Eat Less Chicken
Decreasing or eliminating chicken consumption can reduce animal suffering, improve the environment and protect human health.
About 580 million chickens are slaughtered for meat every year in Canada. Most of them live short, miserable lives in appallingly inhumane conditions on factory farms. They suffer from being selectively bred to grow fast – so fast their bones cannot support their weight, leading to chronic painful conditions and injuries. They endure rough handling, often breaking bones when they are picked up and stuffed into crates on trucks taking them to slaughter. During transport to the slaughterhouse, they are too often exposed to extreme weather over long distances, with some dying before they even get there. Finally, they face the pain of being shackled upside down, dragged through a sometimes ineffective “stun bath” and having their throats slit. Their flesh can now be processed for Canadians to eat.
This industrialized system not only results in poor animal welfare, but also contributes to environmental degradation and risks to public health. Moreover, its final product, chicken meat, is not the healthy alternative it is often promoted as.
Eating less meat, including less chicken, helps reduce the need for factory farming. Our overconsumption of meat is driving the expansion of this cruel system here and around the world. The meat industry correctly claims that it produces a cheap product, but ignores the fact that billions of animals are paying the price in incalculable suffering and that our environment is being polluted and our health put at risk. These are the hidden costs of cheap chicken.
The cruelty – The lives of chickens raised for meat
The risks to human health – Is chicken really a healthy alternative to red meat?
The damage to our environment – The pollution from industrialized poultry production
The cruelty – The lives of chickens raised for meat
Photo by Andrea Maenza
Virtually all chickens raised for meat in Canada have been selectively bred to grow quickly, producing the most meat in the shortest amount of time (which saves on feed costs). Thanks to this intense genetic selection, it now takes broilers (meat chickens) only five weeks to reach their “slaughter weight,” down from 14 weeks in 1950. (According to one U.S. state agriculture department: “If you grew as fast as a chicken, you would weigh 349 pounds by the time you were two years old.”) The result of this unnatural development is a range of side effects, which cause intense suffering. These include:
- Leg and skeletal deformities: Fast growth means the chickens’ legs cannot support their weight. Because proper bone mineralization sometimes does not occur, there can be a crippling and painful bending of the birds’ bones. They may become lame, virtually unable to move. The result is severe skeletal problems for the birds. Growing too heavy for their limbs, they become distorted in shape with unnatural stresses on their joints. The chickens spend more and more time just sitting as they approach slaughter weight. This inactivity is linked to chronic joint pain.
- Ascites – This is a disorder that occurs when a fast growing broiler has insufficient heart and lung capacity to supply all of the soft tissues with oxygenated blood, which can lead to a painful death.
- Sudden Death Syndrome: A phenomenon associated with rapid growth, the birds die suddenly from an enlarged heart.
Overcrowded barns
Broiler chickens live in extremely crowded, barren environments. By slaughter, each bird has only a half-square foot (465 sq cm) of space. That’s less than the size of a computer mouse pad. These barren and confining conditions deny chickens the opportunity to express natural behaviours, and lead to physical and behavioural problems. There is social chaos as thousands of chickens mill about, with too many birds for a well-defined pecking order to develop. Normal behaviour patterns are impossible, leading to stress and aggression.
Litter burn and polluted air
Massive amounts of manure accumulate in the floor litter from the thousands of birds during their six-week life. The birds suffer “litter burn” from the high moisture and ammonia content of the manure on the floor. Litter quality deteriorates, as does air quality, which becomes polluted with ammonia, dust and micro-organisms, causing respiratory infections and sores.
Unnatural lighting
Broiler house lighting is constantly manipulated to stimulate higher food consumption and faster weight gain, with lights kept on up to 23 hours straight. Disrupted circadian cycles cause distress and light deprivation results in less activity, which exacerbates leg problems.
Transportation
When broilers reach 34-42 days of age, they are grabbed by their feet, several at a time, held upside-down and loaded into crates by “chicken catchers”, who work so quickly they cannot treat each bird with care. Many chickens, some of which are already lame, suffer broken legs or wings or bruising during this stressful procedure. Automated catching methods would be more humane.
