Gore: Chicken Murder

[Atlantis]

I want to become a vegetarian...

 

[linearb]

yup, of all the meat animals, chickens probably get the shittiest deal. I grew up with chickens as pets (and for eggs), and as a result, I go way out of my way to buy the most humane chicken meat and eggs that I can. This does generally involve spending $6-8/dozen eggs because of the difficulties of directly accessing humane farms where I live, but at least I can sleep with myself.

That said, you can find equally horrifying footage of pigs and cows and stuff -- and, honestly, the fact that little baby male chicks get ground up in a hurry, bothers me less than what happens to the hens who spend months or longer in tiny, tiny little cells where they don't even have enough room to turn around, let alone stretch their wings.

I have no morale problem with the consumption of meat as an idea, but the way it has been implemented by capitalism is absolutely disgusting. Meat should not be the common, cheap protein source. If people were just willing to accept much higher standards for animal welfare, meat would be more expensive, people would eat less of it and be healthier as a result, basically a win-win.

 

[glynis]

Poor little chicks

 

[dboy]

I want to become a vegetarian...

Unfortunately you would have to become vegan to take a stand against that. As linearb points out, those will be the male chicks that are no good for egg production. He is absolutely right that those chicks are the lucky ones compared to their sisters.

If you want to be vegetarian then go for it - it isn't difficult. I was vegan for the first 25 or so years of my adult life. Even that isn't so hard - only really when staying with non-vegan friends or eating out. I only lapsed to vegetarian when my wife wasn't comfortable raising our boy as vegan and I ended up doing loads of childcare. I started 'hoovering' crusts of cheese on toast that he left rather than binning them. Convenience got the better of me.

Meat should not be the common, cheap protein source. If people were just willing to accept much higher standards for animal welfare, meat would be more expensive, people would eat less of it and be healthier as a result, basically a win-win.

This is very true, and yet of course meat is only really cheap when looked at in a limited way. Meat production is heavily subsidised in many countries, so it is costing more than people tend to realise. The cost is just being spread out via taxes so that everybody pays for it - even those of us who refuse to eat it. And there are other massive costs of meat production (particularly factory farming) such as environmental degradation and the enormous contribution to climate change. Those costs are not really being paid by anybody at the moment, but will probably cost our kids quite dearly at some point in the future.

Sorry if I'm ranting.

 

[linearb]

Sorry if I'm ranting.

You're preaching to the choir! I often find myself telling people that if you completely set aside all of the morale questions about meat in general, and all the moral questions about the way we manufacture meat, the inescapable financial reality is that meat production is so bad for the world along purely environmental and financial lines, that you'd still have to conclude we need to radically change the way those markets work to come up with anything vaguely sustainable.

I was an ovo/lacto vegetarian growing up; I started eating meat in my 20s. I should probably reconsider, otherwise I'm just another hypocrite.

 

[dboy]

I was an ovo/lacto vegetarian growing up; I started eating meat in my 20s. I should probably reconsider, otherwise I'm just another hypocrite.

I feel similarly about my situation. My heart is still in veganism, but my wife and my boy are vegetarian so it would add a bit of disruption now if I were to have separate meals. And being honest I do have a weakness for cheese - the only thing I ever really missed as a vegan. I miss the feeling though... that I live by my convictions.

 

[linearb]

I feel similarly about my situation. My heart is still in veganism, but my wife and my boy are vegetarian so it would add a bit of disruption now if I were to have separate meals. And being honest I do have a weakness for cheese - the only thing I ever really missed as a vegan. I miss the feeling though... that I live by my convictions.

you've obviously messed with your diet a lot; has any of this had any impact on your tinnitus?

Cheese is also the biggest obstacle to veganism for me. Since I didn't eat meat for the first 20 years of my life, I can give it up without too much difficulty (and have, from time to time, but then I get lazy).

 

[dboy]

you've obviously messed with your diet a lot; has any of this had any impact on your tinnitus?

Not at all that I've noticed. Because of other health problems I've tried a few diet modifications. I had a few mild effects on my arthritis (although hard to pin down), but nothing on tinnitus.

