The Cruelty of Selective Chicken Breeding

When you sit down at the table and dig into a big fat roasted chicken from the super market, do you think that the chicken you are eating had a healthy cruelty-free life until its death? Do you think it got to roam around a farm and pick happily at worms in the soil beneath the grass? Do you think it was a normal sized chicken with FEATHERS?! The answer is probably no, especially if you are in Britain.

820 million broiler chickens are  pruduced in Britain every year. The breeders responsible for these chickens are now, at this moment, producing birds that reach 3 kilograms in six weeks...which is equivalent a human child weighing 286 pounds at the age of six. Does that seem normal? Not only are these chickens unable to move their own bodies, but their health  is decreasing rapidly. These broiler chickens suffer from heart failure and many other health and habitat issues, much more than normal-sized free roaming chickens. For the six weeks of a broiler chicken's life, it is kept in a darkened shed with 50,000 other birds crammed in the small space with it, all unable to move because of the tremendous amount of weight, and the space limitation. 25 to 32 million of theses animals die annually from various causes before slaughter, but the companies who own over 80 percent of this broiler chiken population (Ross Breeders of Newbridge and Cobb Breeding of East Hammingfield) say they will continue to breed the chickens to become heavier and heavier because, in spite of the obviously compromised welfare of the birds, they have been able to produce more chicken meat this last year than ever before. Animal welfare campaigners say that the suffering of these animals will certainly get worse as the breeding goes on. The author of this article, Michael McCarthy (Environmental Editor) seems to take the side of the people involved in the animal welfare.

Personally, I agree with the author and the animal welfare campaigners. Normal factory farming is far cruel enough fro anyone to handle, but breeding birds for the amount of meat and ignoring the increasing the suffering rate of LIVING, BREATHING beings is absolutely unacceptable. And strangely, most people that eat factory- farmed meat have no idea how their food felt when it was still alive. Not just chicken, but beef, pork, and any other animal that is bred in factories...even fish!!! In fact, if you would like to have your eyes opened to more truth about factory farming, google the production process of veal. If people are going to raise livestock and animals for food, they should do it in a wide-open, clean, healthy space...and not breed them to become so huge and unhealthy that they can't function. Thank you for reading this blog. You are what you eat.