Caged Chickens and Hormones

 

If most of us thought about the conditions in which chickens used for meat and eggs are raised and slaughtered, we would become vegetarian on the spot. Egg-laying chickens can be raised in cages with 6 chickens to a cage, each chicken getting only 67 square inches of space for its lifetime.

 

Unless they are certified and labeled as being free-range or organic or natural, they might have been fed growth hormones to get them to slaughter faster, and antibiotics to combat the diseases which come from being raised in cramped and less-than-clean conditions.

 

Do you know the recommendations for cleaning up after touching poultry? Recommendations are that you clean any surfaces that the chicken parts touched with bleach to remove bacteria, and wash your hands thoroughly.

 

Do you really want to put something into your body that requires bleach for clean up. Something that needs to be cooked to specific temperatures to be sure you’ve destroyed any bacteria that could make you sick?

 

Chickens and turkeys have become so mass-produced and injected with antibiotics and hormones that there is no taste to it anymore, so why bother? Even the most humanely treated chicken has probably been stunned in a salt-water brine before being beheaded. In John Robbins excellent book and video, Diet for a Small Planet, he shows us pictures of chickens being grabbed in groups by the neck and thrown into cages. Can you really consider eating a chicken with that vision in your head?

 

Any means of mass-producing animals for human consumption is by its very nature unhealthy and cruel for the animals, and unhealthy for humans as well. Even if you are of the opinion that man is a natural hunter, how natural is it to eat an animal that has been raised in captivity and fed a diet of hormones and antibiotics?