by Clare Druce
Then there was the case of the fraudulent eggs: On March 11th 2010 Keith Owen, owner of Heart of England Eggs Unlimited of Bromsgrove in Worcestershire was jailed for three years for passing off 100 million battery eggs as free range, organic and Freedom Food eggs (though I understand from FF that no phoney FF eggs actually reached retail outlets). During his two-year-long fraud, Mr Owen made himself a profit of £3 million. The operation knew no bounds: eggs classed as ‘industrial’ (typically those with cracked or broken shells, suitable only for non-food purposes) were being packed into boxes labelled ‘free range’, as were imported battery eggs, subsequently marked with the Lion Eggs logo, only applicable to British eggs from vaccinated hens (2). How he managed to pull wool over supermarket managers’ eyes on such a massive scale remains a mystery. It seems the fraudster was finally unmasked when lorry drivers became suspicious of the long time they had to wait before they could load up with eggs – time in which, it turned out, Owen was busy re-labelling the boxes.
A frightening example of the lengths some butchers will go to was reported just before Christmas 2010. Food Safety Officers, acting for local authorities in the north east of England, took samples of marinated meat from thirty-three shops across the region, targeting premises that had already given reason for food safety concerns. The officers were following up anecdotal evidence that meat going ‘off’ was being disguised in marinades then sold for barbecues and for stir-frying. Their suspicions were more than justified – more than half of the samples they took were showing the first signs of putrefaction (3).
Not all scams are quite on the scale of the above. Recently, small-scale crooks have been exposed. There was the case of a farming couple from East Yorkshire, Colin and Katherine Chambers, who were fined £21,000 and banned from keeping farm animals for five years for subjecting animals to ‘appalling medieval conditions.’ They were well known locally as organisers of the monthly Humber Bridge Farmers’ Market, which attracted thousands of visitors. The couple had also sold their meat and poultry on stalls in Hull city centre and in Beverley (4).
Then there were two men I read about, complete amateurs when it came to farming. Dressed as true jolly farmers-cum-butchers, in stylish hats and aprons, they’d been doing the rounds at farmers’ markets, selling meat from animals found to be living in filthy conditions, and dying in misery.
At the start of 2013 a new scandal hit the headlines. Revelations of animal suffering, official inertia, risks to human health and the widespread duping of consumers combined to paint a hideous picture of an illegal trade in horses and donkeys for meat. Nobody likes to be cheated, but fraud involving living, feeling animals must surely be of the worst kind.
I’ve heard of a ‘butcher’s’ shop in the Netherlands selling nothing but vegetables and meat-replacement products made from protein-rich lupins. And apparently a nearby bona fide butcher is now stocking the lupin-based products too, so maybe that’s a glimpse into a better, safer future.
The following chapter takes us back to the late 1980s, when Chickens’ Lib was intent on exposing the true scale of abuse involved in chicken meat production. We were now ready to reveal a situation sometimes described as a ‘welfare dilemma’, a term that scarcely hints at the seriousness of the abuse involved.
Half-starved (by design)
In May 1987 Chickens’ Lib revealed an especially ugly aspect of chicken production: that the millions of birds producing the billions of eggs for the worldwide broiler chicken industry are forced to go hungry, and sometimes very hungry indeed. Poultry scientists and industrialists were, of course, well aware of the plight of broiler breeders, but in general the subject was hidden from the public.
In a fact sheet, we referred to the Royal College of Veterinary Surgeons’ evidence to the 1980-81 Session of the House of Commons First Report from the Agriculture Committee on Animal Welfare in Poultry, Pig and Veal Calf Production (1). The RCVS had commented on the ‘heavily restricted’ rations given to female breeders, describing how these birds drank excessively in an attempt to assuage their hunger and how this unnatural intake of water resulted in damp litter in the breeding sheds, whereupon the producers ‘responded by reducing the availability of water…’ The RCVS concluded that this reduction in the water supply ‘may exacerbate their distress’. You bet it did.
