by Joel Bartlett

      ­Ask yourself, how much do you enjoy eating chicken? Is the pleasure you get from eating a chicken patty or a chicken breast greater than the pain and suffering experienced by the chicken while it was still alive? To best answer this question we must educate ourselves.

When chicks are a day or two old, they are taken to the broiler house to be de-beaked and toe-clipped without anesthesia. Bright lights are initially kept on most of the day to encourage feeding, but near the end of the chicken's stay at the factory farm lights must be dimmed to reduce the fighting brought on from extreme stress. During this time chickens are given a half square foot of space to live.

Chickens are taken to the slaughterhouse in crates stacked on the back of trucks, and driven to their destinations protected from the elements solely by the bodies of other chickens. On arrival the birds are dumped onto a conveyor belt. As the birds are unloaded, some fall onto the ground instead of landing on the conveyor belt. Slaughterhouse workers, pushed too hard for the sake of profit, don't have the time pick up individuals who fall through the cracks. Chickens may, if they are lucky, die after being crushed by machinery or vehicles operating near the unloading area, while in other cases, they may die of starvation or exposure after days without receiving their basic needs.

Inside, the fully-conscious birds are hung, by their feet, on a moving rail. The first stop is the stunning tank where the birds' heads are submerged in an electrified bath of water, infamous for spreading containments. (Countries other than the U.S. have modified this practice due to the health dangers it imposes.) Electrical currents are commonly set lower than what is required to render the birds unconscious because of concerns that too much electricity would damage the carcass and diminish its monetary value. (Taste is not a consideration here, as the taste of your factory-farmed chicken is generally determined by chemical flavor generated in factories off of the New Jersey turnpike.) The result is that birds are immobilized but are still capable of feeling pain, or they emerge from the stunning tank still conscious.

After passing through the stunning tank, the birds' throats are slashed, usually by a mechanical blade, draining the birds of blood. But the blade, of course, misses some birds. Next stop is the scalding tank. Here they are submerged in boiling hot water. Birds missed by the killing blade are boiled alive. This occurs so commonly, affecting millions of birds every year, that the industry has a termed these birds "redskins."

This summary of the life of meat chickens is by no means complete. Today's meat chickens are also the victims of genetic engineering, altered to grow twice as fast and twice as large as their ancestors. Hundreds of millions of chickens die every year before reaching slaughter as they are pushed beyond their biological limits. "Broilers [chickens] now grow so rapidly that the heart and lungs are not developed well enough to support the remainder of the body, resulting in congestive heart failure and tremendous death losses," according to one industry journal. Modern meat type chickens also experience crippling leg disorders. Confined in unhealthy factory farms, the birds also succumb to heat prostration, infectious disease, and cancer.

If the number of chickens reared in factory farms each year in the U.S. were laid out beak to toe, the line would stretch to the moon and back twice. And chickens are far from unique in their suffering.

This is no small problem, and should not be ignored.

October 2nd is World Farm Animals Day, proclaimed so in Connecticut by Governor John G. Rowland. The date marks the birthday of Mahatma Gandhi, a key opponent to factory farming. On this day especially we should all ask ourselves if we are doing all we can to limit the amount of suffering in the world experience by farm animals. We should start where we have the most control, and what can we control better that what we feed ourselves?

 

Bartlett is a member of the class 2003.