DinkyDogg on 18/1/2008 at 04:30
You all seem to be uninformed about the conditions battery hens are kept in. Poultry represent 98% of the animals slaughtered for food, and there are NO laws in the U.S. regulating their slaughter and minimal laws about treatment, which aren't enforced. Regarding their slaughter,
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At the Slaughterhouse
Shackling
At the slaughterhouse, the birds sit in the trucks without food or water for 1 to 9 hours or more waiting to be killed. Inside the plant, in the "live-hang" area, they are violently jammed into a movable metal rack that clamps them upside down by their feet. Suspending these heavy birds, most of whom are already crippled, upside down by their feet, puts a painful strain on their legs and hips. Worse, meat industry specialist Dr. Temple Grandin reports "seeing
a lot of one-legged shackling" of birds (2).
Electrical Immobilization
The birds' heads and upper bodies are then dragged through a splashing water trough called a "stunner." This water, which is cold and salted to conduct electricity, does not stun the birds. Its purpose is to immobilize them to keep them from thrashing and to paralyze the muscles of their feather follicles so their feathers will pop out easily, as well as to induce certain "meat" characteristics in their breast muscle tissue (3). For these reasons, at least 24 million chickens, turkeys, and ducks are intentionally tortured every day with volts of electricity in federally inspected slaughterhouses, and further tortured when the machinery breaks down. A former Tyson chicken slaughterhouse worker said that when a line broke down at the plant where he worked, birds would be left hanging upside down in the stunner to drown and that he personally saw them "hang in that position for hours" (4).
Neck-Cutting
After being dragged through the "stun" bath, the paralyzed conscious birds have their necks partially sliced by a rotating machine blade and/or a manual neck cutter. Although both carotid arteries must be quickly severed to ensure a rapid death, these arteries, which carry the oxygenated blood responsible for consciousness to the brain, and which are deeply embedded in the bird's neck, are often missed. So haphazard is neck-cutting that The Poultry Tribune refers to "hopefully hitting the jugular vein" of the birds at slaughter (5).
Bleed-Out Tunnel and Scald Tank
Still alive - the industry intentionally keeps the birds alive during the slaughter process so their hearts will continue to pump blood -- they then hang upside down for 90 seconds in a bleedout tunnel where they're supposed to die from blood loss, but millions of birds do not die, while an unspecified number of birds drown in pools of blood when the conveyer belt dips too close to the floor. Dead or alive, the birds are then dropped into tanks of semi-scalding water. In 1993, of 7 billion birds slaughtered in U.S. facilities, over 3 million birds were plunged into the scald tanks alive (6). According to a former slaughterhouse worker, when chickens are scalded alive, they "flop, scream, kick, and their eyeballs pop out of their heads. They often come out of the other end with broken bones and disfigured and missing body parts because they've struggled so much in the tank" (4).
(
http://www.upc-online.org/slaughter/slaughter3web.pdf)
That refers only to hens raised for meat. Egg laying hens are bred differently, and since roosters don't lay eggs, their disposal is as inhumane than the slaughter of laying hens:
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Killing Unwanted "Egg-Laying" Hens
"When I visited a large egg layer operation and saw old hens that had eached the end of their productive life, I WAS HORRIFIED. Egg layers bred for maximum egg production . . . were nervous wrecks that had beaten off half their feathers by constant flapping against the cage." - Dr. Temple Grandin, Paper presented at the National Institute of Animal Agriculture, April 4, 2001. Because "spent" hens have no market value, few slaughter plants will take them. As a result, most of these birds are suffocated to death in dumpsters (12), then trucked to rendering facilities, or buried alive in landfills. According to Tom Hughes of the Canadian Farm Animal Trust, "The simplest method of disposal is to pack the birds, alive, into containers, and bulldoze them into the ground." Another method is "to pack the birds into a closed truck and connect the exhaust to the body of the truck" (13). In 2003, workers at a battery-hen complex in California said that when their arms got tired from breaking the necks of 30,000 unwanted hens, they threw the live hens into wood chipping machinery, in which a piece of wood is "fed into a chipper's funnel-shaped opening, and blades on a rapidly spinning disk or drum cut it into small pieces" (14).
