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Viva!

Feel like Chicken tonight?

Chickens are thinking, feeling animals whom like most birds, love and care for their young and enjoy dustbathing, nest-building and roosting in trees. They also form friendships and a complex pecking order. Yet every day in the UK 2.5 million chickens are cruelly slaughtered for meat – that’s 30 deaths every second – each one an individual, each one a life lost. Most of the chickens killed for meat never see the light of day. Their six week life is spent inside a foul-smelling windowless shed with 30-40,000 other chickens, each with only a space the size of an A4 sheet of paper. They never feel sunlight or breathe fresh air – until they’re crammed into a lorry and hauled off to the slaughterhouse. Over 850 million chickens suffer this fate every year in the UK.

Selectively bred to reach ‘slaughter size’ in just 41 days, today’s chickens are killed when their eyes are still blue and they ‘cheep’ – chicks in an obese adult body. By the time they are slaughtered most of them are crippled, their young bones unable to support their distorted body weight.

Some lame birds die from starvation and dehydration as they are unable to reach food and water. Millions more die from heart and lung problems brought on by their rapid growth. Over 80% of birds on supermarket shelves show evidence of hock burns, where their sensitive skin has been scorched by the ammonia-rich faeces covering the shed floor. The cramped conditions and accelerated growth rate on modern farms have resulted in birds that are higher in fat than protein – with a single chicken now containing one pint of fat!
http://www.viva.org.uk/campaigns/chickens/broiler.htm

Watching Viva!’s investigation of Faccenda chicken farms was moving and upsetting. Everywhere they looked, birds with filthy, wet feathers huddled together seemingly seeking comfort from one another. Dotted around were lame, deformed and dying chicks who had no chance of escaping painful burns from the ammonia-soaked floor. Sadly, there was nothing extraordinary about this scene as it is repeated over and over again in identical windowless sheds the length and breadth of the UK. The answer? Go vegan.
Heather Mills