by Clare Druce
I rang around and eventually struck lucky, though it turned out that our visual aid would have to remain with us throughout Thursday while we set up for the exhibition: a dangerous swathe of de-frosting time.
I couldn’t face explaining about the parcel to our new hostess. I’d just allow her to put it trustingly into her freezer, believing us to be normal people anxious to preserve some delicacy.
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Thursday June 18th 1987: Irene and I took the train to London. Boxes of leaflets, posters and much else had been sent on in advance, courtesy of a kind supporter willing to drive the load down to London. Our meeting with MAFF was scheduled for Monday afternoon at 2pm.
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Monday June 22nd: We met up with Violet for a coffee in the Army and Navy Stores in Victoria Street, a rendezvous convenient for MAFF’s Horseferry Road offices. We’d stowed our parcel well out of sight under a bench and, on leaving, were half way across the restaurant before we remembered it. We thanked our lucky stars that we had. That parcel was no average item of lost property…
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The meeting had been convened to discuss welfare problems within the battery and broiler industries, and it turned out to be lengthy, lasting nearly three hours. The five MAFF officials agreed to watch extracts from our new video, Sentenced for Life, though cynically we suspected it was the seductive tones of Joanna Lumley, who’d generously supplied the voice-over, rather than the message of the video that appealed. Among the MAFF men present was Roy Moss, Chief Veterinary Officer, and Henry Brown, a rising star, we sensed, in Animal Welfare Division. After the video we had our ‘discussion’. Round and round went the arguments, the denials, while all the time on the floor beside me, in a zipped up shopping bag, lurked The Feet.
Our frustration was nearing boiling point, when Henry Brown allowed his imagination to run away with him.
“But how can we be certain the hens suffer?” he queried, apparently in all seriousness. “Surely we can’t know, without further research?”
Then, unwisely, he began to muse as to whether people would actually suffer, if they were shut away in, say, a broom cupboard, so long as they had food and water brought to them. Perhaps Henry was more cut out for some university’s Department of Philosophy, or an obscure Think Tank. Something more abstract than farming systems, certainly.
By now we were at the end of our tethers, and beyond. Enough was enough. Ignoring the fact that the present item on the agenda was the battery hen, I reached down and unzipped the bag.
“I have here,” I said, lifting out the package, “official proof of the suffering of broiler chickens.”
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And then, as I began to open the plastic bag, it hit us: the putrid stench of rotting flesh. Clouds of the dreadful smell engulfed the spacious room, wafting around the gleaming boardroom table, a truly shocking smell, though familiar enough to anyone who’s been near a skip full of ‘deads’ outside a poultry slaughterhouse.
I realised that this time we had Gone Too Far. No way could I fully unwrap our valuable official proof. I turned to MAFF’s Chief Veterinary Officer and asked him if he could very kindly dispose of The Feet, in view of their unforeseen deterioration. Meekly, obediently, Mr Moss took the packet from me and disappeared – for a very long time. We pictured him making repeated attempts to flush the sad amputated bits and pieces down a ministerial lavatory, or searching around outside for the nearest dustbin.
And now Irene rode to the rescue. Ever resourceful, always well supplied with the essentials of life, she took a perfume bottle from her handbag and liberally sprayed the air. Gradually, Lily of the Valley began to mask the ghastly odour, or at least mix with it, roughly fifty-fifty.
We didn’t chalk the meeting up as a success, just another drip on the stone, though Roy Moss did let drop a hint of sympathy. But then he was about to retire.
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June 29th 1987: I wrote to thank Henry Brown for arranging the meeting, concluding : ‘We apologise again for the unpleasant state of the samples, but can assure you that many almost equally unpleasant smells exist on factory farms, both in batteries and broiler houses, where live birds are suffering. Had we been able to refrigerate the samples adequately we are sure you would have found them enlightening and horrifying, even without the smell.’
