Factory farms cruel and dangerous

THE most revealing aspect of the media coverage of the Rachel Allen pheasant controversy is how little notice the media generally takes of where the bulk of our meat comes from — ie, from factory farms.

To focus on Rachel Allen’s exploits is to miss the much bigger picture. Less than a century ago there was no such thing as a factory farm. Today, 50 billion chickens are raised on factory farms worldwide. None of these birds can fulfil any of their natural impulses, such as nesting, perching, exploring their environment, forming stable social units. They live in windowless sheds for the duration of their genetically-altered short lives of 40 days. The sheds are getting bigger and bigger with every decade that passes. Sheds containing 50,000 chickens is commonplace among the larger producers. All factory-farmed birds are fed a cocktail of drugs as not to do so would almost certainly result in the rapid spread of disease across the farm. About 5% of them will die prematurely, mainly from heart seizure, respiratory ailments, or because the excessive weight of their bodies is too much for their brittle-bone legs to support them. In these cases, which are many, the birds simply collapse, are unable to reach food or water, and are either trampled on or die from stress and/or exhaustion.

Three in every four chickens experience some degree of walking impairment, while one in four will have significant trouble walking at all. This is not a snapshot of a factory farm. To describe properly what takes place on a factory farm would require a much longer letter than this, but it does, I hope, give some idea of what is by any common-sense animal welfare standards (as opposed to the actual welfare laws laid down by the EU), an utterly unacceptable way to raise any animal.