 

[Fungus]

In spite of the avatar and the fact that I keep both sheep and chickens (and other animals), I am vegetarian...ovo/lacto but with eggs sourced from my own chickens and very little dairy milk, sourced from known farms.
Firstly the relevant bit.....I haven't found any dietary change to affect my tinnitus. So my type of tinnitus....started with ear infection, blocked Eustachian tubes and culminating in T-tubes to ventilate the middle ear and sound-generating hearing aids for the small amount of high-tone hearing loss, isn't diet-responsive. As there are so many causes for tinnitus, I can quite believe that some will be diet-sensitive.
Now to my own (some may say hypocritical) stance of 'veggie but keep farm animals'. Firstly I'm a great animal lover......my life would be so much poorer without them. My dog,cats, sheep and chickens are like one big family and all live happily together. My chickens are totally free-range and roam over my garden, fields etc. I eat only their eggs. I hatch chicks from time to time and keep the males or re-home them. I have had as many as 6 adult roosters. the crowing?...no problem, I live in the country and my neighbours have chickens.My current oldest chicken is 10, and they eventually die of old age or disease (with trips to the vet as required).
The sheep? Well, I love sheep. They are MUCH more intelligent than they are given credit for, have widely different personalities and make excellent pets if they are treated right. They know their names, come when called, and love to be petted. They can also be lead-trained, but I let mine roam free. They breed, and all my ewe lambs are for breeding stock. Some of my ram lambs have to go for slaughter....adult rams can fight to the death...but this is something that I deeply regret. Though some by now will be thinking, 'What a hypocrite', I treat them all with the greatest respect, give them the best care I can and give them the best life a captive sheep can have. My ewes only go to slaughter/are euthanised when they become ill/too toothless to adequately eat, and my 'grand old dame' is about 13 (most ewes being culled at about 6), has had about 30 lambs in her time, and is having a well-earned retirement with some other old girls.
What about the vegan cheese alternatives? They taste good to me.....but there again I like sprouts. In fact the only meats I like the smell of are chicken (NO WAY) and bacon. I seem to remember in the dim and distant days of my childhood in a carnivorous family that I like the small of bacon, but found the taste very disappointing.
Well after my long rambling justifying my existence, I can only say again that I haven't found any food or drink (even alcohol) that alters my tinnitus. Though foods/drinks like cheeses and alcohol can affect 5 hydroxytryptamine I would expected there to be some change. Proof of the pudding being in the eating...not for me.

Apologies once more for the rambling.

Fungus.

 

[dboy]

Hey @Fungus, there's no need to justify your existence. Your post is really interesting and personally I find it great to meet someone with such a thought-out approach to dealing with these issues. We do have to eat, and I'm not one of those folks who think a vegan lifestyle is entirely our natural/evolutionary state. I object to the processes by which animal products are abusively produced in the modern world, but speaking for myself its more about how it is done than an absolute position.

I also live in 'Wild, wet and woolly Wales,' so maybe we are neighbours. I found my transition from vegan to veggie came around the time we moved here about three years ago, probably largely by coincidence. A lot of what you say is really interesting. When you say your rams have to go for slaughter, could I ask how that happens? Do they go to a slaughterhouse? I imagine it is p'raps a little painful to talk about so no worries if you'd rather not. Across the road from our house there is a field where sheep are kept most of the year. The ground is waterlogged for weeks at a time and the poor animals are just stuck there. In a storm they try to get shelter standing close to a hedge, but it doesn't really work. This time of year they just stand there looking dirty and lame and miserable. It seems so squalid, just so people can eat them when they are fat enough. Being a wild sheep is probably a tough existence, but at least they have the freedom to move for shelter and stimulation. I'm sure yours have a much better life than the ones I am talking about, so apologies if me saying this seems clumsy - just thinking out loud. Do you shear yours for wool since you are veggie?

