Chicken Cruelty Research Paper

Chicken Cruelty

The average American eats more than 75lbs of chicken a year. But what most don't know is that this chicken comes at a high cost that is hidden from consumers. When we buy chicken from a store or restaurant its hard to remember that this meat comes from an animal. Most don't know how this meat is produced, we see the end product, cut and shrink wrapped or battered and deep fried. You may have an idea of what a chicken looks like in your head from long ago where they are plucking, clucking, around in the grass. But for the vast majority of the 8 billion chickens consumed each year, their lives are far from this natural setting. Undercover investigations from two of the country's top chicken producers, Tyson and Purdue
have revealed horrific detail on the lives of chickens they produce. The conditions of chicken life in these places is not uncommon, they are industry standard.
The life of a broiler chicken, a chicken raised and killed for meat, begins in a large commercial incubator where chicks are hatched by the thousands.
They never meet their mothers. The chicks are boxed into crates and then dumped into long warehouses with tens of thousands of other chicks. In the 1950's, it took 84 days to raise a 5 pound chicken, but now because of genetic selection and growth promoting drugs it now takes an average of only 45 days. University of Arkansas researches say "if we grew as fast as a chicken, we would weigh 345 pounds by age 2." On the factory farm, the chickens will not once step outdoors or breath fresh air, instead they will become increasingly overcrowded as they grow at accelerated rates on an unnatural diet including manure and the remains of other chickens. A leading problem of genetic fast growth is a high number of leg development problems. More than 20% of broiler chickens suffer from cronic pain as a result of bone disease making it difficult for some chicks to reach the water dispensers resulting in death from thirst. As the weeks pass, and the chicks grow, space in the open shed decreases. The pollution in the shed from feces, stench and filth mixed with ammonia reaches horrible levels. In such conditions, the farmers expect that many of these chickens will die from disease and stress. It is not profitable to give the chickens individualized veterinary care, instead they are left to die. After four weeks, hundreds of
birds are already dead, and the carcasses lie throughout the shed. Forced to live in their own waste, many of the corpses show sign of feather loss and burns on the stomachs from ammonia. As the birds reach their last two weeks of life on the factory farm, welfare problems grow more serious. Mentally, these chickens are still babies, but they are trapped in bodies that are too big for their legs to hold or their organs to support. "Broilers now grow so rapidly that the heart and lungs are not developed well enough to support the remainder of the body, resulting in congestive heart failure and tremendous death losses". Foodstaffs, an industry journal, May 27 1997. As early as six weeks of age, the chickens have reached market weight and are ready to be taken to slaughter. They are rounded up in near total darkness where they are more calm and less resistant. The birds are grabbed by the legs, thrown into crates which are stacked onto trucks. Many chickens are injured in this process, suffering dislocated hips, broken legs and wings. Once on the trucks, the chickens are transported to the slaughter house, they are denied food and water and shelter from extreme temperatures. Some chickens don't survive the trip. The rest of the chickens find the trip a stressful, scary and injurious procedure. At the slaughter plant, the chickens are moved out of the trucks, and dumped onto conveyor belts then hung upside down in shackles where they head to a machine that cuts the throat, but quite often the chickens miss the blade altogether or are just maimed. There are no laws that regulate their welfare during slaughter. For those who's throats aren't slit they drown in boiling tanks of water that are there for removal of the feathers. From there they tumble along more conveyor belts, are disemboweled, sliced and packaged accordingly. Each step along the way makes the chicken less recognizable until finally it reaches us and we no longer remember where it came from. Nearly all the chicken meat that is at grocery stores and restaurants comes from the conditions I just explained. The human has no nutritional need for chicken meat, in fact it poses health risks because of its high potential for carrying bacteria.