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How old are the birds when they are slaughtered?
Most intensively-reared chickens are slaughtered at about seven weeks of age (42 days) when they are still baby birds (a chicken's natural life span can be 10 years). A chicken can weigh 5½ lbs at 49 days, twice the weight of a chicken reared some 30 years ago.
Do many of the birds survive these conditions?
In the intensive broiler system it is inevitable that some birds will die. This loss is built into the economics of the industry. Chicks are only days old when they are put into broiler sheds. Motherless, the chicks must fend for themselves from day one. They are fed and watered automatically by machines. Those that fail to find their way to food and water points are called 'starve-outs' and soon die.
Towards the end of the cycle, some broilers are so crippled they cannot walk, so these too die from starvation and dehydration. Each year about 40 million broiler chickens (6%) die before reaching slaughter age. Others die on the journey to slaughter. Common causes of death in the sheds include starvation, dehydration, heart attacks, heart and lung diseases and disorders, heat stress or one of a multitude of other diseases.
Aren't there people whose job it is to care for the birds?
Workers are legally supposed to check the sheds for dead (and sick) birds on a regular basis. However, with so many birds to check, proper welfare inspections are impossible. Many dead and dying birds go unnoticed. Unnoticed dead and dying birds get trampled on by the living birds and soon decompose in the litter.
How are the birds transported to the slaughterhouse?
The suffering and distress caused to broiler chickens during catching, transportation and slaughter are similar to that experienced by 'battery hens'. Catching is done at great speed, with 'catchers' roughly grabbing 4 or 5 birds by one leg in each hand. Soft young bones break and hip joints (often already painfully deformed) become dislocated when birds are caught. Each year, 1-2 million birds die on the way to the slaughterhouse. These deaths are caused by injuries, suffocation and shock.
How are the birds slaughtered?
The birds are shackled by their feet. An automated shackle line carries the fully conscious birds to the electric water bath where they will suffer a painful electric shock which is supposed to render the birds unconscious. However, many birds can avoid contact with the water by raising their heads - meaning that they are fully conscious when they have their necks cut.
And so the cycle continues... In order to maximise profits, when a batch or 'crop' of chickens is removed from a shed and taken for slaughter after a 6-7 week growing period, the shed is soon cleaned of soiled litter, fumigated and re-stocked with the next batch of birds. And so the cycle continues.
Starving parents
Millions of 'broiler breeders' are needed in order to keep supplying the vast numbers of chicks. These birds are also kept in massive broiler sheds in similar conditions to their offspring. Because broilers have been specifically genetically bred for fast growth, if they were allowed to live past the usual slaughter age of 40 days, around 80% would die before the age of puberty at 18 weeks. This creates a problem as breeders must not only survive into adulthood, but they must also remain sufficiently healthy to breed. To solve this problem the breeders' growth rates must be slowed down. This is done by severely restricting the amount of food they are allowed to eat. In some cases their rations are restricted to just a quarter of what they would consume if given free access to food. Birds often go days without any food. In a futile attempt to appease their hunger, they peck at empty troughs and shed walls, eat faeces and litter, and drink large quantities of water. Since excessive drinking produces wet droppings and thus soggy litter, the water supply may be restricted too.
Not surprisingly, one major scientific study concluded that restricted-fed broiler breeders are "chronically hungry, frustrated and stressed". The kind of stress caused by constant hunger and unnaturally frequent mating of birds is cruel and should be prohibited. When breeders pass their peak rate of production of semen or eggs, they are slaughtered and processed into low quality meat products such as pies and soups.
What are the human health risks from eating chicken?
More than three quarters of serious food poisoning cases, where victims need urgent hospital treatment, are caused by campylobacter. Campylobacter, a micro-organism that can cause painful stomach cramps and severe, often bloody, diarrhoea, is now the biggest single source of food poisoning. The main source of this dangerous bug is undercooked, contaminated chicken.
An investigation by the Food Standards Agency found that more than half of the chickens on sale in the High Street were contaminated with campylobacter (Daily Mail, 20/11/02). Sources are believed to be the hot and crowded conditions on factory farms, imported chicken meat and the poor hygiene in slaughterhouses which the Consumers' Association has attacked as "appalling". In 2000, a recorded 17,000 people were admitted to hospital with the bug - 86 people died of the illness. The Food Standards Agency conceded that "poultry plays a significant part in exposing humans to campylobacter organisms".
Surely if I buy organic it will be safer?
An investigation by the Food Standards Agency found that more than 99% of organic flocks are infected with campylobacter - potentially serious food-borne bacteria - and that out of 75 free-range flocks, 69 were infected (The Independent, 20/11/02). All of the infected birds were destined for human consumption.
Also, the vast majority of organic and free-range chickens are slaughtered in the same large plants as intensively reared ones. It only takes a few bacteria to contaminate whole batches in slaughterhouses and processing factories.
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