In Canada, an estimated one per cent of broiler chickens die in transit to the slaughterhouse, exposed for many hours to variations of weather, from winter blizzards to summer heat waves. In hot weather, crowded birds in the inside cages suffocate, and in winter birds freeze to death. Pain in already-damaged limbs is an added stress. The length of journey contributes to the stress and lethality of transport. Chickens may be legally transported for up to 36 hours without being fed or watered according to regulations under the Health of Animals Act.
Slaughter
Sadly, arrival at the slaughterhouse does not signal the end of broilers’ suffering. The slaughter process itself represents yet more pain and stress for the birds:
- Upside-down Shackle: The slaughter procedure for nearly all chickens is to suspend the birds upside-down by their feet, snapped in metal shackles. The procedure must induce fear, as well as seriously aggravating the pain of lameness and injuries from catching.
- Improper Stunning: After being shackled upside-down, chickens are supposed to be rendered unconscious by immersion in an electrified water stun bath prior to having their throats cut. Stunning is followed by a mechanical neck cutting machine and ends with immersion in scalding water to loosen their feathers. However, not all birds are properly stunned. Birds not stunned in the water bath feel their throats being slit, and some reach the scalding water bath while fully conscious. (A more stress-free killing method is administering a lethal dose of gas, which would eliminate removing birds from crates, shackling, and slitting their throats. So far, however, the Canadian poultry industry has not moved to this method.)
The risks to human health – Is chicken really a healthy alternative to red meat?
Fatty chicken
As the consumption of red meat in Canada has declined, partially due to consumer health concerns, poultry has been promoted as a healthier alternative. But is it? A 2009 study of broiler chickens in the United Kingdom found that since the 1970s chicken meat has become less nutritious and higher in fat because of intensive rearing. The researchers stated: “A chicken carcass now contains two to three times the energy coming from fat compared with protein. Parents may think they are still feeding their children a low-fat product, as it was in their youth, but are unknowingly feeding their children on a high-fat product.”
Salmonella and Campylobacter
According to the Public Health Agency of Canada (PHAC), raw chicken remains the commodity most frequently contaminated with Salmonella and Campylobacter bacteria. Estimates vary for the prevalence infected retail chicken meat, but surveillance by PHAC suggests it could be as high as 30 per cent for Salmonella and 43 per cent for Campylobactor. Salmonella can cause stomach cramps, diarrhea, vomiting and fever and can cause serious illness in infants, the elderly and people who are immuno-compromised. Campylobacter can cause similar symptoms.
Antibiotic resistance
Broiler chickens are routinely fed antibiotics as “growth promoters” despite concerns that this could increase the risk of people developing antibiotic-resistant diseases. For example, if someone contracted salmonella from eating undercooked chicken, and that chicken had been fed antibiotics, there is a risk the infection will not respond to some antibiotics used to treat it. One class of antibiotics, cephalosporins, are used to treat especially severe human infections. They are also injected into chicks in Canadian hatcheries. In 2009, data from the Public Health Agency of Canada found that this use of cephalosporins was linked to human resistance to those antibiotics. The prestigious medical journal The Lancet has stated that: “A growing body of evidence suggest that the clinical use of cephalosporins in human beings is under threat because of their widespread use in the poultry industry.”
Lack of genetic diversity and the threat of disease
Through a series of mergers and acquisitions over the years, most of the world’s meat chicken stock, now originates from two major corporations – The EW Group (Germany) and Hendrix Genetics (Netherlands). ). This consolidation is mirrored in declining genetic diversity in poultry. Researchers have found that commercial birds are missing more than half of the genetic diversity native to the species, possibly leaving them vulnerable to new diseases and raising questions about their long-term sustainability. Breeding chickens solely for faster growth and more meat, instead of for health and strong immune systems, has created an opportunity for diseases like avian flu to spread like wildfire through poultry populations. This creates a further opportunity for viruses to mutate and potentially become threatening to humans.
