PlaxMacaws
01-17-2017, 08:37 PM
From: [Users must be registered and logged in to view attached photos or hyperlinks]
If you do any business with the poultry industry, for example, here’s a story that concerns you. From the Washington Post’s October 27 news pages, it’s a straight dose of truth-telling that reveals, among much else, how one form of cruelty can breed others, in a process shrouded from public inquiry by the very distastefulness of the details. The headline, “New technique may prevent the gruesome deaths of billions of male chicks,” hardly elicits eagerness to learn about the current technique. What we might wish were some grotesque outlier in livestock agriculture is, however, a sample of standard, everyday, and indeed worldwide practice: “Amid the recent, growing opposition to tightly caged hens, another practice in the poultry industry has drawn less notice: All male chicks born at egg farm hatcheries are slaughtered the day they hatch. This is typically done by shredding them alive, in what amounts to a blender.”
Just like that, and for the unfortunate ones over breakfast, Post readers were informed that for the sake of making eggs, “billions of newborn chicks,” because they are not bred to grow fast enough to be killed for meat, are shredded alive, or else gassed or suffocated. Egg producers call the process “maceration,” doubtless because “chick shredding” didn’t have quite the right ring of science and normality. They borrowed the term from wine-makers — apparently figuring, hey, what does it really matter whether you’re doing it with grapes or to living creatures? If it were some guy in his backyard “macerating” a handful of live baby birds, instead of a supposedly respectable global enterprise doing it to billions of them, witnesses would call the police, who would call in the psych unit. Never mind what kind of industry can get away with such a thing. What kind of industry would even think of it?
The new technique, in case you’re wondering, promises to identify the gender of chicks well before hatching, and we’re assured it will be adopted when refined and brought to commercial scale in maybe five or so years, or about 20 or 30 billion chicks from now. Progress? Sure. Most anything is bound to be an improvement when the starting point is madness.
Read more at: [Users must be registered and logged in to view attached photos or hyperlinks]
If you do any business with the poultry industry, for example, here’s a story that concerns you. From the Washington Post’s October 27 news pages, it’s a straight dose of truth-telling that reveals, among much else, how one form of cruelty can breed others, in a process shrouded from public inquiry by the very distastefulness of the details. The headline, “New technique may prevent the gruesome deaths of billions of male chicks,” hardly elicits eagerness to learn about the current technique. What we might wish were some grotesque outlier in livestock agriculture is, however, a sample of standard, everyday, and indeed worldwide practice: “Amid the recent, growing opposition to tightly caged hens, another practice in the poultry industry has drawn less notice: All male chicks born at egg farm hatcheries are slaughtered the day they hatch. This is typically done by shredding them alive, in what amounts to a blender.”
Just like that, and for the unfortunate ones over breakfast, Post readers were informed that for the sake of making eggs, “billions of newborn chicks,” because they are not bred to grow fast enough to be killed for meat, are shredded alive, or else gassed or suffocated. Egg producers call the process “maceration,” doubtless because “chick shredding” didn’t have quite the right ring of science and normality. They borrowed the term from wine-makers — apparently figuring, hey, what does it really matter whether you’re doing it with grapes or to living creatures? If it were some guy in his backyard “macerating” a handful of live baby birds, instead of a supposedly respectable global enterprise doing it to billions of them, witnesses would call the police, who would call in the psych unit. Never mind what kind of industry can get away with such a thing. What kind of industry would even think of it?
The new technique, in case you’re wondering, promises to identify the gender of chicks well before hatching, and we’re assured it will be adopted when refined and brought to commercial scale in maybe five or so years, or about 20 or 30 billion chicks from now. Progress? Sure. Most anything is bound to be an improvement when the starting point is madness.
Read more at: [Users must be registered and logged in to view attached photos or hyperlinks]