Karen Davis, PhD
Chickens raised for meat live in crowded, dark buildings the size of a football field, each housing 20 to 30 chickens.
Chickens are forced to grow several times faster than their natural development dictates, so fast that their hearts and lungs cannot support the demands of their body weight, causing them to suffer from heart failure.
The chickens grow up in a toxic environment made up of stinking ammonia fumes and waste products infested with viruses, fungi and bacteria. Chickens are genetically modified organisms with emaciated legs that cannot support their body weight, resulting in deformed hips and an inability to walk. Chickens usually arrive for slaughter with respiratory infections, skin diseases, and crippled joints.
The chicks do not receive any individual care or veterinary treatment. They are tossed into shipping crates for a trip to the slaughter when they are only 45 days old. They are taken out of shipping crates at slaughterhouses, hung upside down on conveyor belts, and treated with cold, salty, electrified water to paralyze their muscles for easier removal of their feathers after they are killed. Chickens are not stunned before their throats are slit.
Deliberately left alive during the slaughter process so that their hearts continue to pump blood. Millions of chickens are scalded alive with boiling water in huge tanks where they flap their wings and scream until they receive a blow that shatters their bones and makes their eyeballs pop out of their heads.
Chickens kept to lay eggs hatch from eggs in an incubator. On farms, on average, 80-000 laying hens are kept in cramped cages. 125 percent of American laying hens live in cages, with an average of 000 hens per cage, each hen’s personal space is about 99 to 8 square inches, while a hen needs 48 square inches just to stand comfortably and 61 square inches. inches to be able to flap the wings.
Chickens suffer from osteoporosis due to lack of exercise and lack of calcium to maintain bone mass (domestic chickens typically spend 60 percent of their time looking for food).
Birds constantly inhale poisonous ammonia fumes emitted by manure pits located under their cages. Chickens suffer from chronic respiratory diseases, untreated wounds and infections – without veterinary care or treatment.
Chickens often suffer head and wing injuries that get stuck between the bars of the cage, as a result of which they are doomed to a slow, painful death. The survivors live side by side with the rotting corpses of their former cagemates, and their only relief is that they can stand on those corpses instead of the cage bars.
At the end of their lives, they end up in garbage containers or turn into food for people or livestock.
More than 250 million barely hatched males are gassed or thrown into the ground alive by hatchery workers because they cannot lay eggs and have no commercial value, at best they are processed into feed for pets and farm animals.
In the United States, 9 chickens are slaughtered annually for food. 000 million laying hens are exploited in the US each year. Chickens are excluded from the list of animals that are subject to humane methods of killing.
The average American eats 21 chickens a year, which is comparable in weight to a calf or a pig. Switching from red meat to chicken means suffering and killing many birds instead of one big animal.