I’ve described how intensively reared chicken meat now comes from obese birds killed when only six weeks old, or even younger. The parent stock reach sexual maturity at around twenty weeks, and, somehow, these adult birds must remain slim and healthy enough to breed for around one year. The problem is that the parent birds share the identical genetic make-up to their obese offspring, being the result of the same selection for abnormally fast growth and ‘meatiness’. Even the brains of broilers have been tampered with, to encourage abnormally large appetites (2). So how exactly does the industry deal with this problem of its very own making?
Dr Joy Mench of the Department of Poultry Science, University of Maryland, USA outlined the issues in her paper ‘Problems Associated with Broiler Breeder Management’. Here’s a taste of what she had to say at the Fourth European Symposium on Poultry Welfare in Edinburgh in 1993 (3): ‘Broiler breeders are truly caught in a welfare dilemma, because the management practices that are necessary to ensure health and reproductive competence may also result in a reduction in other aspects of welfare…The selection of broilers for increased growth rate has resulted in an increase in appetite (Siegel and Wisman,1966) by modulating both central and peripheral mechanisms of hunger regulation (Lacey et al., Denbow,1989). The increased food intake causes obesity, which must be controlled in broiler parent stock in order to maintain reproductive competence. This is typically accomplished by limiting the quantity of food provided. Food restriction is initiated when birds are between 1-3 weeks of age, and results in a reduction in the body weight of approximately 45-50% of that of ad-libitum-fed birds (Katanbaf et al.’1989a) (2).
Irene and I attended this symposium (3), and in the discussion time that followed her lecture Dr Mench memorably elaborated on conditions in America, where skip-a-day feeding of broiler breeders was, and still is, legal (though outlawed in the UK).
Dr Mench described how not only one day’s rations might be skipped, but two: ‘You could hear their beaks tap-tapping on the shed walls, as they searched around for food,’ she told the assembled delegates.
As so often happens when one delves into the hidden world of factory farming, the reality proves much worse than had been feared.
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In 1996 we produced a detailed fact sheet on broiler breeders, and the project involved collating many complicated facts. I sent the final draft to both Cobb Breeders and Ross Breeders, two leading producers of breeding stock, asking them to check the information and to let me know if it was accurate before we went to press.
Ross Breeders declined to reply but, rather to our surprise, Cobb confirmed that the facts were correct but the company didn’t support our conclusions. So with that endorsement we went ahead.
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The wording on the fact sheet’s front cover read as follows:
BROILER BREEDERS
A FARM ANIMAL WELFARE NETWORK FACT SHEET
• Bred to be ‘good eaters’ yet kept on severely restricted rations.
• ‘Skip-a-day’ feeding practised in some countries.
• ‘Baby giants’ on supermarket shelves the offspring of desperately hungry birds!
We included information on feed restriction, the stress of hunger and a run-down of the typical diseases and injuries in breeders. In a spirit of irony, we quoted from a letter to us from the then Director General of the British Poultry Meat Federation, Peel Holroyd: ‘We cannot support your suggestion that parent stock birds are badly exploited; rather, to the contrary, they are reared carefully and sensitively and thereafter live long and healthy lives.’
*
Among the many distressing facts to emerge was the extraordinarily stress the parent bir
ds are subjected to at feeding time. The sexes are of course together, in order to breed, but they must eat separate, meticulously calculated rations. Fed in the morning, the birds would take no more than 10-15 minutes to finish their meagre food supply (4), and this for a species that likes to feed little and often throughout the day. ‘Fowls normally spend a considerable portion of their day in activities associated with foraging, and when given the choice prefer to work for at least part of their daily intake of food rather than eating it all from a free supply (Duncan and Hughes, 1972).
Desperately hungry, at feeding time the birds rush to the feeders, sometimes incurring injuries to their feet, a recognised cause of Staphylococcal arthritis (5). Grids on the females’ ration troughs, purposely narrow to exclude the larger males, must have caused intolerable stress to hungry cockerels, while in one study 15% of females were found to have severely swollen heads, the result of forcing their heads through badly designed feeders (6).
