Chickens' Lib
Page 34
A good aspect of the new Directive is that a period of six hours of darkness out of the 24, at least four of which must be uninterrupted, is now mandatory so birds can rest properly. Though one should question whether crouching down on potentially filthy litter, perhaps on sore and painful legs, can pass for rest.
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Worldwide, the intensive broiler chicken industry remains as ruthless as it is squalid, and will surely continue so for as long as consumers buy cheap chicken, or until the system is outlawed. In our 1995 booklet Today’s Poultry Industry, The Inside Story we quoted Professor John Webster of Bristol University: ‘a cruel mess’ was how he described the broiler system.
Meanwhile, and all too often forgotten, there’s the cruel suffering of the breeding stock, those birds strategically ‘slimmed down’ so they are fit enough to produce clinically obese offspring.
The Spanish connection
In September 2009 I received a letter from Manuel Cases, Deputy-Chairman of ADDA, the Spanish organisation Asociación Defensa Derechos Animal (Association Defending Animal Rights). He’d remembered past co-operation with Chickens’ Lib over our booklet Today’s Poultry Industry and wondered if there was scope for another such venture.
At first, my reaction was negative – Chickens’ Lib’s voice was now insignificant, compared with larger and more active organisations. Opportunities for distribution of material were limited. And yet…I was reluctant to turn my back on the idea. We could afford a new leaflet and existing funds must be put to good use. Surely we still had a voice? But without a plan in place for distribution there was no question of a joint venture with ADDA.
Then Hillside Animal Sanctuary sprang to mind. Every year thousands of visitors come to see Hillside’s rescued animals, and all are offered information packs to take away with them. Hillside has an impressive mailing list too.
I put the idea of a three-way shared leaflet to Wendy Valentine and we came to an agreement: if Chickens’ Lib organised and paid for its production, Hillside would take care of the bulk of the distribution of the English version. I promised to come back to Wendy once I’d had time to think of the best subject matter, which must then be approved by both Hillside and ADDA.
Suddenly, the world was my oyster. Here was a great opportunity to highlight an important issue, preferably one that in our view no other organisation had touched on in sufficient detail.
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My thoughts returned to the NFU-hosted tour of a North Yorkshire battery, all those years ago. I remembered an individual hen, the one pecking at a button on my coat, and recalled how concerned I’d been that my children shouldn’t breathe in the foul air. I thought about how conditions there had sparked off the conviction that keeping animals intensively, crammed together in vast numbers, is not only cruel but inherently illegal. Legislation has been updated since then, but not substantially changed. Still the suffering goes on, while the scandal of a ratio of staff to birds, guaranteed to result in poor ‘welfare’, has not been addressed.
This new leaflet would draw attention to the sheer impossibility of fulfilling EU legislation. The presence of sufficient staff could not change the cruel nature of the systems, but adhering to the law would render most forms of factory farming unprofitable. Our shared leaflet would limit its scope to this one argument.
I put the idea to Manuel and he liked it, as did Wendy. I promised to get to work on the wording, which ADDA would translate and adapt, as necessary, for Spain.
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This was to be the wording at the head of the leaflet, dated January 2010:
FACTORY FARMED POULTRY AND THE LAW
• Statutory regulations intended to protect intensively reared poultry are flouted on a massive scale.
• For daily inspections of factory-farmed birds to be effective, a significant increase in the current typical workforce is required.
• If enough workers were employed to enable effective inspection, intensive systems as presently practised would prove instantly uneconomic.
Under the heading Inspection, the Welfare of Farmed Animals (England) Regulations 2007 state: Animals kept in husbandry systems in which their welfare depends on frequent human attention must be thoroughly inspected at least once a day to check that they are in a state of well-being.
Surely, any reasonable person would assume that a ‘thorough’ inspection must involve paying careful attention to each and every one of such animals. Indeed, this had been the interpretation of similar wording in much earlier legislation. In that court case back in 1982 when a Surrey battery farmer was found guilty of neglect, the concept of the individual bird had been central to the outcome of the case. The EU has now banned the barren battery cage. But I have argued that enriched cages present as many if not more problems of thorough daily inspection.
When it comes to legislation for broiler chickens, the picture is no better. Paragraph 8, Annex 1 in Council Directive 2007/43/EC states: ‘All chickens kept on the holding must be inspected at least twice a day. Special attention should be paid to signs indicating a reduced level of animal welfare and/or animal health.’ The health of broilers or of ducks, turkeys, quail or any other species of animal crammed together en masse, can never be safeguarded.
Nowhere in animal welfare legislation is neglect of sick, injured or dying farmed animals regarded as acceptable. Rather, it is deemed illegal.
A question of survival?
Never once in its early days did Chickens’ Lib aspire to address global issues. The slogan on our headed paper was Chickens’ Lib – fighting cruelty and in those long ago days we simply meant the cruelty of the battery cage system.
With our trademark cage, we’d shown Londoners and officialdom the truth – the pitiful live victims. But, as time went by, the campaign developed and of necessity changed. Along the way we were to see the bigger picture, discovering just how disastrous are the side-effects of factory farming for animals and humans alike and how widely its destructive net has been cast.
