chickens

...now browsing by tag

 
 

International Respect for Chickens Day

Tuesday, May 4th, 2010

Today is International Respect for Chickens Day, an event “to celebrate chickens throughout the world and protest the bleakness of their lives in farming operations.”

Begun in 2005 by United Poultry Concerns, International Respect for Chickens Day is quickly becoming an annual tradition for animal rights activists.  Chickens are by far the most abused animals on the planet–in the US alone, 287 are killed every single second.

In Canada, 19 million chickens languish in battery cages.  Some chickens are described as “free range”, “organic”, or “humane”–but some never even go outside, and when they don’t lay enough eggs to make a profit, they are slaughtered.  And in every egg farm, male chicks are killed soon after hatching.  That means that every hen born to lay an egg, a male chick was suffocated in a plastic bag with his brothers or ground up alive, as is industry standard.

Try to imagine life in a battery cage:

Now imagine a world in which chickens are treated as friends, not food:

From United Poultry Concerns:

Please take time today to speak out for the chickens and hold a thought for them as you go about your daily activities. Show people you care about these wonderful birds. Help others to see chickens as you do – as friends, not food.


Egg Industry in Trouble

Tuesday, April 13th, 2010

Good news.

A lawsuit alleging the U.S. egg industry conspired to increase consumer prices got a boost recently when a defendant turned over documents and internal memos that show an industry group called for egg producers to slow production.

The lawsuit alleges that as egg prices climbed between 2004 and 2008, industry officials who blamed rising feed costs were covering up an orchestrated hen kill-off to reduce supplies. (abcnews.go.com)

Apparently, the U.S. egg industry isn’t doing so well, and is having to resort to illegal tactics in an attempt to make more money.  That means that Canada’s egg producers are probably in trouble too, as well they deserve to be–yes, things are just as bad here as they are in the U.S.  Here’s some footage of Canadian battery cage operations.:

“I’m confident that, years from now, when battery cages have been banned nationwide, today’s news will be cited as a key moment signaling the industry’s doom.” (Happy Day: Egg Industry Fucks Itself)

Chickens used as “props” in a media stunt

Thursday, March 25th, 2010
Chickens at Victoria Animal Control

Chickens at Victoria Animal Control

Showing a clear lack of respect for the well-being of animals, several University of Victoria students released (some accounts say “tossed”) 6 hens into MLA Ida Chong’s office in Victoria during a Dogwood Initiative rally on Tuesday.

Dogwood Initiative is a BC-based environmental organization that has dealt with issues like urban sprawl and tankers on BC’s coast. They famously created decals to be placed on loonies depicting a loon caught in an oil slick.

They have since issued an apology on their website and have distributed it to the media.

Dogwood Initiative apologizes for the release chickens in Oak Bay-Gordon Head MLA Ida Chong’s office on Tuesday, March 23 during a rally to protect forest lands and stop reckless development on Southern Vancouver Island.

….

Concerns have been raised about the welfare of the chicken released. We have investigated and determined that the chickens were not harmed during the event. We regret any distress that the chickens may have experienced during the event. The chickens are now Victoria’s Animal Control and we are taking steps to ensure that the birds are adopted by a humane home.

If you are able to provide a home for these chickens, or know someone who might be able to, contact Victoria Animal Control.

Apparently the students who released the chickens claimed that they were rescued from “a very crowded egg farm where they were they were living on a two foot pile of their own filth.” (Source) However, the chickens as pictured are clean, have all of their feathers, and nice, healthy combs. So I don’t know what to believe.

Valerie at GreenMuze wrote a really great post about the whole thing:

The apparent disconnect between environmental activism and animal rights was again highlighted by a recent protest organized by Victoria-based Dogwood Initiative. During the protest, student activists threw six live chickens into an office area to protest MLA Ida Chong’s inactivity on protecting the Western Forest Products land, located on Vancouver Island.

The fate of these lands has long been a contentious subject in the community, and, like most environmentalists, I think the lands must be protected. But I strongly disagree with the tactics of throwing and abandoning live animals to make a publicity point about saving forests.

