Fowl Treatment

Category: Health News

Shame On The Chicken/Egg Industry

`How many people ever ask themselves what lies behind those eggs they so easily lift off the supermarket shelf and place in their shopping trolley? Contrary to what advertisements would have us believe, the truth reads like a horror story.

Facts:

`¤ The egg industry in this country (South Africa) incubator-hatches millions of chicks each year to maintain it’s stock of laying hens.

`¤ Millions of newly hatched rooster chicks, useless to the egg industry, are suffocated to death in garbage disposal bags and thrown on the rubbish dump or used as animal food by crocodile farms, snake parks etc. On the day the incubator is cleaned, all un-hatched eggs, whether they contain live chicks or not, eggs in which the chicks are starting to hatch and hatched chicks which are unable to get to their feet, are also dumped into garbage bags or dustbins and left to die.

`¤ Hen chicks are de-beaked with a red hot blade at about 12 days so that as adults, confined in cramped, all-wire cages with other laying hens, they are not able to inflict serious harm on each other as they fight to relieve their frustration at being unable to move about freely, or even stretch their wings. Sometimes even their toes are amputated.

`¤ From the age of 21 weeks, laying hens spend their lives cramped into minute wire battery cages, the space size is 25% less than an A4 size sheet of paper per bird, never able to peck or scratch in the dirt, never able to dust bath, prevented from forming social structures, not allowed to incubate their eggs, denied access to sunlight and open space.

`¤ The battery hen lays an egg each day for approximately 270 days. After this, she is sold to a hawker as a cull chicken and is then sold on the open market for home slaughter. The conditions under which cull chickens are transported by hawkers are often nothing short of disgusting. After being manhandled they are transported tied at the feet.

`The next time you see a fluffy little chick for sale in a pet shop, think of the millions just like it which gasped their final breath in the stifling confines of a plastic garbage bag and the next time you need eggs, go to a little trouble, and perhaps a little extra expense, to find free-range eggs and know that you are not supporting the barbaric battery egg industry which incarcerates millions of hens in minute wire prisons.

What You Can Do!

`Find a local free-range egg supplier in your area and promote a cruelty free lifestyle.

`The National Council of SPCA is opposed to:

`The battery cage system for egg production, or variations of that system which do not fulfill the health and welfare needs of the hen.

`The Council is in favour of systems in which the welfare of the bird is fully protected and in which a nest, scratching/dust-bathing areas and a perch are provided, and that a stocking density and colony size appropriate for the needs of the hens is maintained.’ (KZN Focus, Page 4, October 1999)

Ed. So much for the poor chickens – but what about the health of those who use these inferior eggs, and those who eat these chickens?

 

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