"See no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil" can be a very comfortable way of living, provided you do not have some thing called conscience! The fact that the world harbors a large number of carnivorous and omnivorous human beings cannot be denied and plant eating population is relatively a minority, We have to live with the custom of killing other animals to meet the insatiable desire for meat foods. Vow, how do we go about it! The inherent demand and potential new demand for chicken meat and related products can be met only by the so called industrial poultry farming where millions of birds are raised under conditions that cannot be called totally acceptable to the conscience of man. There are millions of poultry farms across the world which produce chicken carcasses that is the basis of a roaring international trade. From time to time cases of meat contamination and food poisoning are reported involving large number of recalls from the market. Most consumers are under the impression that chicken preparations they consume whether at home or in eateries come from hospital-like, clean, hygienic farm facilities where the birds enjoy a luxurious comfortable life! Unfortunately the truth is some thing else as revealed by a recent expose which is nauseating and abominable to say the least. Look at the report more carefully and see whether you can resist throwing up, after watching the scenes in a typical poultry farm in the US.
"Most shocking is that the bellies of nearly all the chickens have lost their feathers and are raw, angry, red flesh. The entire underside of almost every chicken is a huge, continuous bedsore. As a farm boy who raised small flocks of chickens and geese, I never saw anything like that. One reason seems to be modern breeding: Chickens are now bred to have huge breasts, and they often end up too heavy for their legs. Poultry Science journal has calculated that if humans grew at the same rate as modern chickens, a human would weigh 660 pounds by the age of eight weeks. These chickens don't run around or roost as birds normally do. They stagger a few steps, often on misshapen legs, and then collapse onto the excrement of tens of thousands of previous birds. It is laden with stinging ammonia that seems to eat away at feathers and skin. I called Perdue to see what the company had to say. Jim Perdue declined to comment, but a company spokeswoman, Julie DeYoung, agreed that undersides of chickens shouldn't be weeping red. She suggested that the operator was probably mismanaging the chicken house. That doesn't go over well with Watts, whose family has owned the farm since the 1700s and says he has been raising chickens for Perdue since 1992, meticulously following its requirements. As Watts sees it, Perdue realized that consumers were concerned about animal welfare and food safety, and decided to manipulate the public. The claim about the chickens being raised "cage free" is misleading because birds raised for meat are not in cages. It's egg-laying chickens that are caged, not the ones we eat. So "cage free" is meaningful for eggs but not for chicken meat. Moreover, Perdue's chickens are crammed so tightly in barns that they might as well be in cages. Each bird on the Watts farm gets just two-thirds of a square foot. So why is our government giving its seal of approval to these methods as humane, in ways that seem to mislead consumers? "U.S.D.A. is the accomplice of Perdue in the fooling of consumers," says Leah Garces, American director of Compassion in World Farming, who calls it a marketing scam."
the tragedy is further compounded by the tacit recognition of this by the authorities who are supposed to prevent such animal abuses. Though animal activists and scientific community frown at these malpractices, nothing much is happening to take to task such powerful farmer lobby which is a law unto themselves with no accountability to the feelings and welfare of the consumers who form their "bread and butter". To add insult to injury the industry is brazen enough to proclaim on the product labels that their products are made from birds raised in a humane way!. Greediness for maximizing their profits through increased productivity per farm and minimizing their input cost drive most poultry farmers to use a variety of techniques and chemicals to torture the birds to increase their body weight. If the same techniques are used in man, he will be as heavy as 300 kg within 8 weeks, so say some experts! Every chicken meat consumer must introspect and decide whether he wants to eat meat from such birds!
V.H.POTTY
http://vhpotty.blogspot.com/
http://foodtechupdates.blogspot.com
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