CHICKENS, HERE AND THERE
It may well be that you have not been in and around the nation's poultry houses recently, but the publicity prone poultry problem protesters are present once more. They are attempting to build a strong anti-chicken eaters group among us and to boycott all chicken-serving restaurants.
Their allegations, once again are that we are grossly unfair and unnecessarily cruel in the manner in which we raise and execute our birds. They are gathered again in the name of “animal “ rights.
They dislike the manner in which thousands of American chicken producers continue to place generous supplies of finely ground grains and nutritionally balanced food before their housed birds from chick hood - medications,as well, if needed and supplemented to meet ever known chicken need! Fresh water is supplied in a steady, constant flow of droplets of water from pipes installed just over the feeder and readily available to all. There is not crowding and pushing around basins or troughs to compete for walked-though , filth-filmed water. We deceive our birds, they point out, by burning lights in the houses in the evening and again during the wee-hours of the night to make them think it is daylight and time to eat some more of that fine grain. That's unfair, it seems.
Among other cruel things we do - there are protesters who point out that the chickens we eat never get to ”touch ground”, never get to fly though the air, and never get to eat green grass blades, scratch for dried weeds seed and small pebbles, or delve among cow-droppings for choice leftover tidbits - and to, then, wash it all down with a swig of brackish, green water from the nearest puddle.
By contrast, our system is quite acceptable when compared with the modern process of raising birds in France, for instance. If they have to protest, they might do well to go there to see what cruelty can be. American poultry raisers cringe when they read about common French methods.
The French love their “pate foie gras” and many French and a few English producers, customarily force feed their birds during the final weeks of growth to as a more than twice the size of the valuable liver. Almost all French production is geared for each bird to have its mouth pried open, a tube is inserted down its throat and quantities of “maize” are pumped into its stomach, averaging as much as six pounds per day until time of slaughter. “World Farming”, an an animal welfare campaign group in Europe, estimates that the amount of feeds thus force fed daily as being the equivalent of a human being force-fed about twenty-eight pounds of cooked spaghetti per day. And, the procedure is growing. The increasing demands for ”pate foie gras” mean at least twenty-five million ducks and geese are to be force fed each year in France – double what the rate was just ten years ago.
It all makes our chicken-rising routines seem like kindergarten play, doesn't it?
A.L.M. September 14, 2003 [c530wds]