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Eventually, following recommendations by Chickens’ Lib, the Farm Animal Welfare Council decided to study conditions endured by the parent stock (its April 1992 report on broiler chickens had made no reference to the breeding stock). We’d complained to FAWC about this serious omission, and six years later, in August 1998 (two years after we’d issued our fact sheet on the subject) the Council brought out its Report on Broiler Breeders. While meekly accepting the necessity of feed restriction, FAWC did draw attention to some of the worst aspects of the cruel regime.
Under the heading Pedigree (Elite) Stock (that’s the valuable 1% or so of birds selected to form the basis of the national/international breeding stock) paragraph 66 states: ‘The process [of selecting suitable birds at an early age] creates a welfare dilemma because, having been fed ad libitum, the weights achieved by the birds at about 8 weeks of age will be above those required at point-of-lay. It is therefore necessary to restrict feed intake severely during the next 2 or 3 weeks to return the bird to physical fitness. The level of restriction which is imposed may limit intake to as little as 25% of previous feed over this period and this would imply a potentially serious welfare problem.’
A potential problem? More than potential, surely, to those chickens genetically programmed to be big eaters and suddenly denied 75% of their previous rations. Even after this severe and sudden restriction, more moderate restriction must continue throughout their lives, as is the case with the non-elite breeders too.
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Research dating back to the 1970s left us in no doubt that broiler breeders, elite or otherwise, are truly hungry: Food restricted broilers, however, consume their food ration in a very brief period of time. (Kostal et al., 1992) Restricted males are more aggressive than fully-fed males (Mench,1988; Shea et al., 1990; Mench et al.,1991) while restricted hens and pullets are more fearful and active and also display high levels of pecking stereotypes (van Niekerk et al., 1988; Savory et al., 1992). And so on….and on…The quest for morbidly obese chickens for a chicken-besotted public has led to sustained cruelty, assumed to be ‘necessary’ by the industry, by MAFF/ DEFRA, and now by FAWC. But what solution could there be to this ‘dilemma’?
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Professor Ian Duncan, a leading poultry welfare researcher, was present at the 1993 Edinburgh symposium that Irene and I attended. Workshops were arranged to take place between lectures and I was drafted into Professor Duncan’s. Representatives from true animal welfare interest groups were few and far between at the symposium and I felt a little like Daniel entering the lion’s den. Indeed, when I went through the door into the room where the workshop was held, I swear I sensed waves of antagonism coming my way from what appeared to be a collection of international poultry industrialists.
The topic of Professor Duncan’s workshop was welfare problems within the broiler industry. Some way into the proceedings he threw out a question for all of us to ponder: what solution might there be to the serious health and welfare problems afflicting broiler chickens?
When the time came, and risking a metaphorical knife in my back, I ventured the thought that the only way out of the dilemma was to select backwards, in the direction of slower growing and therefore slimmer, healthier birds. (Selecting backwards? I may even have used that most unscientific term).
At the end of the workshop I enjoyed a moment of quiet satisfaction when Professor Duncan returned to his challenge.
“I think I agree with Clare Druce,” he said.
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February 2011: There is little progress to report, if secret filming of broiler breeders by investigators for Hillside Animal Sanctuary is anything like typical. In the unit they entered, thousands of hens, along with the ‘approved’ number of cockerels (roughly nine hens to every cockerel) were recorded. It was night-time, but no comfortable perches were to be seen. Instead, the birds crouched on the floor, or roosted on the harsh metal edges of feed and water equipment. One had settled down on the corpse of another, possibly taking some comfort from the soft surface.
Most of the hens’ backs were denuded of almost every feather and many showed scratch marks, the result of unnaturally frequent mating. Cockerels in such an environment, hungry and bored out of their minds, have little else to do but subject the females to what must increasingly feel like painful assaults as their damaged backs become more and more raw. One hen had a swelling the size of an orange on the upper part of one leg, with blood beginning to seep from it. Anxiously, she kept turning around, trying to remove this terrible burden. The presence of such an advanced swelling proved the total inadequacy of the daily inspections (the ones demanded by law).
