Unbelievable Cruelty to Chickens

Reader Contribution by Staff
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Be forewarned — this is pretty gruesome information.

“29% of all hens have one or more broken bones during time spent in cages, depopulation, and transport for processing,” according to research cited in a paper written by seven individuals associated with Purdue University and Hy-Line International Dallas Center. (The paper’s title is “Can Lighting Programs be Manipulated in the Growing Phase to Improve the Skeletal Integrity of Commercial Egg Layers.”) The authors go on to say “In addition to the bone breakage of live birds, economic losses arise due to high fracture incidences during carcass processing. Because of bone splinters in the meat of spent hens, the egg industry has lost the majority of its market to companies manufacturing chicken based soup products. Most soup companies now use broiler meat in place of spent hen meat.”

Why, you may ask, do industrial chickens suffer such brittle bones that the “spent” hens cannot be used to make soup? The reason is that the industry has bred the birds to produce eggs at such a fast rate that the birds can’t eat enough calcium to keep up with the egg-laying genetics that have been bred into them. As a result, the hens’ bodies must pull calcium from their bones, resulting in severe osteoporosis after just a few months of high rates of egg laying.

Modern broilers (chickens bred for meat production) suffer similar cruel treatment. They routinely experience severe health effects because the producers choose to maximize their profits by using birds that have been bred to grow so fast that their muscles grow faster than their hearts, lungs and bones.High rates of heart attacks and broken legs are commonplace.

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