Killing Unwanted Chicks
Along with defective and slowhatching female chicks, the U.S. egg industry trashes 250 million male chicks as soon as they hatch because the males don't lay eggs. Instead of being sheltered by a mother's wings, the newborns are ground up alive or thrown into trashcans where they slowly suffocate on top of one another, peeping pitifully as a human foot stomps them down to make room for more chicks. Some hatcheries gas the chicks with carbon dioxide (CO2). Ruth Harrison, the author of Animal Machines (1964), said she stopped supporting CO2 gassing of chicks after subjecting herself to nhalation of various gas concentrations. She said, "In my opinion, it is no better than the old practice of filling up a dustbin with them and letting them suffocate" (15).
(
http://www.upc-online.org/slaughter/slaughter3web.pdf)
Here's a bit on the abhorrent conditions of battery hens before they are slaughtered: (emphasis mine)
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Battery hens suffer from the reproductive maladies that afflict female birds deprived of exercise: masses and bits of eggs clog their oviducts which become inflamed and paralyzed; eggs are formed that are too big to be laid;
uteruses "prolapse," pushing through the vagina of small birds forced to strain day after day to expel huge eggs. The battery cage has created an ugly new disease of laying hens called fatty liver hemorrhagic syndrome, characterized by an enlarged, fat, friable liver covered with blood clots, and pale combs and wattles covered with dandruff. In recent decades, hens' oviducts have become infested with salmonellae bacteria that enter the forming egg causing food poisoning in consumers. Disease and suffering are innate features of the battery system in which the individual hen is obscured by gloom and thousands of other hens in an environment deliberately designed to discourage perception, labor, and care.
Battery hens live in a poisoned atmosphere.
Toxic ammonia rises from the decomposing uric acid in the manure pits beneath the cages to cause
ammonia-burned eyes and chronic respiratory disease in millions of hens. Studies of the effect of ammonia on eggs suggest that even at low concentrations significant quantities of ammonia can be absorbed into the egg. Hens to be used for another laying period are force molted to reduce the accumulated fat in the reproductive systems and
regulate prices by forcing the hens to stop laying for a couple of months.In the force molt, producers starve the hens for four to fourteen days causing them to lose 25 to 30 percent of their body weight along with their feathers. Water deprivation, drugs such as chlormadinone, and harsh light and blackout schedules can be part of this brutal treatment.Even eating is gruesome for the battery hen, who must stretch her neck across a "feeder fence" to reach the monotonous mash in the trough, a repeated action that over time wears away her neck feathers and causes throat blisters. In addition, the fine mash particles stick to the inside of the hen's mouth attracting bacteria causing painful mouth ulcers. A mold toxin, T-2, can taint the mash creating even more mouth ulcers in the hens, who have no choice but to consume what is in front of them.
Battery hens are debeaked with a hot machine blade once and often twice during their lives, typically at one day old and again at seven weeks old, because a young beak will often grow back.
Debeaking causes severe, chronic pain and suffering researchers compare to human phantom limb and stump pain. Between the horn and bone of the beak is a think layer of highly sensitive tissue. The hot blade cuts through this sensitive tissue impairing the hen's ability to eat, drink, wipe her beak, and preen normally. Debeaking is done to offset the effects of the compulsive pecking that can afflict birds designed by nature to roam, scratch, and peck at the ground all day, not sit in prison;
and to save feed costs and promote conversion of less food into more eggs, because debeaked birds have impaired grasping ability and are in pain and distress, therefore eating less, flinging their food less, and "wasting" less energy than intact birds. Diseases of Poultry (1991) states that " A different form of cannibalism is now being observed in beak-trimmed birds kept in cages. The area about the eyes is black and blue due to subcutaneous hemorrhage, wattles are dark and swollen with extravasated blood, and ear lobes are black and necrotic" (p. 827).
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http://www.upc-online.org/batthen.html)
Now that there's a bit of background, let me respond to individual points.
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Posted by Chimpy Chompy:On the bestality bit, I think the point is abuse and suffering. It's legal to kill a sheep for dinner, but I don't think it's legal to start punching it in the face. Screwing it is deemed another kind of abuse. We've decided that ending animals' lives to serve us is fine, we just shouldn't make them suffer whilst still alive.