Concentrations of ammonia were found to be well over recommended limits. The suggested ‘safe’ upper limit for young broilers throughout the EU is 20 parts per million, but the reading in this unit went as high as 38 ppm, suggesting an air quality damaging to lungs and respiratory tracts, and possibly eyes too. Research indicates that ammonia levels lower than 20 ppm can be dangerous too, especially if the exposure is prolonged.
While the young broilers may be hatched and slaughtered within a space of six weeks, the breeders must live for roughly a year after reaching sexual maturity. In the unit described above, it’s unlikely that the litter on the shed floor was ever changed over the course of that year, its quality worsening steadily as time went by. DEFRA tells me that litter may be topped up as and when required and some patches of especially solid or damp litter exchanged. No past activity of that nature was apparent in the unit described above.
Although there is no specific legislation for ppm of ammonia gas for broiler breeders, EU law states that: ‘Air circulation, dust levels, temperature, relative air humidity and gas concentration must be kept to limits which are not harmful to the animals.’ (7) Certainly, the birds were exposed to harm.
Litter high in ammonia leads to foot problems and many of the birds were found to be suffering from an advanced form of pododermatitis, a condition that results in lameness and abscesses caused by the bacterium Staphyloccocus aureus entering wounds, most often caused by injuries and prolonged contact with ammonia-soaked litter. And this breeding unit was no small-time operation but attached to a well-known company.
Readers may be glad to know that a successful operation was carried out on the chicken with the orange-sized swelling. Who knows if she remembers her terrible days in the broiler breeding unit as she wanders on grass under sheltering trees, her leg now totally healed?
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But now I’ve been getting ahead of myself, by decades. It had taken us a long while to produce our broiler breeder fact sheet, and meanwhile much work had been going on to publicise the plight of those over-sized baby broilers, bred to satisfy an ever-increasing demand for chicken.
By 1987 the plight of broiler chickens formed a major part of our campaign. The suffering caused by hock burns and pododermatitis, frequently found in chickens of less than seven weeks of age, was of especial concern. Then suddenly, quite unexpectedly, we had an ally.
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Geoff Ord was Area Manager for Meat and Poultry Inspection for Bradford, and something of a rarity among officials. He knew that millions of broiler chickens routinely endured pain and, what was more, he cared. In fact he cared so much that he wanted MAFF to admit that Chickens’ Lib didn’t indulge in exaggeration.
In June 1987 we were due to meet with MAFF in London, and we’d be taking the evidence of suffering with us. For Geoff had offered to bring us off-cuts from a Bradford poultry slaughterhouse. Practical support like this from an official employee was pure gold dust.
But in the event, our plans were to go just a little awry…
The saga of the feet
Wednesday June 17th: A fine summer’s evening and I’m at home, expecting the visit from Geoff. Ah! Here he comes, hurrying up the path.
I’d pictured the amputated feet discreetly packed in a container smacking of the laboratory – stainless steel maybe, with a tight fitting lid. Instead, he has them rattling around in a shallow open box marked Mars Bars. Never mind, they are well and truly frozen. Once Geoff has gone I wrap them in a plastic bag, then a second one, and put the grim bundle in our freezer.
An hour later the phone rings. It’s the London friend in whose house Irene and I were to stay. She is so sorry: a domestic crisis! Beds for the night are now out of the question.
Our carefully laid plans, in disarray!
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Mark Gold, by then Director of Animal Aid, the animal rights organisation based in Tonbridge, was the moving force behind the annual Living Without Cruelty exhibitions. For one weekend every June, from 1987 to 1994, the whole of the Kensington Town Hall was given over to hundreds of stands representing the major UK animal welfare, animal rights and environmental organisations, and attracting many thousands of visitors. Chickens’ Lib had a stand booked, and to save on train fares we’d tacked the meeting with MAFF onto the end of this event. And now we desperately needed an alternative place to stay, with shelf space in someone’s freezer an absolute priority.