THE FOOD REVOLUTION - by John Robbins


Page 190) The Golden Egg
When I asked one poultry producer whether he was worried about the increasing public concern for farm animal welfare, he told me, "They're just stupid birds."
This attitude underlies the way chickens are treated in the poultry industry today. "They're just stupid birds," so there's no limit to how cruelly you can treat them. People with a little more sensitivity, however, look at it differently.
Bernard Rollin, the Colorado State University expert on animal farming notes that,
"Contrary to what one may hear from the industry, chickens are not mindless, simple automata but are complex behaviorally, do quite well in learning, show a rich social organization, and have a diverse repertoire of calls.
Anyone who has kept barnyard chickens also recognizes their significant differences in personality . . . There are vivid and classic bucolic images of chickens pecking contentedly in a barnyard . . . Conversely, few images in agriculture are more grating to common sense than chickens squeezed into small cages."


In Germany, the United Kingdom, Sweden, and Switzerland, however, it became illegal in the 1990s to keep chickens in cages. In the United States, sadly, the practice is not only still legal, but standard.


Page 191) When chickens are crowded together this tightly, their innate sense of a pecking order is obliterated. As a result, they become violent and sometimes peck each other to death. The industry responds with a procedure commonly called "debeaking." The procedure consists of routinely cutting off 1/3 of each bird's beak so that they won't kill each other in their frustration at being crammed into tiny cages with no possible outlet for their innate drives and instincts.


Although McDonald's implied in 2000 that the company was banning debeaking, this was not the case. The company was actually only calling for the debeaking to be done more carefully, so that the hens could still be able to eat. If implemented this would be an improvement, because the procedure often leaves the birds so mutilated that they cannot eat properly. Some starve to death because they cannot eat at all.


But McDonald's proposed changes still did not reduce the conditions that drive the chickens so mad that they attack each other in the first place. The industry is happy with what they euphemistically calls "beak trimming" because it renders the birds incapable of doing much harm to company property - in this case, the other birds.


More than 90 percent of the hens who lay the eggs in the United States are debeaked and kept in cages where the excrement from the birds in the upper tiers collects above them, often falling onto their heads.


When egg production declines, the hens are often subjected to a process called "forced molting," in which they are starved and denied water. This shocks the hens into losing their feathers. Those that survive start a new egg laying cycle.
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