- Cancer is the number 2 U.S. killer: The huge consumption
of animal fat and protein are implicated in the soaring cancer rate.
Chicken is higher than red meat in hetero-cyclic amines—the compounds
shown to raise cancer risk.
- 1 out of every 2 Americans will die from heart disease.
Excess saturated fat (mostly from animals) and cholesterol (
completely from animals) will be the cause in almost every case.
- Poultry, meat, fish, and dairy products are the primary
cause of atherosclerosis (clogged arteries to the heart or brain) in nonsmokers.
- Male meat-eaters have a 50% chance of dying from a heart
attack. Vegetarian males have a 4% risk.
- Diet accounts for 40% of all male cancers and 60% of
all female cancers. The key dietary causes of cancer are overeating, fat and meat.
All these health facts
and a lot more, which regards to humans self-interests, do not convince them. Even
the most selfish argument is not working. The
meat is killing them and they don’t care. So do you
really believe that humans would care that an animal has been killed for them?
Even if the day that humanity consider the interests
of the weaker member of its own species and all the other species will come, do
you really believe that the billions of creatures that their lives are pain and
suffer from birth to death should wait for that day? We think not!
If you accept all this happening until the last meat
eater will be convinced, and don’t think we have to stop it right now, at any
price, then you are not much better than those who take an active part.
Do not reduce suffer when you can eliminate it!
Imagine
a situation in which over 90% of the people in the world are crippled, who can't
walk normally and suffer from constant pain for about
half of their lifetime.
A global nightmare!
This
is an every day reality for a population, which is 8 times larger than the human
one per year.
Our real world is much worse than the one you have
just imagined.
The
industry which makes meat out of little fragile chicks, and
also refers as broiler chickens, is indubitable the extremist example of
humans absolute and destructive domination on nonhuman animals.
An ownership, which is found in every aspect of their miserable
short life.
The
massacre numbers are unbearable.
25 million chickens are murdered every single day in the United State only. 14,400 every minute!
Right
now, while you are reading this sentence, thousands of sentient and innocence creatures
are brutally slaughtered somewhere in the world. More than a 3,000 in a second.
The suffer begins at birth. The chicks never
experience maternal care.
Under
natural conditions the mother hen is fiercely
protective of her chicks, sheltering them under her wings for their first two
months of life. Day-old chicks are thrown
into prisons.
A
Short Life and a Brutal One: Mass-produced
chickens spend their short lives in huge windowless sheds with up to
100,000 other birds.
Motherless,
the chicks must fend for themselves from day one.
We've certainly broken their ties with their own mothers
and the natural world. We do not know how these birds feel in being ripped
apart from one another.
On
natural conditions, chickens live in complex communication and social structure.
Spend 50% of their time foraging for food. Have strong sense of personal space.
Very wary and shy on the confinement conditions, the chicks denied fresh air
and freedom to fulfil their natural instincts. They deprived social order and
hierarchy, adequate resting period, sunshine, dust bathing, quietness, ability
to forage, natural diet and space.
Chickens
can function well in groups of up to about 90, a number low enough for each
bird to find a niche in the pecking order. In crowded groups of thousands,
however, no such social order is possible, and, in their frustration, the birds
peck at one another so vehemently that they draw blood and even kill one
another.
As birds grow, space for each individual decreases. By the end of the growing cycle
each bird has only 0.5 square ft of floor and must push his/her way trough
a solid mass of other chickens to reach food and water points. Many die in the attempt.
The violent body invasion
Picture a six-year-old child weighting 130kg.
Terrifying!
Now try to imagine him walk.
Hideous and cruel for a child-but a present reality for a six weeks old chick.
This handsome bird of the forest floor reaches maturity at 18 weeks of age, when she/he weighs less than 1kg, (2.2lb)
Compare that with a human being, reaching maturity at 18 years, and weighing, let us say, 50kg.
By 1976, the domestic chicken was reaching 1kg in a third of the time, just six weeks rather than 18.
So picture, for comparison, not an eighteen-year-old but a six-year-old child weighing about 50 kg.
Now, though, because of the intensive selective breeding by the broiler industry in the past 25 years,
the six-week-old chicken weighs 2.6kg.
That is the equivalent of a six-year-old child weighing 2.6 times 50kg = 130kg!
In the next few years, we will see in the supermarkets – unless it is stopped – broilers attaining fully 3kg in six weeks, the equivalent of a six-year-old weighing 150kg.
Today's meat chickens have been genetically altered to grow twice as fast,
and twice as large as their ancestors. Pushed beyond their biological limits,
hundreds of millions of chickens die every year before reaching slaughter weight at 6 weeks of age.