Post script: Henry Brown sent Chickens’ Lib a Christmas card after this event, repeating the gesture for two or three years, until he moved to another department – Economics, I seem to remember. Could it be that Henry harboured a secret admiration for our derring-do?
The shortest of lives
Approximately half of all chickens hatched are male. In the broiler industry both sexes are reared, but egg production-type males are deemed worthless; if reared, they’d be skinny, by comparison to the modern, clinically obese broiler.
As mentioned earlier, ruthless genetic selection over the last five or six decades has ensured that breeds of chickens now fall into two distinct types – those destined for egg production, the rest – the vast majority – for meat. And it makes no difference whether commercially produced eggs come from intensive systems or the best of free range: day-old male chicks, the brothers of the future laying hens, have no future.
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One of the saddest purchases ever made by Chickens’ Lib was of a dozen dead male day-old chicks. We’d found a nearby hatchery willing to sell to us – destroyed chicks are routinely bought as food for captive animals, so our request wasn’t considered strange.
We wanted them so the image of these beautiful little birds could be shown on our latest video, to highlight the waste of life in the poultry industry – around forty million male chicks would have been destroyed that year, when the national flock of laying hens was estimated to be around that same number. We arranged to have hundreds of small sticky-backed photos made of the little heap of fluffy day-olds, for our supporters to distribute.
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As soon as chicks of the egg-laying strain have struggled out of their shells and their down has dried, they are sexed. Sexing is a high-speed operation and doubtless skilful. All female chicks are added to the mass on a passing conveyor belt, all males tossed aside.
The approved methods of killing male and other chicks regarded as surplus are threefold: ‘mechanical apparatus producing immediate death’, ‘exposure to gas mixtures’, or dislocation of the neck (the last not used in large-scale operations)(1) .
Maceration is used for unhatched embryos, but is not popular in the larger hatcheries, since, according to FAWC, ‘the rate of delivery of chicks exceeds the capacity of the [macerating] machine’ (2). Because of this, gassing is still the favoured method. We used to hear of supposedly gassed chicks reviving, while large numbers, especially those near the bottom of the bins, suffocated before the gas overcame them. FAWC in its report mentions the ‘highly aversive’ nature of 100% carbon dioxide, in that it causes a distressing and relatively prolonged death. While recognising that the use of 100% carbon dioxide is legal, FAWC recommends alternative gas mixtures as being more humane (3).
This cruel mass destruction of life is a direct result of having divided chickens into two distinct types and has nothing whatsoever to commend it. What is more, the manipulation of nature, if you like, has had a direct effect on human health, and in more ways than one.
Let’s take a look at the most obvious connection – the rise in obesity in humans.
Clinically obese humans
When only a few weeks old, broiler chickens are so heavy their legs cannot comfortably carry their own weight. More and more people are fat too. Clinical obesity is taking a huge slice out of the National Health Service budget as cases of Type 2 diabetes increase, even in children. 10% of UK citizens are currently being treated for obesity, one in twenty of them for diabetes, mostly those of Type 2, the kind linked to diet and lifestyle. Worldwide, 80% of people with Type 2 diabetes are found to be obese when diagnosed (1).
The fat-chicken trap has caught people from all walks
of life. Poultry meat has been foisted on the public as the healthy alternative, part of ‘lean cuisine’, while at the same time reduced to junk food. Not so long ago, you could pick up a leaflet in any doctor’s surgery and find chicken recommended as a healthy option, though I fancy that this advice is not seen so frequently now. However, if you consider when the dangers from modern chicken meat were first logged, it’s taking a remarkably long time for the penny to drop.
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Towards the end of 1986 an interesting letter had appeared in The Times. Above it was a cartoon showing a very fat man consulting his doctor. The caption read: ‘As I see it your main problem is that you’ve been intensively reared’. The letter was from Professor Michael Crawford, then Head of the Department of Biochemistry and Nutrition at London’s Institute of Zoology, and a consultant for diverse organisations including the World Health Organisation and Action for Research into Multiple Sclerosis. He now heads the Institute of Brain Chemistry and Human Nutrition at London Metropolitan University.