Yeah, the vegan cheeses can be pretty tasty. You can even make a great pizza with them nowadays. They can be expensive though, and the older I get the less comfortable I am with food invented by scientists and extruded from machines in a factory. Which is so much of food nowadays it scares me. It's a difficult balancing act. I eat normal cheese now, but cannot bring myself to drink milk at all. Just the thought of it makes me feel queasy. Weird, eh?

 

[Fungus]

dboy...thanks for the kind words!

Some of the ram lambs have to go for meat, and I'm always going to feel bad about that. I also know that ultimately most will end up in the food chain. What I can say is that the life they have whilst with me is about as good as it can get. During this terrible wet weather they have been kept in a field with shelter and any sickly sheep have access to the barn (though they mainly prefer to lie out!) and their food is fed to them on concrete standing with the area cleaned daily. The ewes only go to market or are euthanised if there is good cause.

A breeding ram of ours became involved in a fight this year (they fight mercilessly with each other at times) and suffered concussion and a nasty eye injury. The swelling was huge and he ended up having to have his eye removed by the vet. The alternative was euthanasia, so eye out it was. So Popeye the One Eyed Ram is now roaming the fields and has the privilege of staying with the ewes all year so that he doesn't get into any more fights.

They are sheared in the summer as their fleece continues to grow and they overheat. The amount that we pay the shearer is roughly the same as we get for the fleece (£1 per animal).

Veggie cheese has some pretty strange looking ingredients, I must admit, and I hate the smell and taste of any type of milk on its own. I don't like soya in coffee, though....so I'll just have to get used to drinking it black.

I haven't found anything ..... any food or drink ,either taking a particular item or avoiding it entirely, medicines (taking or avoiding), alcohol, supplements etc. have any influence on my tinnitus. Anxiety or concentration on tinnitus certainly makes it seem worse, and distraction makes it less noticeable.

After 15 months I would now say that I have tinnitus, probably due to known ear problems, but no longer SUFFER from it a great deal.

Fungus

 

[dboy]

@Fungus thanks for sharing that about your sheep. Your approach seems very ethical. Sorry to ask another question, I'm just curious about the reason to keep the sheep if you don't use the wool or meat yourself and don't seem to be doing it for financial reasons? Is it just that you enjoy keeping them?

Yeah, I worry about some of the things in the ingredient lists of stuff like vegan cheese. Carrageenan is something I've become very wary of lately, and that is in loads of vegan products, even some soya milks. I have problems with arthritis and also some psoriasis, and carrageenan looks well worth avoiding like the plague with those kinds of inflammation problems. But no, like you I don't find foods affect my tinnitus. I've just given up soya milk for a bit to see whether that has any impact on my arthritis and psoriasis.

 

[linearb]

hey @Fungus,

I agree with everything @dboy said. The serious issues I have with meat, all relate to mass production at scale. If you're keeping your own animals, then you know a lot more about their welfare than I possibly could

I grew up keeping chickens, and I hope that some day I live someplace where I can do so again. I understand that some people take a much harder line on this, and I think that's their right, but I personally can't be convinced that the chickens we kept were suffering as slaves, because I spent enough time with them to have, I think, a pretty good grasp on their emotional state. Sure, they might be happier in some primordial garden-of-eden free and natural state... but so would I, and that's just not the world we live in

 

[Fungus]

dboy, it's a good question as to why I keep sheep. Not one I necessarily have a sane answer for, though. When we moved here just under 10 years ago, the idea was that we would grow our own vegetables etc. and keep a few sheep as a hobby.We started with just 4 pregnant ewes and I discovered that they have great personalities, are appreciative of what is done, and know their owners very quickly. I was immediately smitten (I am a lifelong animal lover). So the number grew. Proper sheep care is quite intensive and costly, so we, at best, break even. I have had the habit of keeping the best examples of the breeds each year, so the 'quality' of the flock is increasing. When they have been sheared, I give a few of the best fleeces to friends who spin.