Frankly, aside from the ignorance of the chicken throwers, what has surprised me the most is that the Dogwood Initiative would in anyway associate themselves with such a stupid stunt. Most thinking environmental organizations would run a million miles from assholes throwing lives animals at a protest. (Source)

She goes into a lot more detail and writes a lot better than I do, so I’d encourage you to check out the rest of that post for the whole story.

The apology was prompted by a much bigger backlash than Dogwood had anticipated. Not only did the Vancouver Humane Society and the BC SPCA speak out about in the media, a small but fierce firestorm raged on Twitter, Facebook, and in the comments sections of some of the articles (Victoria Times-Colonist, National Post, Province). Dogwood Initiative also received several phone calls about it. US-based poultry protection group United Poultry Concerns also put out a press release.

Chickens are one of the most abused animals on the planet. There was no need to subject them to such stress and danger for a media stunt. In the future, I hope that Dogwood Initiative and other activists will plan their events to show respect for all life, whether that be human or animal or the environment.

The apology

Dogwood is to be commended for issuing an apology, even though it was two days late and was not their first choice.

Some of my fellow activists have expressed concerns about the apology, wondering what steps Dogwood Initiative will be taking to ensure that these chickens find a safe and caring home. Also, some are bothered that the apology does not really address anything about the issues associated with the use of animals.

But, I do think it’s likely to be the best apology that we will get, and I do hope that going forward this makes it that much less likely that someone will think that it’s ok to exploit an animal for our own gain.

When animals are abused we need to be ready to stand up for them. If we don’t do it, no one else is going to. Especially if they are chickens.

Spent Chickens in School Lunches

Friday, January 8th, 2010

Remember how when you were in school, everyone made fun of how horrible the cafeteria food was?  At my school, at least, there was a rumour that our food was grade F, and that prisoners received grade D.

Regardless of how true that is, there’s a reason that school food sucks.

It’s this:

This is what we're feeding to schoolchildren.

USA Today just reported that over the past eight years, the government has handed the egg industry $145 million taxpayer dollars for flesh that would probably otherwise be turned into pet food or compost.” (Vegan.com)

That’s right, after the chickens have basically laid eggs to the point of death–usually at around 1 1/2 to 2 years of age (they can live between 10 and 15 years normally)–they are considered “spent” and basically thrown away.  (It’s the same in the organic and free range industry, incidentally.)  There was a fairly famous case in which a farm in California killed 15,000 spent hens by tossing them live into a wood chipper; though cruelty charges were raised against the farm, they were dropped because it was proven to be “common industry practice.”  (You can read more about this case at our page here.)

The bodies of spent hens are so weak, bruised, and depleted that their meat is almost useless; in the true spirit of the industry, of course, there’s always something to do with it.  Usually it goes into soup, pot pies, baby food, and any other product that easily hides bruising–low quality meat products, basically.  And school lunches.

Eat up, kids.

Uninspected slaughterhouse in NY operates for years

Tuesday, December 29th, 2009
chicken

Chicken photo by flickr user mark lorch

Ok, this is just plain crazy. There’s a kosher poultry slaughterhouse in New York State that has been operating without state or federal inspection since 2002.

According to a story in the NY Daily News:

A filthy Kosher slaughterhouse was able to sell more than 1.7 million uninspected birds to consumers in the past five years, a federal suit aimed at shutting the dirty Rockland County plants charges.

New Square Meats and Adir Poultry of Spring Valley stonewalled the federal Department of Agriculture, the suit says.

The plants owners managed to keep inspectors from checking their books or their facilities with any regularity since 2004, when the slaughterhouse applied for federal oversight rather than state inspections. (Source)

What I don’t understand is how it has taken more than 5 years for any legal action to be taken on this? Apparently no one from the USDA is really concerned with public safety, and quite obviously the slaughterhouse isn’t either. According to the story, “Agents found pools of stagnant water, mold growing on walls and ‘excessive fat and protein buildup on walls and window surfaces.’…”

I can’t even imagine what kind of hell it is for the chickens slaughtered there.

