This is not a chicken.
Yesterday morning I asked Ten Questions About Chickens:
- You just got 25 hatchery hens. What happened to the roosters?
- You raise 25 roosters. What happens next?
- Wild chickens still exist in Asia. What are they called?
- Wild chickens routinely sit on clutches of 10 or more eggs. What does this tell us about chicken mortality?
- What is wild chicken mortality if we factor out predation?
- Chicken farmers routinely trim beaks of egg-layers. Why?
- Chicken farmers never trim the beaks of meat birds. Why?
- Is beak trimming a modern practice?
- Is rooster culling a modern practice?
- What is the best way to kill a chicken?
This is a chicken.
I promised to post the answers, and here they are:
- What happened to the roosters? Since you were only ordering hens, you were no doubt ordering chicks of an egg-laying breed, and the rooster chicks of egg-laying breeds are normally killed as soon as they can be sexed (i.e. within the first week after hatching).
- What happens when you have 25 adult roosters? Simple: a lot of noise. Depending on the number of hens in the flock, and the room allocated, you can also have fighting that can lead to death. Meat chickens are typically killed between the age of 6 and 16 weeks, before the age when roosters will begin to fight amongst themselves.
- Wild chickens are called junglefowl. They come in three basic types: Red Junglefowl, Grey Junglefowl, and Green Junglefowl. The modern chicken seems to be a descendant of both Grey and Red Junglefowl.
- Any animal that has a lot of babies is telling you a lot of them die very young.
- When junglefowl are raised in an aviary by a professional, over 65% die of disease before the age of three months.
- Beak trimming is done because chickens have a tendency to become cannibalistic. Chicken cannibalism occurs in 13-15% of all free range egg-laying birds, and occurs among all breeds. Cannibalism seems to be a learned behavior, and so it is more prevalent in larger flocks than smaller ones, and it is generally triggered at the beginning of egg laying. Too much light can trigger chicken cannibalism (one reason chicken houses have very low-lighting), while pellet food, reduced crowding, and an ability to forage may reduce incidence rates (without ever completely eliminating them).
- Meat birds generally do not need beak trimming because they are killed at a young age, before egg laying begins. Individually caged egg-laying birds have less opportunity to engage in cannibalism, and so beak trimming is often omitted. Egg-laying birds in commercial operations that are not individually caged, however, are generally beak-trimmed to reduce feather-plucking and cannibalism.
Cage-free hens are almost always beak trimmed. - Beak trimming has been done for more than 70 years. While there may be no reason to trim beaks if you have only a dozen back yard birds for personal consumption, commercial egg producers often have 50,000 to 250,000 chickens at a time, and in these kinds of situations beak trimming is automated, and done with a hot cauterizing wire or laser that removes the tip of the top half of the beak when the chick is less than 10 days old. With just the top tip of the beak removed, the chicken can no longer grasp hard enough to pluck feathers or bite a neighbor's flesh.
- Rooster culling is a very old practice, though now it tends to be done with chicks under the age of 10 days, rather than with very young birds weighing just 3 pounds -- the proverbial "spring chicken."
- The best way to kill a chicken is the best way to kill any animal -- quickly.
I posted the questions, and then the answers, so that people would have some background with which to judge the video, below.
It is a disturbing video, without a doubt, and it shows very sloppy management systems at an Iowa poultry house.
That said, to show this video without explaining chicken management problems in the real world is to engage in a lie of omission.
Perhaps the most shocking thing to most people is that male chicks are killed using either an auger, a machine-hammer, or a spinning-blade chipper.
Is this an aesthetically pleasing way to die? No.
But is it unethical? No.
The only unethical death is a slow one.
Death through freezing, gassing, or asphyxiation would be slower and far less ethical.
So too would be the kind of natural death junglefowl face in the wild: death from disease, starvation, flooding, exposure, and predation by snake, fox, cat, or hawk.
Bottom line: The objection to an auger death is aesthetics not ethics.