linearb, I think the chickens here are pretty pampered. They roam wherever they like, put themselves into the coop at nightfall, and are great for 'mopping up' spilt sheep food etc. Having two cats also, we don't have a rat problem at all. The hens don't always lay in the chicken coop and an 'egg hunt' is necessary from time to time to find the caches. I suspect that some of the folk who adopt a hard line on egg eating are not fully aware of the nature of chickens. The vast majority of eggs that a hen lays are immediately abandoned, with the hen having no intention of ever returning to incubate them. When the hen turns broody, she will sit on anything, her own eggs, those of other hens, stones, fresh air etc. and there doesn't have to be a rooster around, so she may choose to sit on a pile of infertile eggs until they explode. As I do have roosters, occasionally a hen has gone 'AWOL' and has eventually been found sitting on a pile of eggs under some hedge etc. I will then transfer her to the barn and let her hatch them (you see, our garden is a bit like a primordial swamp rather than Garden of Eden as the weeds tend to get a firm hold and we have lots of rain)

I think that being out-in-the-sticks is good for tinnitus, though I developed it whilst here. The 'nature sounds' are good, and there's often plenty of sound from sheep, cattle. birds of prey etc. I don't have a problem with roosters crowing or the neighbour's tractors and heavy machinery.

So, back to the original theme of the thread. I don't personally find any food or drink alters my tinnitus, but choose to not eat meat or eggs from birds raised in cruelty for ethical reasons.

Fungus.

 

[dboy]

So, back to the original theme of the thread. I don't personally find any food or drink alters my tinnitus, but choose to not eat meat or eggs from birds raised in cruelty for ethical reasons.

Yes, in the warmer months I'm OK with eating eggs sold by our neighbours - you can see the hens scratching around in their garden and they look happy. When it gets colder they don't seem to lay much and my wife starts buying 'free range' ones from the supermarket. This I am much less comfortable with - although technically they might be free-range, you know they are still produced on an industrial scale with all the horrors that implies - such as the GIF that started the thread.

Thanks for all your answers - they were really interesting.

 

[linearb]

Yes, in the warmer months I'm OK with eating eggs sold by our neighbours - you can see the hens scratching around in their garden and they look happy. When it gets colder they don't seem to lay much and my wife starts buying 'free range' ones from the supermarket. This I am much less comfortable with - although technically they might be free-range, you know they are still produced on an industrial scale with all the horrors that implies - such as the GIF that started the thread.

Thanks for all your answers - they were really interesting.

The eggs I buy at the grocer are from a smallish company which claims that their hens have a minimum of 100 square feet of grass space, each, to themselves.

They also cost ten dollars a dozen.

 

[dboy]

ten dollars a dozen.

Respect!

I didn't mean to diss anybody's choices. I'm lucky that we live in a fairly rural setting now where quite a few people keep a few chickens and sell their spare eggs. Living in a city this isn't really possible. The downside is the cockerels crowing in the summer (if you have insomniac tendencies).

 

[Fungus]

linearb, those should be free range,organic ostrich eggs at that price! I think , as dboy says, anyone who takes the time, trouble, and expense of trying to get ethically treated products is a'good egg'. City living makes the ability to do that a whole lot harder.

Where I live in Wales a lot of folk have their own chickens (when the fox doesn't get at 'em). In the summer when my girls go into overdrive I sell them at £1 for 6...so less than the shops.

During the dark winter months they stop laying, and I then personally don't eat eggs.

My chickens are far enough from the house not to disturb us with the crowing, but what if you see this face in the morning?

Fungus.

 

[Reinier]

After accidentally viewing the shocking images from @Atlantis I would like to mention something related to this. At least I think it is.

After my NIHL I became even more aware of science and testing on animals in laboratories.
I am starting to realise that, when the (my) need arises, it is not all black and white all of a sudden. (You are either opposed or in in favour of animal testing.)

I really want science to find a cure for NIHL. I always have been a vegetarian (my parents choice initially) and am struggling with the concept of animal testing. The biology of chickens, birds and fish are able to give science insight which is needed for repairing the cochlea in humans (if possible). I constrict my argument to NIHL. Animal testing is done for so many reasons.

Should we treat animals with more respect than we do now? I think we do.
Or is this something I can struggle with because I live in a richer part of the world? If this where the case I would not stop doing so.

