With increasing numbers of consumers concerned with the humane treatment of animals that end up on the dinner table, chicken producers are eager to claim that animals were raised as cage free and free range. But do these terms accurately portray the way the animals were actually handled, or are they simply marketing gimmicks used to boost chicken sales?
Matt Rice, director of investigations for animal rights organization Mercy For Animals, discusses the ways some corporations are concealing the truth about how animals actually make it from the farm to your plate.
“Unfortunately these are for the most part marketing terms designed to make people feel better about paying more for some of the same types of abuses that you might see on a traditional factory farm,” Rice said.
“Our undercover investigations have shown time and again that chickens are generally raised in giant windowless sheds with no access to sunlight. And after a few short weeks, they’re rounded up violently by workers and thrown into transport trucks and sent to slaughter.”
He also describes that the process has evolved over the years for farms to try to breed and grow their animals extremely fast, which has led to a number of health issues. “Over the last several decades, the industry has bred chickens to grow extremely fast – they actually reach adult size in just about 42 days. If a human were to grow that fast, they would reach about 500 pounds in the first two years of life.”
The rapid growth usually leads to frequent heart attacks, organ failure, crippling leg deformities, and other problems, according to Rice. “So these animals, even though they’re only alive for a short period of time, are suffering immensely during that time.”
He said these factory farms become breeding grounds for disease when thousands of animals are crammed together in such a small space. “To keep them alive in conditions that would normally kill an animal, they put antibiotics into the feed to kill any pathogens in there.”
The antibiotic additives can then breed so-called antibiotic-resistant superbugs that threaten human health by making consumers of the product more resistant to antibiotic treatments.
Watch the full interview to also see undercover footage obtained by Mercy for Animals that reveals the truth behind typical free-range chicken farms.
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