As for beak trimming, it is not done to be cruel; it is done to avoid cruelty. It is an additional expense, and one that a poultry house would love to avoid if if could.
The problem is that chicken cannibalism is a predictable, quantifiable horror when raising more than a few dozen egg-layers at a time.
With world population at almost 7 billion, and most of this population residing in urban areas, we can no longer afford to raise chickens as we did in the Year One.
In Iowa, where this video was filmed, there are 3 million people, 4 million cattle, 19 million hogs, and 52.4 million chickens producing 13.9 billion eggs a year.
In the U.S. alone, about 2 billion chickens are in production at any given time, with about 9 billion chickens a year slaughtered.
Across the globe, there are an estimated 25 billion chickens being raised right now, making Gallus gallus domesticus the most common bird in the world.
If you think "free-range" chickens or eggs are ethically superior to any other type found at your local grocery store, think again.
"Free range" chicken eggs are not defined by the USDA, and egg producers can slap that label on the side of any egg carton with complete impunity.
As for "free range" broilers, USDA only requires that they have theoretical access to the outside world for a few minutes a day. Broilers are never raised in cages, but instead are raised in large sheds, and the "free range" sticker almost always means that a door on the side of the shed was left open for a short period of time so that any chicken that wanted to (often none) could go outside in a narrow fenced area devoid of vegetation, and covered in gravel.
A final bit of trivia: What happens to all those commercial egg-laying hens after their second egg-laying season?
A large number end up as dog food, as these birds are now too old to be of much value as roasting birds.
For the record, I have eaten chickens and eggs my whole life, and I will continue to do so. I raised chickens in my youth, and I have no illusion about how animals get to the table, whether that is on the farm or in the wild.
Do I want farm animals to be raised with a bit more room, less unnecesary antibiotics, and a little more attention to waste management?
Absolutely.
That said, I do not think poultry producers are cruel. They are simply giving us chickens and eggs as we have asked for them: cheap, and at a volume demanded by rising affluence and burgeoning human population.
Poultry men and women have gone to considerable lengths to give us "cage-free" hens that do not kill each other as they live out their lives.
Seen that way, beak-trimming is not a cruelty, it is an enlightened management technique.
As for the euthanasia of male chicks via spinning blade, hammer anvil, or auger, if you have a faster and more humane way of getting that job done, be sure to speak up, as a fortune is to be made by simply patenting it.
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7 comments:
1. they probably got fed to something else.
2. what kind of roosters are they? meat birds? if so then they would be slaughtered with the rest of them
3. wild jungle fowl
4. that it's high
5. probably still rather high
6. isn't it to keep them from cannibalizing each other?
7. maybe it's because the life expectancy for a meat bird is shorter than a for a layer. I don't really know, never thought about it for some reason.
8. don't think so
9. no
10. cut the throat and bleed it out?
It's time to inject some humor from the 50's.
I was thinking of the big hen that Walt Kelly used to spoof the Republicans during the McCarthy hearings,
"Sis" Boom Bah. I believe McCarthy was a pole cat.
There are some inaccuracies here.
First, chicks in modern hatcheries are sexed (and surplus males culled) within a couple hours of hatching, not a week. Chicks must be shipped within 24 hours of hatching. Chick sexing is a modern innovation, as much art as science.
Cornish cross industrial meat chickens are killed by about ten weeks at the latest. If not, they happily die on their own. Sixteen weeks is right out.
I know of no private keeper of an ordinary laying flock that practices debeaking, no matter how large the flock. Cannibalism is a vice of crowding and the lack of access to forage. Industrial egg birds are crammed, lifelong, into wire-floored cages so tight that I would hesitate to transport my hens in such a cramped manner for more than an hour. Birds that are not crowded -- and in particular, true free-range birds like my own who spend their days foraging -- do not eat one another.