I hope that this respect for animals is just part of human evolution. It will take (a long) time before the majority of humanity accepts that it is not acceptable using animals the way we do now. (And has the "luxury" to act accordingly?). We used to accept cannibalism a long long time ago.

Back to animal testing: I think a really excellent step forward is stem cell therapy. Also more efficient ways are found to change "ordinary" cells into stem cells and hopefully this renders the ethical discussion somewhat moot. I understand that with stem cell technique it already is (very limited at the moment) possible to grow organs. If humanity does not destroy itself, in time we should be able to ban animal testing. We "simply" grow a cochlea in a petri dish and subject it to extreme noise. I am not downplaying the extreme complexity of this technique, but get the impression from articles in the news media that this is not too far fetched.

We already can grow meat for consumption in laboratories.
Or am I watching to much Star Trek with its "food replicators"?

 

[dboy]

I hope that this respect for animals is just part of human evolution. It will take (a long) time before the majority of humanity accepts that it is not acceptable using animals the way we do now.

Those two sentences reminded me of a wonderful book from a few years ago called "The Expanding Circle: Ethics, Evolution, and Moral Progress" by the philosopher Peter Singer. I just looked it up and the whole text is available free online now. It is a great, stimulating read (although I've argued with parts of it myself). I copied a few passages from Chapter 4 to give a flavour of it to anyone interested.