The modern broiler is a genetic freak, doomed to all manner of physical and mental
ills, all the result of: Ruthless selection for heavier birds.
 |
By nature, chickens are alert and nimble forest-dwellers and foragers who have been forced
to subsist in alien bodies and alien environments that manifest human psychic patterns, not theirs.
They are not suited to the life imposed on them in order to satisfy human demands in the modern world.
Broiler chickens have been forced to grow three and a half times faster than normal chickens
through dietary and genetic manipulations for meat production, resulting in painful skeletal
and metabolic diseases. An example is Tibial Dyschondroplasia, in which the growing bird's young
leg bones develop crippling fissures and fractures |
Several decades ago, 1.2 percent of chickens
suffered from Tibial Dyschondroplasia. Today 50 percent of broiler chickens--baby birds
slaughtered at six weeks old--suffer from this human-created disease.
The combination of forced rapid growth and excessive weight causes chronic, painful lameness and
abnormal gait. The bird’s body grows too fast for the bone plates to accommodate. Consequently,
the birds develop angular bone deformities, Tibiadyschondroplasia, and “kinky back,” in which
vertebrae snap and put pressure on the spinal chord, causing paralysis.
Though they only live a few weeks, broilers suffer old-age illnesses such as heart attacks,
as their hearts and lungs are unable to keep up with the fast growth of their body muscle.
Heart attacks and the so-called acute death syndrome are major causes of mortality.
Heart failure is directly related to the exaggerated growth of chickens. The strain on their
cardiovascular system is enormous, the congestive heart failure which causes ascites a pooling
of blood fluids in the abdomen.
The high oxygen demand of rapid growth in the modern broiler combined with restricted space for
blood flow through the capillaries of the lung results in an internal accumulation of yellow or
blood-stained fluid. Compared to other chickens, heart related mortalities have only been observed
in broilers. Cardiac arrhythmias have been found in broiler chickens as young as seven days of age!
Selective breeding for rapid weight gain and the use of growth promoting antibiotics in feed means
many broilers are unable to support their own weight. Twenty years ago broiler chickens took
about 84 days to rear. Today, broilers reach the same weight in only 42 days.
80% of broilers suffer from broken bones or other skeletal defects. Birds severely crippled
and deformed die of starvation and thirst, unable to reach food or water. Other birds may
only be able to move by using their wings to balance.
The unnatural growth rate of broilers together with the lack of space to move or exercise
encourages the birds to rest on the wet, dirty, ammonia-ridden litter. This leads to painful
breast blisters and hock burns. Hock burns ere
very common. Foot and breast lesions and ulcerations
are also frequent.
 |
The faster a bird grows the higher the incidence of leg problems.
The birds spend 40% less time walking because of the legs weakness
and the chronic pain. Humans severally disable billions every year for the sake
of a few more grams on every "little money unit".
Endemic studies have shown that 90 percent of birds have a detectable abnormality in their gait.
Pathological leg conditions which have been found in broilers include: tibial dyschondroplasia,
twisted leg, tibia septic arthritis in joints, "kinky back" and slipped tendons. |
Squalid Conditions. An attempt to collect the dead should be a daily task. A poultry worker has
described it as follows: 'This has to be done every day because of the heat and the way the birds
are packed so tight. When you pick up a
dead bird it's quite common for them to be so putrid that they are just bags of bone and fluid'
The health problems of the chickens are so severe that if - instead of being slaughtered
at 6 weeks - they were allowed to live on, most would die before the age of puberty at 18 weeks.
The broiler industry has in effect bred animals, which are simply not viable, in that they
are unable to survive into adulthood without succumbing to crippling leg problems or heart diseases.
In the main, this does not matter to the industry, as the vast majority of the birds will be slaughtered well before reaching adulthood.
But the industry is in a bind. Some of the birds must survive into adulthood -the breeder flock, those that are to
produce the subsequent generations. These birds must not only survive, but also remain sufficiently healthy to breed.
If the breeders were fed normally, most would die before puberty and the survivors would suffer from
reduced fertility. To avoid these problems, the industry has to find a way of slowing down the fast
growth rates of the breeders (growth rates which have been imposed on the breeders to ensure that
their offspring put on weight as quickly as possible). The industry’s "solution" is to feed breeders
on severely restricted rations - in some cases, just 25% - 50% of what they would eat if given free
access to food. Broiler breeders are “chronically hungry, frustrated and stressed”.
The birds are highly motivated to eat at all times and display abnormal forms of oral behaviour such
as stereotyped pecking at non-food objects and excessive preening. Such behaviours are characteristic
of birds whose desire for food is being frustrated, and of undernourishment and nutritional deficiency.
They literally go mad because of hunger.
Despite the severely restricted rations, male breeders still experience chronic orthopaedic problems,
which cause chronic pain. Either side the chicken loses.
The effort to squeeze more and more money over the chicks broken and deformed body, leads to
enormous amounts of all kinds of experiments. One example regards to the lighting.