Lies of the Egg Industry

Monday, November 23rd, 2009

It’s no secret that, having researched “free range” and “organic” farming, I am less than impressed and feel that most consumers have been thoroughly deceived as to what such terms mean. Most people aren’t aware that “cage-free” chickens usually can’t go outside, that “free range” has no legal meaning, and again, doesn’t require that chickens have access to the outdoors, or that even “organic”, which is the highest standard there is, requires routine mutilation and death.  (More here.)

That said, do I believe that it is better to live like this…

freerangeeggs

…than like this?

Battery_Cage_01

Of course I do.  Both types of farming result in considerable and unnecessary suffering for the animals involved, but one is obviously worse than the other.  Most reasonably sane people will be able to agree on this last point.

That brings us to the United Egg Producers, who, like most egg producers on the North American continent, are very concerned with keeping chickens in battery cages.  Why is that?  Because they CARE about chickens.  Who knew?

freerange-uep2Witness the profound absurdity of a company insisting that free-range chickens, who in the very best of circumstances, DO go outside, won’t have any form of shelter and will have to stand around in the rain.

"I miss my warm dry cage, Dolly!"

"I miss my warm dry cage, Dolly!"

Same thing with this brilliant attempt at fooling the public.  Message to the public: apparently egg producers think you are unbelievably stupid.

freerange-uep1Apparently egg producers also think chickens are unbelievably stupid, and will stand around waiting to get picked off by predators.  I guess they haven’t read the studies which demonstrate that chickens actually have different ways to communicate where a predator is coming from, as well as how much of a threat it is.

One more:

freerange-uep3As if chickens lay their eggs for us to eat.  Even life in a battery cage does not destroy the chicken’s desire to create a nest for the babies she expects to have.  Because battery cages are entirely barren, however, they don’t generally have anything to build with–no straw, sticks, leaves, etcetera.

On occasion, however, and because the cages are (literally) never cleaned out:

deadhenFace it, egg producers, chickens don’t care whether their eggs taste like wild onions or like cheap corn meal/flax seed mixes.  They lay them for the same reason that all birds lay eggs–because they are expecting to have offspring.

My thanks to Suicide Food for bringing the ridiculous attempts of the UEP to my attention.

Reading: a bunch of links from the past week

Sunday, November 8th, 2009

Here is a batch of links from the past week or so, for your reading pleasure. Sorry to get to it so late. The biggest story was probably the HSUS veal slaughterhouse investigation, but I’ve only included one link to a story about it below. I’ll try to do a recap post about that story sometime this week.

NPR: For Foer, Meat is Murder …And Worse

New Yorker review of Eating Animals

Wolves, moose and biodiversity: An unexpected connection

Hearts on Noses pig sanctuary fundraiser at Karmavore

HSUS veal slaughterhouse investigation

Poultry giant Tyson sued by the state of Oklahoma

Meat loving cowboy is still vegan

Supervegan: Does it matter that Jonathan Safran Foer isn’t vegan?

Digging through the dirt: ‘Bones’ Features Factory Farm, Slaughterhouse Footage

VegNews interview with Jonathan Safran Foer

Change.org Animal Rights blog: There Is No Such Animal as “Seafood”

Animal Place: Divine Turkey Talk

The Vegan Dietician: No Need for Vegans to Give Up Fat, Gluten, Soy or Cooked Foods

Filthy Feed & downer cattle

Wednesday, November 4th, 2009

I read yesterday on Vegan.com about a new site called “Filthy Feed” that “exposes and seeks to end the practice of feeding broiler litter (read: chicken shit) to cattle.”

This is pretty gross, and I can’t believe that this practice still goes on. I wonder how much of that meat makes it up here to Canada?

Canada has had a ban against the feeding of poultry and litter to ruminants for many years now (our ban went into effect around 1997). Our little bout with mad cow disease was the real reason for this. It seems that we were feeding out cattle remains to chickens and turkeys, and there’s too much risk that the poultry litter (the hay or straw and shit on the floor of the barn, plus feathers and the carcasses of the chickens who didn’t make it the full 6 weeks) might contain some undigested remains of a cow.