The letter, published nearly a quarter of a century ago, described how he and his wife were planning a dinner party and had bought several packs of frozen chicken thighs from a well-known supermarket. The recipe they’d chosen called for the chicken pieces to be first boiled, and they were amazed at the amount of fat that rose to the surface. After some kitchen-based experiments, Professor Crawford concluded that the calories obtained from the chicken pieces were largely from fat. In his words: ‘Clearly such 1986 chickens as we purchased need to be crossed off the list of low-fat foods’.
I wrote to Professor Crawford, enclosing our fact sheet on broilers and our recently produced video Chicken for Dinner? He replied saying that he had found the contents disturbing. ‘Quite apart from the importance such a distortion would have on the health of the bird itself,’ Professor Crawford wrote, ‘it is a colossal waste of energy [energy in the dietary sense] and directly contrary to the current recommendations which are being made by the DHSS and NACNE and specifically against the recommendation of the FAO/WHO expert committee of 1978, who specified the need to produce leaner livestock’ (2).****
In 1987 Poultry World reported on a conference at which Professor Crawford told delegates that the UK was ‘top of the league’ in the highest death rate from heart disease in the Western world and this could be directly linked with the amount of saturated fat consumed. He’d gone on to explain the harm done by saturated fats in meats, saying that meat was part of a normal diet – but meat fat was a killer, so far as heart disease was concerned. While the body needed unsaturated fat for structural and brain development, he said, saturated fat was stored in the body. Modern meat was low in polyunsaturates and harmful to health (3). Since the rise of factory farming and changes in animal feed contents, the fat in meat is found throughout the animal’s body, so cannot simply be cut off. This infiltration of muscle with saturated fat is known as ‘marbling’.
Some years previously, Professor Crawford and colleagues had pointed to the difference in the fat quality to be found in traditionally reared livestock in Africa. The fat in such meat was found to be polyunsaturated, similar to that found in wild animals, while for intensively reared animals it’s a very different story: ‘This fact is simply explained by the large amounts of adipose fat (energy store as opposed to structural lipid) which infiltrates the muscle tissue of intensively reared animals fed high energy, fattening foods without exercise’. (4)
In 1991, World Health, the magazine of the World Health Organization, (July-August issue) published an article by Professor Crawford, at that time Director of The Institute of Brain Chemistry and Human Nutrition at Hackney Hospital in London. The opening paragraph to ‘Fat Animals – Fat Humans’ was startling: ‘The accepted wisdom on animal agriculture is that it is there to produce protein. So it may come as a surprise to learn that beef, lamb, poultry and pork provide consumers in northern Europe and America with more fat than protein. Not just more, but several times more!’ Later on in the article he commented: ‘Sadly, developing countries are already copying this unhealthy type of animal husbandry’. Sad indeed, that ruthless multinationals continue to foist potentially lethal food onto largely unsuspecting populations. Though why the people in China and India should choose to adopt diets proven to be harmful is not easy to understand. Nor is Africa immune to the temptations of fast and fatty food. According to a report in The Lancet obesity is occurring in sub-Saharan Africa, a region more often associated with famine (5).
Having taken a trip through the development of modern farming methods, Professor Crawford then explained how the recent mania for fat has been profit-led, starting with high energy diets, so allowing more animals per field – a development emerging well before factory farming got going: ‘This high–energy diet plus low exercise regime led to a third development. When the animals were sold in the market, the heavier they were the better the price. So the ones that put on weight fastest were chosen for breeding. Farmers fell into the trap of selecting for the fat animal. This at first seemed not a bad idea, since people liked a bit of fat and it was useful for many purposes from boot polish to soap. At the same time they were selecting animals that would tolerate the kind of food man gave them to eat,’– in that case more ‘managed’ but less appropriate natural grassland, as well as (relatively speaking) restricted space. Turning to factory farming, he went on to describe one of its worst examples, the imprisonment of breeding sows ‘…sows tied down so their nipples were constantly available to the ravenous piglets’. He gave Chickens’ Lib a mention too: ‘Chickens’ Lib has also highlighted the plight of battery hens and broiler chickens. Genetics, environment and food have been designed for fat gain.’