Artificial lighting within the broiler sheds is carefully controlled. Initially,
lighting is bright to accustom the chicks to the location of food and water and encourage
maximum eating and rapid growth. This lighting is then dimmed to a level of 2-5 lux in order
to discourage aggression and fighting between chickens. The deep gloom in the sheds is
continual except for half-hour each day when the lighting is turned off completely so
that the birds may become used to total darkness.
In the name of greedy, humans would do anything, even turn off the sun.
Broiler farmers usually rear five or six batches of chickens a year. Two or three weeks are
needed between batches to allow the sheds to be cleared of litter and fumigated. The litter
is not changed or cleaned during the chickens' time in the sheds and so becomes increasingly
wet and greasy and covered in the bird's faeces. It is estimated that 80% of the litter by
weight consists of faeces by the time of slaughter. This capping of litter with a greasy
layer is exacerbated by a diet which includes the recycled blood, offal and feathers of dead birds.
Stress and disease are inevitable under these conditions. Strong ammonia fumes can lead to
keratocon-junctivitis, a painful eye condition leading to
blindness. Heart attacks (also
called acute death syndrome), chronic respiratory disease, fatty liver and kidney syndrome
and a wide range of bacterial and viral infections can lead to high mortality amongst flocks.
Heat stress in sheds can also lead to considerable deaths. Many broilers die during periods
of hot weather due to inadequate ventilation.
The murder
Their last day is probably the most traumatic one. They violently grabbed while asleep in
the middle of the night by men who are cursing and yelling at them while pitching and stuffing
them into the crates in
which they will travel to the next wave of human terror attacks on them at the slaughterhouse.
The prevalence of dislocated hips is one of the worst aspects of the broiler industry,
which is the brutality often associated with the removal of the chickens from the sheds
for transportation to the slaughterhouse. Teams of catchers "depopulate" the sheds as
quickly as possible, carrying four or more birds upside down in each hand. The chickens
are held by just one leg with rough handling being commonplace. Their well-being is of
little importance as the catchers "must" handle 400-500 per hour. This brutal process is
referred to by the industry as "harvesting".
That conception says it all.
Once on the truck, the chickens, which have spent their entire lives in darkened sheds,
finally see sunlight during the ride to the slaughterhouse, on such unnatural and crazy circumstances.
During the journey, the birds will experience sudden jolting movements, vibration, loud noises,
deprivation of food and water and overcrowding. Extremes of heat and cold and high levels of
humidity combined with bad ventilation may also be encountered. All these contribute to
distress and a state of extreme fearfulness.
Long delays can arise between arrival at the slaughterhouse and unloading and these exacerbate
the stresses imposed by transport. These delays are particularly likely to be prolonged where
birds arrive too late to be slaughtered that day and are left in the containers on the lorry
to await slaughter the next day. Where delays are accompanied by poor weather conditions, such
as extremes of heat and cold, many birds die between arrival and unloading.
90% of U.S.A chickens are infected with leucosis (chicken cancer) at time of slaughter.
Once they arrive to the murder factory, the chickens that have survived so far are pulled from the
crates and shackled onto a conveyor belt by their feet whilst still alive. The conveyor carries
them into the killing room where their heads pass through an electrified water bath intended to
stun them. As they pass along further, an automatic knife cuts their throat, and then they proceed
into a scalding tank to loosen their feathers before plucking.
Unfortunately some birds lift their heads and miss the electrified water bath and they are
therefore still fully conscious when the reach the automatic knife.
Some birds may also miss
the knife and are then lowered into the 50-degree scalding tank while still alive. Some regain
consciousness.
Back-up people are supposed to cut the throats of the chickens that miss the automatic knife,
but due to the emphasis on speed in the processing plants this does not always occur.
We believe that what emphasize the speciesism and the alienation at most, is the farming regulation -
34 kilogram per meter. One sentence that unfortunately really describes the relationship
between human and nonhuman animals.
That relationship is devastating towards all nonhuman animals. To more than 100 billion a year.
This relationship has got to end.
Don’t let the routine confuse you:
Isolate an animal from its natural environment is wrong!
Deprived the opportunity to carry out any natural behavior is wrong!
Deprived maternal care is wrong!
Deprived a normal social structure is wrong!
Spending a life in severely over crowded shed is wrong!
Living in the excrement of thousands of birds during a lifetime is wrong!
Genetically invade in someone else's body is wrong!
Creating a genetic freak, doomed to all manner of physical and mental ills in the sake of a few more cents is wrong!
Impeding an animal to support its on weight is wrong!
Causing cardiac arrhythmias at seven days old is wrong!
Being exposed to sunlight only on the way to the slaughterhouse is wrong!
Cripple 50 billion creatures a year is wrong!
Only One Solution
