Chicken Farming Practices in New South Wales
I rise to offer comments about the factory farming of meat chickens, which I learned more about while reading the publication From Nest to Nugget: the Expose of Australia’s Chicken Factories published by Voiceless, an organisation working for farm animal welfare.
Chicken meat was expensive when I was young, but today it is one of the ‘cheapest’ meats available – and it is the use of factory farming methods that has led to it being cheap. Every year vast numbers of chickens are raised and killed internationally – with 488 million slaughtered in Australia alone. These birds are treated as commodities on a production line rather than as living, feeling creatures.
I have chooks at home so I have observed their strong emotional ties to their chicks and complex social life with their fellows; I have noted that they have different personalities. Because of my knowledge of them I know they deserve better treatment than they get when factory farmed – where 50,000 of them are put into a shed as one-day-old chicks.
Meat chickens are bred to grow as quickly as possible. Regular chickens have a life span of about 7 years, but the chickens that people eat are 6-week-old chicks with artificially giant bodies – and the birds pay a very high price for growing so fast: their under-developed legs cannot support their disproportionately heavy weight – so thousands of them perish from thirst or starvation even with water and food close by, because they are unable to get to it.
Thousands more perish from stress, heart failure, being trampled, or from the overcrowding and chaos of being crammed in with 19 others per 1 square metre! Then, over the next 6 weeks, as the manure accumulates from multiple thousands of birds, the unventilated air becomes thick with dust and the germs from the decaying chicks that are not removed, plus an increasingly toxic level of ammonia that burns the chickens’ eyes – while the manure burns their feet and legs. They live in this unrelieved torment their entire lives…
Our meat chicken may be ‘cheap’ for us to buy – but it is very expensive in other ways, for it is a massively polluting industry. Cheap chicken meat means that someone else, or something else, is paying the real costs involved, such as the rivers that are polluted with the contaminants that run off from the sheds, or the neighbours whose property values have fallen and who are made ill due to the unrelenting stench, and the workers who pay a high price because they get respiratory diseases from the ammonia, bacteria, excrement and dust inhaled.
A report by the Public Health Association emphasised that every stage of the food chain needs to be considered when assessing the impact of our food choices – because heavily polluting industries such as factory farming are not sustainable.
It is also expensive in terms of degrading ourselves, for treating living beings this way. What is the Christian point of view on this? In the Bible we read that God is concerned ‘even with one sparrow falling’ and that He intended human beings to be ‘good stewards’ of His creation.
William Wilberforce, in addition to opposing slavery for fellow human beings, observed that many conditions similar to slavery were inflicted on animals, and insisted that society’s treatment of animals improve. Although God gave humankind ‘dominion’ over the animals we should exercise it with compassion. There is certainly no compassion evident in the practices of factory farming.
Even the Pope has commented on factory farming, saying that “Animals are God’s creatures… and human beings owe animals kindness. It is contrary to human dignity to cause animals to suffer… needlessly.”
I believe that if ordinary Australians knew what was being done so they could eat cheap chicken, they would be horrified and insist on changes being made. They would prefer to pay more for their chicken to ensure that these creatures were treated with some basic decency, as has been happening in the United Kingdom. As people there have learned about the suffering of farm animals they have called for reforms.
In 2007 the European Union set minimum standards for the treatment of meat chickens, addressing the worst aspects of factory farming – all of which continue unabated here in Australia. Therefore, I support setting minimum standards in NSW for the treatment of meat chickens, and I encourage everyone who has ever eaten chicken to read the Voiceless report.