I agree - I don't think any moral person could condone animal abuse, and I seem to have come off kind of wrong. I don't think that bestiality and the abuse it entails is harmless - my point is that any kind of animal abuse due to bestiality is a drop in the bucket compared the the legal, institutionalized abuse that billions of birds suffer in battery farming. It's natural to assume that "punching a sheep in the face" would be illegal, and the problem is that you're dead wrong. Read the accounts of the slaughter and conditions of battery hens. This relates to the double standard I mentioned earlier - no kind of animal abuse from bestiality could possibly compare to this.
There is even a sexual component to the abuse of laying hens. Presumably people don't get their rocks off to it, but the act of laying an egg is sexual in nature. Hens will try to find somewhere secluded and lay their eggs in private, not unlike humans do when defecating, and this instinct is so strong that battery hens will throw themselves at the bars of their cages up until the last second before they lay an egg, looking for somewhere sheltered to do it. Rotting carcasses of other chickens often become makeshift nests. Forcing them to lay in such conditions and crammed in with other hens IS sexual abuse, as sure as inserting things into their orifices would be. Which does happen on the slaughter floor, according to anecdotal accounts of a former slaughterhouse worker.
You claim that you oppose animal abuse, particularly sexual abuse of animals, right? Then stop buying battery-farmed meat and eggs. To know of this kind of abuse and continue to support it by buying their products does a hell of a lot more damage than you could even if you were to abuse animals yourself.
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Posted by Shug:Your problem shouldn't be the 'double standard' - and "the" problem isn't the taboo against sexual deviance - the issue should be stopping widescale animal abuse rather than accepting further animal abuse in the form of raping animals. Otherwise it's just a case of justifying one wrong with another.
I agree - I didn't mean to imply that that the double standard is the primary problem here in and of itself, it's the fact that nothing is done to prevent animal abuse in the meat industry. As I just mentioned, anyone who buys battery-farmed products is perpetuating the abuse.
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Posted by Subjective EffectWe kill animals to eat them though, and we need to do this. Just killing an animal for no reason or just for fun is largely not acceptable because it's unnecessary, as would beastiality be.
The abuse of chickens in the industry is motivated by greed, not sexual pleasure - does that make it any better? From the studies I have read, a free-range egg would cost somewhere between 2 and 9 extra pence to produce (4-18 cents). That makes a difference to the poultry industry, but not to a consumer. Don't trot out the "We need meat, so there's no need to treat meat animals humanely" crap - treating them humanely might reduce profits for their abusers, but it won't break the bank for anyone who actually eats either their meat or their eggs.
And the argument that chickens aren't aware beings is a load of crap, which is apparent to anyone who's raised them in a non-industrial setting. I've had chickens for ten years, and they're extremely social and have recognizable emotions. They're flock animals, and you can hear them clucking constantly, communicating with one another. If the rooster finds a worm or a nest of bugs, he'll make an excited noise to call the hens over so they can have some, or he's feeling randy sometimes he'll peck at the ground and pretend to have something to lure the hens over. The bond with one another - I had to take one of my hens indoors for 10 days because she was ill, and when I released her back outside she ran back to her rooster, and stayed by him for a long while. One of the other hens who has been ostracized by the group has bonded to me, and will follow me around, even back into the house if I don't close the door. And roosters who aren't specifically raised to fight and haven't been abused by humans are incredibly friendly - I can give my rooster a hug and he's never even pecked at me. They're honestly the gentlest creatures I know.
So, to those of you who claim to be against animal abuse, or against bestiality on the grounds that it's abusive to animals - I challenge you to stop buying battery-farmed meat and eggs. Eggs can be assumed to be battery-farmed unless they are labeled specifically as "cage-free" or "free range". Chicken at restaurants and fast-food joints (KFC, for example) is battery farmed. Almost all supermarkets carry cage free or free range meat and eggs. I've kept my diet entirely free of poultry meat for about 7 years - it's not at all hard to do. And free range eggs even taste better than battery farmed ones, which is hardly surprising.
This is particularly for Scots, Shug, SubjEff, and Chimpy Chompy, because you've said that you're against animal abuse and bestiality. Will each of you agree not to support battery farming?