The damage to our environment – The pollution from industrialized poultry production
Intensive agriculture, including poultry production, has a huge impact on the environment. Factory farms pollute the air and local waterways, while consuming large amounts of energy and water.
The broiler industry in the United States raises and slaughters about nine billion chickens annually, requiring massive amounts of feed, water, fuel and other resources. A recent study estimated the industry consumed the energy equivalent of 6.7 billion litres of crude oil to produce 16 million live-weight tonnes of broiler poultry. This production generated 22.3 million tonnes of greenhouses gas emissions, 254,000 tonnes of acidifying emissions (air pollution) and more than 62,000 tonnes of eutrophying emissions (water pollution).
B.C.’s Lower Mainland has the same intensive broiler production, and the accompanying pollution, on its doorstep. Most of the provinces chicken meat industry is in the Fraser Valley, producing about 80 million broilers a year. The Fraser Valley poultry industry was producing 736,500 cubic yards of manure in 2000 and this is expected to rise to 1 million cubic yards by 2010.
This surplus manure produces large amounts of ammonia. Ammonia can react with other pollutants to form fine particulates, which can be harmful to respiratory health. The manure, which is sprayed on local crops as fertilizer, also contains nitrogen, phosphorus and other nutrients that run off into streams and groundwater. High levels of nitrates in drinking water are associated with blue baby syndrome, a condition which reduces babies’ ability to carry sufficient oxygen in the blood.
Resources
Broiler welfare
Humane Society of the United States report: http://www.hsus.org/farm/resources/research/welfare/broiler_industry.html
Canadians for the Ethical Treatment of Farm Animals report: http://www.cetfa.com/documents/Broken%20Wings.pdf
Animal Welfare Institute report: http://www.awionline.org/ht/a/GetDocumentAction/i/22540
Poultry and human health
London Metropolitan University report on fatty chicken: http://www.biomedsearch.com/nih/Modern-organic-broiler-chickens-sold/19728900.html
United States Department of Agriculture article of obese poultry: http://www.ars.usda.gov/is/AR/archive/jan08/chicken0108.htm?pf=1
Consumer Reports Magazine study on chicken meat safety:
Public Health Agency of Canada surveillance report (2008) http://www.phac-aspc.gc.ca/c-enternet/report-rapport/sp-rs2008-01-eng.php#rc
Canadian Medical Association Journal article on antibiotics and poultry:
http://www.cmaj.ca/cgi/content/full/181/1-2/21
BC Medical Association Journal article on antibiotic resistance and livestock:
http://www.bcmj.org/antibiotic-use-our-livestock
Article in The Lancet on antibiotic resistance and poultry:
http://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(09)61578-6/fulltext
Poultry and the environment
Study on environmental performance of US broiler industry: http://ideas.repec.org/a/eee/agisys/v98y2008i2p67-73.html
Article on the impact of intensive agriculture in the Fraser Valley and Okanagan Valley: http://www.irpp.org/po/archive/jul09/schreier.pdf
Links
Organizations working on farm animal welfare:
Beyond Factory Farming http://www.beyondfactoryfarming.org/
Canadians for the Ethical Treatment of Food Animals: http://www.cetfa.com/
CCFA: Canadians Coalition for Farm Animals: http://www.humanefood.ca/
BC SPCA: http://www.spca.bc.ca/welfare/farm-animal-welfare/
Humane Society of the United States: http://www.humanesociety.org/
People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (Kentucky Fried Cruelty): http://www.kentuckyfriedcruelty.com/
Compassion in World Farming: http://www.ciwf.org.uk/
Information on vegetarian alternatives
Chooseveg.com: http://www.chooseveg.com/
Earthsave Canada: http://www.earthsave.ca/
Toronto Vegetarian Association: http://veg.ca/component/option,com_frontpage/Itemid,1/
GoVeg.com (PETA): http://www.goveg.com/
Gardein (Richmond, BC company producing meat alternatives): http://www.gardein.com/index.php