Debeaking does nothing to affect egg-eating. Industrial birds don't get an opportunity to eat eggs, as they roll off instantly and are whisked away. A de-beaked bird could still eat eggs if she got a chance. Egg-eating is an opportunistically learned vice (usually happens when a weak-shelled egg breaks in the nest and a curious bird tries it out). The cure is culling the egg-eater before she teaches others to do so. (She's the one who literally has egg on her face.)
I'm not sure what your point is about the green junglefowl mortality in the aviary. For one thing, the birds were NOT laying very many eggs each. And their survival rate suggests less than replacement-rate reproduction, which strongly suggests that something was not kosher with captive husbandry for those particular birds. (Any keeper of domestic fowl who was getting such terrible survival rates would quickly be out his business or hobby. We had 3% (2 deaths to trauma, one culled for ADR) mortality in our meat flock this year and have had a total of 4% mortality in our laying flock over 14 months -- i.e. one trauma death and one weird bird gone missing.)
Domestic chickens lay a lot of eggs because they've been rigorously selected to do so, not because it is part of their wild heritage. Web sources give a clutch size of 5-6 for red jungle fowl. That's not huge for an animal that must have lifelong susceptibility to predation.
That's a chicken, Boy.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=is9cW0IC_GE&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a0Ur5Vd__wM
According to my professor of avian and poultry science, all galliformes (which include chickens) are naturally cannibalistic creatures. Crowding probably does increase the incidence of cannibalism because of the close proximity of the birds, but the inborn tendency to cannibalize other birds is still there, as is the tendency to fight among male chickens.
I don't believe it was ever claimed that debeaking was used to prevent egg-eating because as you said the eggs roll down the ramp before the hens can touch them. The debeaking is used to prevent cannibalism and pecking/plucking feathers.
I think it's great if people want to raise their own chickens for meat or eggs so they don't have to worry about how their food was produced, but as was stated very accurately by the Terrierman if average consumers are going to demand lots of eggs and meat at a cheap price all year round then the egg and meat producers don't have much choice but to adopt the practices that they have. That goes for producers of other kinds of food as well.
Heather is correct in every point she made. No, I did not consult a chicken professor - I've worked in two separate egg hatcheries/laying/meat operations.
The handling you saw is standard.
De-beaking did not happen at either facility I worked at.
The video was actually not as bad as it COULD have been - I was expecting something horrific, and frankly it was quite tame.
In regards to the cannibalism, both facilities I worked at did NOT trim the beaks of ANY of their birds. Both facilities were typical, crowded chicken barns, however both employed very efficient practices.
No reason not to do a little reading, is there?
If you do, you will find that most commercial egg-layes in the U.S. and around the world are beak-trimmed, and that this is generally done before 10 days. The reason for this is production.
As the USDA notes at >> http://www.ars.usda.gov/research/publications/publications.htm?seq_no_115=157677
"[B]eak trimming treatments resulted in better egg income, feed cost per hen and net income. Also, both of the beak trimmed treated hens exhibited lower fearfulness levels and better feather coverage at the end of the production cycle (78 weeks of age). It was determined that beak trimmed hens can adapt to the physiological stress of beak trimming and perform at a greater level of egg production compared to non-trimmed controls.
At >> http://www.publish.csiro.au/paper/EA9900349.htm it's noted:
"Early in lay there was no difference in daily egg production with age at beak trimming, but by 50 weeks of age, birds trimmed at hatching or 42 days were producing more eggs than those trimmed at 10 days of age. Chickens trimmed at hatching consumed less food than chickens trimmed at 10 days, and in the late laying phase (67-82 weeks) all beak trimmed groups had significantly lower food intake than control hens. These results show that age of beak trimming influences performance and that considerable saving in food costs..."
See also ::
http://ars.sdstate.edu/animaliss/poultry.html
http://www.thepoultrysite.com/articles/1404/comparative-assessment-of-layer-hen-welfare-in-new-zealand
http://www.springerlink.com/content/d6pv858w53lvu5m1/
Patrick
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