http://www.stafforini.com/txt/Singer - The expanding circle.pdf

As we have seen, many non-human animals assist their own kin, or refrain from harming them. In some species this is true of unrelated animals as well. So the first steps toward ethics, like the first steps toward mathematics, were taken by our pre-human ancestors. Ethics starts with social animals prompted by their genes to help, and to refrain from injuring, selected other animals. On this base we must now superimpose the capacity to reason. Imagine a group of early humans interacting on the basis of kin and reciprocal altruism. From kin altruism we get a strongly developed tendency for parents to provide for and defend their offspring. Brothers and sisters would help each other to a lesser extent. Nieces, nephews, and cousins receive preferential treatment over non-relatives, to a degree that diminishes with the distance of the relationship. Nevertheless, in a small, cohesive community, all members might be related to some degree, and so kin altruism, supplemented perhaps by a weaker tendency toward group altruism, would lead to a general readiness to help other members of one's own group, rather than other humans belonging to a different group. Reciprocal altruism adds a different and to some extent conflicting current: gratitude to those who have helped in the past leads to friendship and mutual aid which is not based on close kinship; and hostility to "cheats" who do not reciprocate would counteract any general benevolence toward all members of the group. So far, this description could hold for non-human social animals as well as for human beings, although reciprocal altruism would be likely only among intelligent animals living in relatively stable groups. Gradually, as we evolved from our pre-human ancestors, our brains grew and we began to reason to a degree no other animal had achieved. We became better able to communicate with our fellows. Our language developed to the point at which it enabled us to refer to indefinitely many events, past, present, or future. We became more aware of ourselves as beings existing over time, with a past and a future, and more conscious of the patterns of our social life. We could reflect, and we could choose on the basis of our reflections. All this gave us, of course, tremendous advantages in the evolutionary competition for survival; but it also brought with it something which has not, so far as we can tell, occurred in any non-human society: the transformation of our evolved, genetically-based social practices into a system of rules and precepts guiding our conduct toward one another, supported by widely shared judgments of approval for those who do as the rules and precepts require, and disapproval for those who do not. Thus we arrived at a system of ethics or morality. The transformation must have been a gradual one, over hundreds of thousands of years. The difference made by reason in this transformation is the difference between responding with a friendly lick or an intimidating growl when another member of the group does or does not repay favors, and responding with an approving or a condemnatory judgment. Stating the difference this way leaves open how big a difference it is-some may think that ethical judgments really are no more than refined friendly licks and intimidating growls. One difference, though, is apparent: growls and licks leave little to be discussed; ethical judgments leave a lot. To judge, beings have to be capable of thinking and of defending the judgments they make. Once beings can think and talk, once they can challenge each other, and ask, "Why did you do that?" their growls and licks are evolving into ethical judgments.
...
Reasoning in ethics is not limited to the negative task of rejecting custom as a source of ethical authority. We can progress toward rational settlement of disputes over ethics by taking the element of disinterestedness inherent in the idea of justifying one's conduct to society as a whole, and extending this into the principle that to be ethical, a decision must give equal weight to the interests of all affected by it. This would require me, in making an ethical judgment, to take my decision from a totally impartial point of view, a point of view from which I disregard my knowledge of whether I gain or lose by the action I am contemplating. One way of arriving at such a decision... is to imagine myself living the lives of all affected by my decision, and then ask what decision I prefer.
...
The ancient Assyrian kings boastfully recorded in stone how they had tortured their non-Assyrian enemies and covered the valleys and mountains with their corpses. Romans looked on barbarians as beings who could be captured like animals for use as slaves or made to entertain the crowds by killing each other in the Colosseum. In modern times Europeans have stopped treating each other in this way, but less than two hundred years ago some still regarded Africans as outside the bounds of ethics, and therefore a resource which should be harvested and put to useful work. Similarly Australian aborigines were, to many early settlers from England, a kind of pest, to be hunted and killed whenever they proved troublesome. So the shift from a point of view that is disinterested between individuals within a group, but not between groups, to a point of view that is fully universal, is a tremendous change-so tremendous, in fact, that it is only just beginning to be accepted on the level of ethical reasoning and is still a long way from acceptance on the level of practice. Nevertheless, it is the direction in which moral thought has been going since ancient times. Is it an accident of history that this should be so, or is it the direction in which our capacity to reason leads us?
Why should our capacity to reason require anything more than disinterestedness within one's own group? Since the interests of my group will often be better served by ignoring the interests of members of other groups, the need for a public justification of conduct should require no more than this. Indeed, shouldn't we rather expect the need for public justification to prohibit justifications which give the interests of my group no more weight than the interests of other groups? This suggestion overlooks the autonomy of reasoning-the feature I have pictured as an escalator. If we do not understand what an escalator is, we might get on it intending to go a few meters, only to find that once we are on, it is difficult to avoid going all the way to the end. Similarly, once reasoning has got started it is hard to tell where it will stop. The idea of a disinterested defense of one's conduct emerges because of the social nature of human beings and the requirements of group living, but in the thought of reasoning beings, it takes on a logic of its own which leads to its extension beyond the bounds of the group.
...
The circle of altruism has broadened from the family and tribe to the nation and race, and we are beginning to recognize that our obligations extend to all human beings. The process should not stop there. In my earlier book, Animal Liberation, I showed that it is as arbitrary to restrict the principle of equal consideration of interests to our own species as it would be to restrict it to our own race. The only justifiable stopping place for the expansion of altruism is the point at which all whose welfare can be affected by our actions are included within the circle of altruism. This means that all beings with the capacity to feel pleasure or pain should be included; we can improve their welfare by increasing their pleasures and diminishing their pains. The expansion of the moral circle should therefore be pushed out until it includes most animals. (I say "most" rather than "all" because there comes a point as we move down the evolutionary scale - oysters, perhaps, or even more rudimentary organisms-when it becomes doubtful if the creature we are dealing with is capable of feeling anything.) From an impartial point of view, the pleasures and pains of non-human animals are no less significant because the animals are not members of the species Homo sapiens. This does not mean that a human being and a mouse must always be treated equally, or that their lives are of equal value. Humans have interests-in ideas, in education, in their future plans that mice are not capable of having. It is only when we are comparing similar interests- of which the interest in avoiding pain is the most important example-that the principle of equal consideration of interests demands that we give equal weight to the interests of the human and the mouse.

Excerpts from Chapter 4 of "The Expanding Circle: Ethics, Evolution, and Moral Progress" by Peter Singer

 

[Reinier]

Thanks.
I downloaded the book.

 

[dboy]

Thanks.
I downloaded the book.

I hope you enjoy it as much as I did.