The prosperous among the world’s exploding population now eat more and more meat, while dairy products are fast becoming popular in previously non-dairy countries. To take just one example: New Zealand is rapidly increasing its stock of dairy cows to supply cheese to the Japanese. Multinationals exploit the assumption that meat equals the good life, while junk food outlets continue to spread like an ugly stain throughout the world, worsening global warming while accounting for an increase in obesity, Type 2 diabetes, certain cancers and heart disease.
Ironically, it’s possible that global warming, coupled with more enlightened views on health, will benefit ‘food animals’ faster than all the campaigning for better animal welfare, let alone the principles of animals’ rights. Now, eminent thinkers and scientists are opening their minds to the possibility of a new way of eating, often for essentially practical reasons.
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In March 2010 Sir Liam Donaldson, the UK Government’s Chief Medical Officer warned: ‘Our diet is warming the planet. It is also damaging our health’ and his words echoed the conclusions of many eminent scientists (1). He went on to estimate that reducing meat consumption by 30% could save 18,000 human lives from premature disease every year in the UK alone.
But a mere 30% reduction is unlikely to go far in solving the problem of a world where millions routinely go hungry. Take animal feed: According to United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) figures, 60% of the world’s crop of maize and 97% of the world’s soya are grown for animal feed (2). Maize is a staple in the diet of some societies, and contains most of the eight essential amino acids found in meat, fish and eggs, while soya goes one better, being comparable in food value to beef. In the UK, half of all wheat and barley goes to feed farmed animals (3).
The grain:meat conversion ratio is complicated, since many factors must be considered. For instance, cattle reared on grass or goats on scrubland are eating what humans could not (but could protein-rich nuts grow there?). On the other hand, intensively r
eared pigs and poultry are fed on the high protein foods listed in the above paragraph, all of which are suitable for direct consumption by humans. Millions of cattle, notably in the USA, are confined on concrete in feedlots; they never graze, but must have every scrap of food brought to them.
The facts behind the 97% of soya that’s grown for animal food are especially shocking. Vast areas of forest have been destroyed and continue to be destroyed to provide land for the crop, a fact highlighted in Friends of the Earth’s press release of October 19th 2010. In addition to worsening the rate of global warming, research for a FOE report, carried out at Oxford University, analysed the health implications of a range of dietary options. The conclusion was that diets lower in meat could cut UK deaths from heart disease by around 31,000, deaths from cancer by 9,000 and deaths from strokes by 5,000 each year: ‘Switching to diets that contain no more than three meat meals each week could prevent around 45,000 early deaths and save the NHS around £1.2 billion each year – as well as helping to tackle climate change and curb deforestation.’
On June 6th 2012, under the heading Tesco fends off accusation over Amazon beef, the Guardian’s environmental correspondent described a Greenpeace report. It claimed that JBS, the Brazilian supplier of meat and cattle by-products, has over recent years violated its own ethical sourcing code and sold meat, leather and other by-products to leading UK companies, including Tesco, Sainsbury’s, Asda, Ikea, footwear company Clarks and food firm Prince’s. ‘…this latest study alleges that in the past three years JBS has failed to live up to its pledges. According to evidence amassed by Greenpeace, the company bought animals from at least five farms accused by the Brazilian government of illegal deforestation, between June and December 2011.’
Ironically perhaps, JBS’s motto is ‘In God we trust. Nature we respect.’
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The global scarcity of water is now foreseen as an impending reason for unrest and even for wars.
Surprisingly, an article in The Ecologist (4), which described lack of sufficient water as the greatest barrier to increasing food production, failed to mention the vast water use by animals, especially those confined in factory farms where the atmosphere is typically dry and warm, encouraging maximum water consumption.
In the same article, Lloyds Insurance Group was quoted as listing water problems in South Asia as being due to high population densities, climate variability, hydropower requirements, poor water governance and widespread ecological collapse of freshwater systems. No mention of the elephant in the room: the massive expansion of factory farming, especially of poultry, in that part of the world.
Consider this example of the water needed for beef production: to produce one kilogram of beef, approximately fifteen thousand litres of water are needed. Or, put another way, one 250g (a half pound) portion of beef on the dinner plate will have used the same amount of water that one human needs for thirty-four years of life, assuming a meagre one litre a day (that’s just over two pints) (5). Professor Martin Rees, in his second 2010 Reith Lecture, Surviving the Century, advocated a vegetarian diet as a way to save the earth’s resources. The figures he chose to illustrate the point were as follows: to produce a kilogram (2.2 pounds) of vegetables takes two thousand litres of water, in contrast to the fifteen thousand required for the same amount of beef.
In our 1993 booklet, Hidden Suffering, we included information about the gulf between human nutrition in the West and in Asia: ‘Asian adults consume between 300 and 400 pounds of grain a year: three fourths or more of the diet of the average Asian is composed of grain. A middle-class American, by contrast, consumes over a ton of grain each year, 80% of it through eating cattle and other grain-fed livestock’(6). There are 2,240 pounds in a ton, or just over 1,000 kilos. The information quoted was dated 1977, and the trend since has been for Asians to move towards the diet of a middle-class American, with all its dire consequences for human health, the environment and, last but certainly not least, the inevitable victims of it all, the animals.
