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| The corpse of a chicken. Photo from No Caged Eggs |
80% of Australians surveyed on the topic of factory farming said they wanted it banned. Yet factory farming remains to cause the most suffering to the largest number of animals in Australia – more than 500 million every year, and over 90% of all eggs sold in Australia are caged.
For chickens who are bred for food, their natural lifespan of five to eight years is drastically reduced to 35 days. These chickens are bred at three times their natural growth rate and they cannot cope with the unnatural speed at which their bodies are growing. A lot of the chickens die before they even reach the slaughterhouse because their legs are underdeveloped so they cannot support their weight, making them unable to reach the food. Others don't survive the five weeks because their hearts and lungs simply cannot cope with the rapid, unnatural growth.
These chickens never see the sunlight, never feel grass and never leave their shed where tens of thousands of other chickens are stuffed. These sheds are never cleaned so they spend their entire lives sitting in their own faeces and develop diseases from it.
The worst part is that these chickens die when they are literally still babies. They may be the size of fully grown chickens but they enter the slaughterhouse with their baby feathers, baby blue eyes and still cheeping away like chicks do.
For chickens who are used for laying eggs, the situation is just as dire.
Laying hens live in a cage, slightly smaller than an A4 piece of paper, with three to seven other chickens for their entire lives, and usually with untreated broken bones. Their introduction to life is to be debeaked, this is when the tip of their beaks, which is filled with nerves, are sliced off without any form of pain relief. Since this operation rarely heals completely, the chickens are constantly in a state of suffering and they often die from ulcers, infections and even sometimes starvation.
An egg laying hen's natural instincts include perching, roosting, being able to dust bathe or spread her wings, and the big one, lay her eggs in a nest. This instinct is so strong and the hens become so desperate that they sometimes nest in the rotting corpses of other chickens and lay their eggs in them.
Companies do a lot of other procedures to ensure the hens keep laying eggs outside of their natural cycle. Hens normally stop laying during Autumn to rest, but this period, seen as unproductive to the battery farmers, is changed. The chickens are instead starved in order to get them to start laying eggs again quickly, but not before many hens have already died from starvation. Another process is through artificial lighting that trick the hens into unnatural laying cycles. This weakens the hens body and many don't survive because of it.
Although chickens can live for up to 12 years, their egg laying starts to decline at 18 months, so they are sent off to their slaughter.
Male chicks don't feature in this article at all and there is a reason for this. Make chicks, scene as obsolete because they cannot lay eggs and they take too long to grow for meat, are killed when they are just one day old by being either gassed, suffocated or dropped into grinders whilst they are still alive. Half of all chicks born are male.
What people don't realise is that chickens have cognitive capacities that are the same as a primate's. They are intelligent and curious, and being couped up in a cage denies them their physical needs as well as their mental ones. This sort of treatment needs to be stopped.
These chickens never see the sunlight, never feel grass and never leave their shed where tens of thousands of other chickens are stuffed. These sheds are never cleaned so they spend their entire lives sitting in their own faeces and develop diseases from it.
The worst part is that these chickens die when they are literally still babies. They may be the size of fully grown chickens but they enter the slaughterhouse with their baby feathers, baby blue eyes and still cheeping away like chicks do.
For chickens who are used for laying eggs, the situation is just as dire.
Laying hens live in a cage, slightly smaller than an A4 piece of paper, with three to seven other chickens for their entire lives, and usually with untreated broken bones. Their introduction to life is to be debeaked, this is when the tip of their beaks, which is filled with nerves, are sliced off without any form of pain relief. Since this operation rarely heals completely, the chickens are constantly in a state of suffering and they often die from ulcers, infections and even sometimes starvation.
An egg laying hen's natural instincts include perching, roosting, being able to dust bathe or spread her wings, and the big one, lay her eggs in a nest. This instinct is so strong and the hens become so desperate that they sometimes nest in the rotting corpses of other chickens and lay their eggs in them.
Companies do a lot of other procedures to ensure the hens keep laying eggs outside of their natural cycle. Hens normally stop laying during Autumn to rest, but this period, seen as unproductive to the battery farmers, is changed. The chickens are instead starved in order to get them to start laying eggs again quickly, but not before many hens have already died from starvation. Another process is through artificial lighting that trick the hens into unnatural laying cycles. This weakens the hens body and many don't survive because of it.
Although chickens can live for up to 12 years, their egg laying starts to decline at 18 months, so they are sent off to their slaughter.
Male chicks don't feature in this article at all and there is a reason for this. Make chicks, scene as obsolete because they cannot lay eggs and they take too long to grow for meat, are killed when they are just one day old by being either gassed, suffocated or dropped into grinders whilst they are still alive. Half of all chicks born are male.
What people don't realise is that chickens have cognitive capacities that are the same as a primate's. They are intelligent and curious, and being couped up in a cage denies them their physical needs as well as their mental ones. This sort of treatment needs to be stopped.
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| Caged hens. Photo from Wikipedia |
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