I understand that farms face the prospect of losing money pretty much all the time (and likely wouldn’t survive if they weren’t massively subsidized through cheap feed, etc), but who really first came up with the idea of scraping up all this shit and waste and grinding it up to add to food for other animals?

Strangely, for all our concern with mad cow disease, Canada has not banned the slaughter of downer animals. The regulations only state that animals may not be transported if they are too sick to walk, but nothing is said about slaughtering them if they can be induced to enter the truck under their own power. (source)

So, we can’t feed chicken waste to cattle, but we can slaughter cows who are too sick to walk into the slaughterhouse (who are more likely to have mad cow as well). Are we really working to prevent mad cow and protect human health or just choosing easy actions that don’t really have any effect on the practices ofthe meat industry that put us all at risk?

Dear Vancouver, backyard chickens are a bad idea

Friday, October 23rd, 2009

We already have issues with unwanted dogs, cats, rabbits, hamsters, guinea pigs, turtles, llamas, chinchillas, tropical birds, and the list just goes on and on. Introducing another kind of animal that will be part pet, part food source will likely mean bad things for the chickens themselves. Why, in this whole question of whether we should be allowed to keep backyard chickens, does no one consider the implications for the chickens?

Marji at Animal Place posted a blog today about this very issue. She writes:

Chickens are wonderful animals. They’re fascinating and engaging. They form bonds and friendships, have preferences and desires of their own. We believe they can become wonderful companions. We do not believe the backyard chicken phenomenon is turning out to be in the best interest of the birds or people. That is not to say we oppose the adoption of chickens, we whole-heartedly support anyone’s efforts at providing an appropriate and permanent home to abandoned birds.

In her post she quotes from an article by Kim Severson which appeared in yesterday’s New York Times, which looks at the problems with urban chickens in the Bay Area. Severson writes: “Unwanted urban chickens are showing up at local animal shelters. Even in the best of circumstances, chickens die at alarming rates.”

But with increased chicken popularity comes a downside: abandonment. In one week earlier this month, eight were available for adoption at the Oakland shelter and five were awaiting homes at the San Francisco shelter. In Berkeley, someone dropped four chickens in the animal control night box with a note from their apologetic owner, said Kate O’Connor, the manager.

I wonder if the Vancouver supporters have considered the negatives of backyard chickens. Is there any way to guarantee that chickens will be well-cared for and won’t be abandoned or simply slaughtered when they stop producing eggs? Will people understand that buying chickens from a breeder simply perpetuates a system that kills unwanted birds (especially roosters) and that is as cruel, if not worse, than the worst puppy mills?

When the city council voted to allow backyard hens in Vancouver many animal protection groups in Vancouver opposed the motion. Not a single animal protection group supported it. There may be a few people who do a wonderful job caring for their pet chickens, but many more chickens will suffer as a result, and a new cottage industry of breeding chickens for sale to urbanites will have been created.

It’s about time we started thinking past the latest fads of local food or sketchy ideas of “food security” and really begin to care for our fellow residents of this planet. It’s the only decent thing to do.

Sincerely,

Glenn

ps. I was looking at the nutritional content of an egg, and 1 cup of peas has more protein and more iron than 1 egg. Plus more other vitamins and a whole lot less cholesterol. It’s healthier for us and for the chickens to eat a plant-based diet.

One million calories.

Wednesday, October 21st, 2009

This super interesting new interactive chart from Animal Visuals shows how many animals die for one million calories’ worth of chicken, eggs, beef, veggies, grains, etc.  You can sort it by total, by how many are slaughtered (intentionally, I assume?), and by the harvesting of fields, either to feed us or to feed animals.

Isn’t it fascinating that you can help more animals by dropping chicken and eggs than you can by dropping chicken, beef, and pork combined?

This also brings up the age old and ever compelling (yawn) argument against veganism–that we’re hurting animals accidentally when we harvest our fields, so why bother to curtail  intentional slaughter at all?  I covered this in Arguments Against Veganism, part 3, but this chart says more than I ever could have.