Most people have seen the commercials: a pleasant family gathers together in a sunny kitchen to savor a fresh-baked chicken dinner. The scene is idyllic. The smiles, laughter, and perfect place settings build the impression how the companies behind these ads value general well-being and happiness. But as many secretly- filmed documentaries show, the horrors felt by the birds who end up on our dinner tables are almost unimaginable.

Modern best backyard laying eggs doesn’t look very modern. It appears barbaric. Plus it bears little resemblance to farming.

Birds who will be hatched at modern commercial poultry farms begin their lives on a conveyor belt. Once they’ve been taken from their shells, the horrors begin. Newly hatched the male is personally picked through the conveyor belt and tossed alive into grinding machines. Because birds are exempt through the Humane Slaughter Act, this practice can be as legal because it is unethical. Thousands of chicks meet this atrocious fate each day. To the females, their ultimate fate is determined by whether they’re being hatched as broilers or laying hens. Both types are taken to environments their homes in impossibly crowded conditions and therefore are without the benefit of ordinary pleasures of existence like sunlight and oxygen. The information their traumatizing lives, however, vary by their intended use.

Broilers, chickens being raised for meat, are stuffed by the a huge number into warehouses. The chicks are given artificial human growth hormone that can cause their bodies’ development to outpace the expansion of their legs, and for that reason, they can be struggling to walk or move by the time they’re only months old. Many chicks get no sleep because lighting is maintained constantly to stimulate unnatural eating patterns that facilitate faster growth. Nothing with regards to their life is normal or natural.

Laying hens experience different, but equally horrifying, treatment. They’re jammed into cages so small they cannot even spread their wings. Their beaks are burned so they won’t peck at themselves from frustration. This debeaking often leads to severe, chronic pain for that animals. Most are also be subject to a practice called “force molting” which involves starving the birds-sometimes not providing them with food for two weeks-in order to shock their health into another egg laying cycle. Once egg production drops, they’re immediately shipped on be slaughtered.

Because the 1990’s, many undercover investigators have secretly filmed the grim and horrifying conditions of these commercial chicken farms. As the films negatively affect sales, the meat industry has fought to really make it a criminal offence to secretly operate cameras of their facilities. These laws, designed to silence whistle-blowers, are referred“ag-gag” laws. But it is mainly due to those earlier films the public has grown to be conscious of the terrible conditions in which commercially “farmed” chickens live along with the inhumane means by which they die. So next time you see one of those commercials in the media, do not be deceived with the happy family propaganda. Under the surface is really a horrifying reality those companies don’t want that you be familiar with.
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