Now for a leap forward, in time if not in terms of progress: In 2005 the Observer Food Monthly published details of Professor Crawford and colleagues’ on-going research. They’d found that chicken meat in 2004 contained more than twice as much fat as in 1940, a third more calories and a third less protein – despite the fact that protein is what the consumer generally assumes he or she is paying for. As Professor Crawford commented: ‘We now need a new definition of what we mean by a healthy food.’ He revealed too that even organic chickens had not been found to be much healthier as food, since they too are bred for rapid weight gain. It seems the ‘slower growing’ chicken, introduced in recent years, is only very slightly behind the worst of an average broiler, in the fat stakes. Most of the slow growers are slaughtered at around 80 days rather than the 40 or so common to intensively reared birds. It seems the race is still well and truly on to get chickens off the farm and into the supermarket, whether factory-farmed, free range, or organic.
The 2005 Observer Food Monthly article proved to be the precursor of research published in 2009 (6). The conclusions in the paper’s Abstract are as follows: ‘Traditional poultry and eggs were one of the few land-based sources of long-chain n-3 fatty acids, especially DHA, which is synthesised from its parent precursor in the green food chain. In view of the obesity epidemic, chickens that provide several times the fat energy compared with protein seem illogical. This type of chicken husbandry needs to be reviewed with regard to its implications for animal welfare and human nutrition.’
For the layperson like me it’s a complicated paper, but the nub of it is that the researchers believe that both physical and mental health problems, including behavioural problems in children, may be the result of poor nutrition: ‘Explanations for the tripling of obesity since 1980 include a lack of exercise, fast food, social factors, television, schoolchildren’s snacks, sugary drinks, genes and ethnic backgrounds. The National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence, the Food Standards Agency and the National Collaborating Centre for Primary Care have published recommendations to deal with the “obesity epidemic”. Yet there is no reference to the changing composition of food…The increase in brain disorders this century has catapulted mental ill health to cost £77 billion in the UK during 2008, greater by far than all other burdens of il
l health. Although the intensification of chickens alone cannot be responsible for this rise in disorders, it is part of a package in the changing food system that has ignored the nutrient requirements of people and, specifically in this case, for the brain. It would be helpful if human food production was again linked to human nutritional requirements as its first priority, as was achieved during World War 11 by Professor Sir Jack Drummond.’
So far Chickens’ Lib’s campaign hadn’t strayed far from chickens, as befitted its name. Soon though, we were to speak up for another kind of bird, when we turned our attention to a whole new world of darkness and disease.
But before going there, I’ll mention just a few of the valuable contacts we were now making.
Overseas links
Contacts with activists all over the world brought home to us the enormity of the damage that’s been done in the name of cheap food and ‘efficiency’. Sometimes, the wide world seems to cry out with the distress of cruelly exploited animals, yet conversely one small scene can encapsulate the whole rotten story.
We were in the process of making Sentenced for Life, our video about the battery hen, and had just released a batch of newly rescued hens into our orchard. A few seconds of the filming still haunt me.
In among a patch of summer weeds, a semi-naked little hen cautiously takes a few steps. It’s the lack of confidence, the obvious strangeness of experiencing a sense of purpose that reveals her history. After a year of so spent on the harsh metal cage floor, never once able to take a meaningful step, pecked relentlessly by the other hens in her cage, suddenly she has options. And, best of all perhaps, nobody is bothering her. So she makes her little bit of progress, slowly, hesitantly, wondering at her new surroundings.