A Factory Farm's Chicken Story

There are two groups of chickens in food production. Chickens that are raised for their meat (broilers) and chickens that are raised for egg laying (battery). In both cases female chickens are preferred, for egg production and because they have a tendency to grow faster than their male counterparts. Here is the life story of chickens in a factory farm:

The chickens are incubated and hatched at a large hatchery and shipped to the processing plant where they are sorted. The sorting is for the sole purpose of weeding out the undesirable chicks, most of which are male since they cannot lay eggs and they do not grow fat fast enough to produce a high enough return on investment, others are discarded if they are visibly scrawny or lame. The sorting procedure is fast and rough, the "sexers" - people who inspect the chicks for their sex handle them quickly and harshly so they can process thousands of birds a day. The sexing takes place in a few ways:

• Feather sexing - Some chickens have been bred so that female chick's wing pinfeathers are longer than the male for easy detection.
• Vent sexing - involves literally squeezing the feces out of the chick, which opens up the chick's anal vent slightly, allowing the chicken sexer to see if the chick has a small "bump," which would indicate that the chick is a male.
• Pubic bone sexing - placing an index finger on the pubic bones. If the index finger fits, then the chick is likely a female.

The unwanted chicks are tossed onto a conveyor belt where they are sent for culling. They are killed in one of these four ways:

• Maceration - an automated method where the chicks are dropped into a meat grinder alive and fully conscious where they are ground up. At the Hy-line Hatchery this technique is used to cull 150,000 chicks a day.
• Gassing - the chicks are gassed usually with carbon monoxide.
• Cervical dislocation - the spine is dislocated from the skull.
• Electrocution - a new method that has been touted as being cheap, reliable, and humane by its developers.

Sorting and processing chicks is mostly an automated process where conveyor belts move them through the different procedures. During this process many chicks fall off the belt or are injured by the equipment and are left to die from their injuries or starve to death.

After the sexing, the desirable chicks are sent to be debeaked. The practice of debeaking began in the 1930's to minimize flock loss due to cannibalism and feather pecking. The extremely crowded living conditions creates a stressful environment for the chickens which results in abnormal behavior and eventual profit loss for the company.

Debeaking is performed by a machine that cuts part of the chick's beak off either with a laser or a small guillotine device. In 1990, Michael Gentle and his associates at the Institute of Animal Physiology and Genetics Research, Edinburgh, Scotland demonstrated the effects of debeaking:
"To enable the animal to perform this wide range of activities, the beak of the chicken has an extensive nerve supply with numerous ... [nerve endings sensitive to mechanical pressures, heat and pain]....Beak amputation results in extensive neuromas [tumors] being formed in the healed stump of the beak which give rise to abnormal spontaneous neural activity in the trigeminal [threefold] nerve. The nociceptors present in the beak of the chicken have similar properties to those found in mammalian skin and the neural activity arising from the trigeminal neuromas is similar to that reported in the rat, mouse, cat and the baboon. Therefore, in terms of the peripheral neural activity, partial beak amputation is likely to be a painful procedure leading not only to phantom and stump pain, but also to other characteristics of the hyperpathic syndrome, such as allodynia and hyperalgesia [the stress resulting from, and extreme sensitiveness to, painful stimuli]." – Applied Animal Behavior Science, Vol. 27. 

Broiler chicks are debeaked once since they only live for seven weeks. Egg laying chickens are debeaked numerous times during their life.

Battery chickens are put into cages, usually 8-10 birds are in a cage the size of a filing cabinet drawer. The space available to battery hens has often been described as less than the size of a piece of paper. This is not enough space for the chicken to spread its wings or even sit. Usually the cages are wire mesh which causes the chickens to develop sores on their feet that are not attended to and can become infected. The extreme crowding creates a stressful environment for the birds which results in feather loss and attacking other birds. Chickens that attempt to break out of their cages become injured and entangled in the wire mesh left to suffer and die slowly. The cages often deteriorate creating holes in the mesh where birds fall through the cage floor becoming injured and unable to reach food they slowly starve. Birds that are found injured by poultry workers usually have their necks broken, however with so many chickens per cage and sometimes thousands of cages per facility many hens are neglected to suffer a slow death. In addition to this daily existence, many poultry workers have been filmed abusing chickens, throwing them indiscriminately, hanging them alive on cages to languish, and throwing injured live chickens in trash cans to suffocate under numerous dead birds. Once the hens have decreased their egg production, they are slaughtered.

Broiler chickens are grown by the hundreds of thousands in large windowless sheds. These sheds are environmentally controlled, the temperature and lighting are set for optimal growth. The lighting is manipulated to stimulate more eating and growth in a shorter period of time. For the first few weeks the light cycles every few hours to simulate daytime and night time. This causes the chickens to eat more and sleep less.

