Chicken Ethics Vs Chicken Aesthetics

This is not a chicken.

Yesterday morning I asked Ten Questions About Chickens:

1. You just got 25 hatchery hens. What happened to the roosters?
   


2. You raise 25 roosters. What happens next?
   


3. Wild chickens still exist in Asia. What are they called?
   


4. Wild chickens routinely sit on clutches of 10 or more eggs. What does this tell us about chicken mortality?
   


5. What is wild chicken mortality if we factor out predation?
   


6. Chicken farmers routinely trim beaks of egg-layers. Why?
   


7. Chicken farmers never trim the beaks of meat birds. Why?
   


8. Is beak trimming a modern practice?
   


9. Is rooster culling a modern practice?
   


10. What is the best way to kill a chicken?

This is a chicken.

I promised to post the answers, and here they are:

1. 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).
   


2. 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.
   


3. 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.
   


4. Any animal that has a lot of babies is telling you a lot of them die very young.
   


5. When junglefowl are raised in an aviary by a professional, over 65% die of disease before the age of three months.
   


6. 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).
   


7. 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.
   


8. 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.
   


9. 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."
   


10. 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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