from the tens of thousands into warehouses. The chicks are shown artificial human growth hormones that induce their bodies’ development to outpace the development with their legs, and thus, they are usually 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 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 that they won’t peck at themselves from frustration. This debeaking often leads to severe, chronic pain to the animals. Many are also subject to an exercise called “force molting” involving starving the birds-sometimes not feeding them for about two weeks-in to shock their bodies into another egg laying cycle. Once egg production drops, they may be immediately shipped away and off to be slaughtered.
Since 1990’s, many undercover investigators have secretly filmed the grim and horrifying conditions over these commercial chicken farms. Since the films negatively affect sales, the meat industry has fought to make it a criminal offense to secretly operate cameras within their facilities. These laws, designed to silence whistle-blowers, are referred“ag-gag” laws. But it’s largely because of those earlier films that the public is now mindful of the terrible conditions by which commercially “farmed” chickens live as well as the inhumane means by they will die. So the next occasion the truth is some of those commercials on television, a lot of the through the happy family propaganda. Behind the curtain is really a horrifying reality that runners companies do not want you to know about.
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