The chickens are selectively bred to grow bigger and faster. This unnatural growth rate creates problems for the birds. Their bodies grow so quickly that their legs and feet cannot support the weight of their bodies, as a result they develop hip and leg deformities and lameness. Many birds develop lung and heart problems and as many as 19 million chickens die each year from heart failure long before they make it to slaughter. Thousands of birds are packed into these sheds, usually with little or no ventilation. The chickens live for seven weeks walking in their accumulating droppings, since the sheds are only cleaned after they are taken to slaughter, causing hock burns (foot ulcers and blisters) The inadequate ventilation creates ammonia build-up burning their eyes and lungs. In the last few weeks the lights in the shed are dimmed significantly to reduce the stress the chickens encounter from overcrowding.

When the chickens are ready for slaughter, they are forcibly stuffed into mesh crates and transported by truck to the slaughterhouse. The chickens are shackled upside down on a conveyor belt where they are dipped into an electrified "stunning" bath. their throats are cut then they are pulled through scalding water that removes their feathers. The procedure rarely resembles this description. Often chickens are not stunned when they have their throats cut and suffer tremendously by malfunctioning equipment or because they moved to try to avoid the cutting machine. Some are still alive and conscious when they are pulled through the boiling water. In addition, it is well documented that many poultry workers abuse and prolong the suffering of these animals.

Approximately 80% of meat and egg production uses factory farming techniques in the U.S. and 60% in the EU.

Animal Liberation Revisited

 “The question is not, Can they reason? Nor can they talk? But, can they suffer?”
 – Jeremy Bentham

All mammals have at least 92% of the same genes humans do. They share many of the same primary functions – they metabolize food, reproduce, bear young, feed and protect their young, sense danger, display the “fight or flight” response to fear, and feel pain the same way we do. They possess a central nervous system that senses pain stimuli and a brain that processes the pain. The neurons that travel in an animal to communicate to the brain that bodily harm is occurring are the same neurons that course through humans when we are injured.

Given that both animals and humans have the same basic physiology, neurologically speaking, it is safe to say that both species experience physical pain. Emotional pain is more difficult to quantitatively measure since this type of pain is measured through observation of behavior.

One such measurement was done by academics at the University of Bristol. They demonstrated that chickens possess one of the important attributes that underpins empathy toward other chickens. When chicks were exposed to sudden puffs of air, the hens became alert, discontinuing their natural habits, such as preening, and stood for long periods, their heart rate increased, the hens made more clucking noises toward the chicks, and they showed elevated signs of stress and fear. To read more go here.

Other animals currently used in husbandry practices also exhibit complex cognitive behavior, cows have exhibited joy and delight after solving a complex puzzle and sheep have been known to form deep friendship bonds with other sheep.

These observations do not scientifically “prove” the existence of abstract emotion in animals, but at the very least it throws into doubt the human conviction that animals do not have “feelings.” Given the scientific data and observations of animal behavior, humans should at least look at their current actions toward animals.

Each year, 100 million cows, pigs and sheep and 5 billion chickens are slaughtered in factory farms. If one really contemplates the juxtaposition of the words “factory” and “farm,” one may infer what these places are doing, they are “producing” meat on a massive scale for massive consumption. Just as factories produce consumer products for a profit, factory farms produce meat for a profit. Long gone is the family farm where cows are sent out to pasture and chickens scratch the dirt in the yard. Now, the capitalization of husbandry has reached the pinnacle of meat production.

Like industrial factories, these factory farms seek to have the highest return for their investment. To this end, they pack animals tightly together in large warehouse-like buildings in order to produce as much meat as possible in as little space as possible. This saves money on overhead and maximizes their profit. These animals are not only confined in tiny spaces but are routinely abused by their handlers – See cows in a factory farm. Factory farming is also harmful to human health. In 2008 the largest beef recall in U.S. history occurred because of contaminated meat entering the food supply by factory farms slaughtering and distributing meat from downed and severely sick cows. The meat from these cows was added to the supplies for school lunch programs, endangering the lives of children.

Our individual choices and actions make a difference. Nothing speaks louder than our wallets, and withholding our monetary support of these practices will improve our health and the well-being of our animal co-inhabitants.

What can you do? The best choice to alleviate suffering and protect yourself from contaminated food is to become a vegetarian or vegan. The next best thing is to buy free range eggs, meat and dairy. Ask your local restaurants to only serve free range, organic, and hormone free products. Educate yourself – see where your food comes from so you can make a good choice for yourself and your family.

I intend to discuss these topics in-depth in future posts.