The Issue of Inhumane Conditions of Chicken Farming

Introduction

Most people have chicken in their normal diet, but almost none of them know where it comes from or how it is killed. If these people figured out how this happens some of them might never eat chicken again. The way they raise, kill, and process, chicken in most farms is inhumane and very gross.

Every year there are more than 50 billion chickens killed. Throughout this process chicken go through terrible things no living thing should go through. The chicken that you buy from the grocery store are selectively bred to grow faster. By the time the chicken grow up they can’t walk because their legs can’t keep up with the rest of their body. This also causes many painful diseases or deformities. These chickens also have little to no space to grow. Each chicken only has less than a square foot of room in their pen. You can’t even see the floor in there! Since these chickens live in these conditions, they tend to fight or peck each other. To solve this problem chicken producers cut the tip of their beaks off! With all of this happening, the chicken can’t have a healthy and clean life. Many chickens have a disease called ammonia burn. Would you ever want to live in these conditions, because I know I wouldn’t!?

Now that the chickens have fully grown up and are ready to be killed, they put them into a fully loaded truck, that has no protection from heat. As a result of that many of them die while being shipped. If they survive the truck ride the chicken are then moved to processing facilities. Those facilities kill about 8400 birds per hour. First the chickens are hung upside down and put into “leg shackles”. During this time they are moving on a pathway. As the chickens go down the pathway they go into baths of electrified water. This water stuns them for “humane purposes”, but it is believed that it is just to make the process to go quicker. After that they move along the pathway and a mechanical blade. Once the chickens have bled out they are dunked into a skulking bath to remove all of their feathers. Even though it seems like the chickens can’t feel anything, sometimes the blade can miss or the bath could be too low. So, many chickens are boiled alive during this process.

The way we kill chickens is gross and inhumane. There are many different ways we can kill them without them actually feeling it or being aware. For example, there is a law called the USDA’s Humane Methods of Slaughter Act that makes you have to make sure that the animal you are killing feels no pain or has a torturous death. However chickens are excluded from this act, so if we simply add them on the list of animals that this applies to the killing part would be solved. The problem with this is that the chicken would still be raised in a horrible environment. So a better solution to this would be purchasing you chicken from free range, small, local businesses. This is because the chicken there are usually raised in a healthy environment and killed in a painless/ torturous way. So, in conclusion, before you buy your next chicken from the grocery store, think about all of this.