Any agriculture system uses water, but intensive animal farming, often promoted as the solution to feeding a hungry world, involves an unnatural and unsustainable amount of it.
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One solution to hunger could be cultured, or in-vitro, meat. In-vitro meat is grown in a laboratory – its source is animal-derived, but no animal’s death is needed to start the process. To date, the resulting meat is of the sort that might be found inside a beef burger – there’s nothing yet resembling a lamb chop or a chicken, but this may well be developed if consumers hold fast to the idea that their protein food must look like an animal, or a part thereof.
Hanna Tuomisto of Oxford University, where she studies the environmental effect of food production, is quoted as saying that switching to lab-produced meat could theoretically lower livestock greenhouse emissions by up to 95%, since both land and water use would also drop by 95% (7). The Dutch government is supporting research into in-vitro meat at Maastricht University and similar work is under way in the USA, Scandinavia and Japan (8).
‘Quorn’ (9) is grown from a naturally occurring mycoprotein organism, first found in the soil of a field in Buckinghamshire, England, and now widely available as the protein ingredient in ready meals. I gather it is good to eat. (While being suitable for vegetarians, it does contain egg white, so is not acceptable to vegans.) Like soya products (tofu for example) Quorn contains all eight essential amino acids and is therefore comparable to the protein obtained from beef, but is low in saturated fat, with zero cholesterol.
Straight talking
December 2010 saw the publication of the Farm Animal Welfare Council’s Opinion on Osteoporosis and Bone Fractures in Laying Hens.
On reading it, I remembered Mr Easterbrook’s words about the battery hen, written in 1948 when the cage system was in its infancy: ‘…often with their bones so brittle they will snap like dry twigs…’, and reflected on the extraordinary length of time it takes for progress to be achieved. Progress? For me, this Opinion is progress in that it highlights the stark truth that osteoporosis is not only associated with the barren battery cage but with those alternative systems generally heralded as ‘improvements’.
FAWC harks back to the 1989 work on battery hens at Bristol, which revealed 29% of new fractures (those incurred during the catching and transport of ‘old’ hens) (1) and describes the collapse of spinal bone
and paralysis from bone weakness, once commonly called Cage Layer Fatigue (2).
The Opinion points out that the keel bone (sternum) may be damaged during collisions, when birds land awkwardly, perhaps when jumping down from perches (3), and states that bone fractures associated with osteoporosis are believed to be rare in wild birds, or in domestic fowl in times gone by (4). Years ago, I complained to MAFF about the lack of dimmer switches in free range and barn-type units – almost unbelievably, some farmers were simply turning off the lights in the evening, leaving birds who hadn’t yet settled down for the night suddenly plunged into darkness. Many fractures must have occurred due to this stupid practice, let alone to the overcrowding which continues to this day.
FAWC states that when bones first break ‘acute pain’ is probably felt (5), followed by chronic pain due to nerve sensitivity and inflammation (6), and that the barren battery cage scored worst in mortality figures from osteoporosis (7).
Crucially, the unequivocal need to adhere to the 2007 Welfare of Farmed Animals Regulations (England, Scotland and Wales) which ‘gives legal force for the need to exercise and avoidance of trauma’ is spelled out (8).
The British poultry industry is said to be keen to assist with research into ways of improving the state of laying hens’ bones, and FAWC comments that any improvement would ‘also have commercial benefits by reducing bone splinters in meat.’ (9) Better, I thought on reading this, than the method, hopefully now abandoned, of turning down the electric current at slaughter.
The Opinion draws attention to the suffering of birds already in pain from bro
ken bones, when they’re shackled, awaiting slaughter (10).
Project AWO231, a Scottish Agricultural College/DEFRA initiative, compared the figures for bone fractures in both intensive and extensive systems, describing their prevalence, in all bones, as ‘disturbingly high (11).
System
Old fractures %
New fractures %
Conventional cage
23
24
Enriched cage
27
6
Barn
42
10
Free range
44
10
The above table makes for uncomfortable reading for anyone who’d hoped for a clear conscience when buying eggs from ‘alternative’ systems. Free range birds can be severely overcrowded, suffering especially in badly designed houses (too few pop-holes to the outside, for example) or during those times when flocks of thousands must shelter inside in bad weather.
Similar research, a Bristol/DEFRA project this time, revealed the very high extent of damage to keel bones (36%) in hens kept in enriched cages, while the average prevalence of such injury in other non-cage systems was 86%, with 95% recorded in ‘the worst flocks’. A contributing factor was perches, ‘many of which were not well-designed’ (12).
With these grim statistics before us, we now read that the prevalence of bone fractures has not declined over the last twenty years and ‘may be rising’(13). In view of this deeply depressing scenario, it’s encouraging to see FAWC questioning whether hens suffering from bone fractures should be transported at all, citing the demands of the Welfare of Animals (Transport) (England) Order 2006 (with similar regulations for Scotland and Wales) which require birds to be fit for any proposed journey (14).