Wednesday, February 23, 2011

chickens coming home to roost

The WSM is not necessarily a movement to advance vegetarianism. Some socialists are vegetarians, but others are not. We have never seen a reason to take a stand on this issue as a party, however strongly some individual members may feel. But this does not stop some socialists responding to the cruelty that the profit system inflicts on the vast majority by becoming vegetarian or vegan.

No creature has been optimized and exploited for mass production as much as the chicken. The barns are largely automated -- a single worker now handles 100,000 animals. Fifty years ago, it took two months until a chicken was ready to be slaughtered, at a weight of about one kilogram (2.2 pounds). Today's chicken, housed in a gigantic, constantly illuminated barn, needs only 33 days to eat its way to a slaughter weight of 1.6 kilograms (3.5 pounds). It has been bred to no longer feel satiated. Its flesh grows faster than its bones, which often fail under the weight of the modern turbo-chicken. By the end of this manic fattening period, many animals, turkeys and broilers alike, can hardly stand up anymore. Walking to the feed or water trough is torture, and many chickens are in constant pain from blisters on their breasts, fractured bones, chemical burns on the balls of their feet and wounds inflicted by the beaks of other birds. The industry, however, doesn't necessarily need healthy animals. Business is just as profitable with sick ones. More than 50 billion birds a year are produced in industrial poultry hatcheries worldwide. A slaughterhouse is having built in Wietze near Celle in north-central Germany, which will have the capacity to slaughter 27,000 chickens -- an hour. With an annual capacity of 135 million birds, the slaughterhouse will be Europe's largest. The major players, like Wiesenhof and Heidemark, are more or less fully integrated. They own everything from breeding operations to feed producers, chick production and broiler fattening facilities, slaughterhouses and processing plants. PHW/Wiesenhof even makes its own vaccines.

In the past, a chicken could easily live to the age of 15 years. They were robust and adaptable, and they ate whatever fell to the ground. Romans treated the chicken as an oracle, the Teutons used chickens as funerary objects, and they served as emergency food reserves on ships. Even old breeds like the crested red laid eggs, about 36 a year. Today's laying hens produce about 300 eggs a year, no matter how poorly they are treated. "They simply lay until they drop dead," says a veterinarian working for a state regulatory agency. Laying hens are killed after one year. For the industry, it's cheaper to start over again with new animals. The genetic makeup of the animals was thoroughly manipulated. Of the hundreds of chicken breeds that once existed, only a handful of hybrid varieties dominate the market today. Attempts to liberate these broilers and allow them to continue living on farms have been miserable failures, with many of the over-bred birds dying of heart attacks within weeks. Even an internal Lohmann memo admits that this genetic depletion and lack of fitness is "a critical issue." Between 1935 and 1995, the average weight of a fattened chicken increased by 65 percent, while its average life span declined by 60 percent. "These animals are so degenerated that even daylight is a stress factor for them," says veterinarian and author Anita Idel.

Although the individual farmers are theoretically independent, they are in fact nothing but wage earners. They buy chicks for about €0.20 apiece, and when they sell the chickens to Wiesenhof and other processors, they are paid about €0.95 a kilo. When the investment in the barn and the costs of feed, energy and veterinary services are deducted, the chicken farmer is left with little if any profit. To make matters worse, in this system the farmer bears the risks of epidemics and disease.

The rise in demand for ‘cruelty-free’ products in Western countries shows that, given the luxury of choice, people prefer not to be responsible for inflicting such suffering.
No reasonable person today really questions the fact that animals, or at least farmed animals, are capable of fear and pain. Most people do not visit abattoirs nor do they really want to know what goes on in them, yet there is an unspoken knowledge behind the sterile and sanitized supermarket packaging. As the Nobel Prize winning writer Isaac Bashevis Singer put it in The Letter Writer speaking of factory farming: "In relation to animals all people are Nazis; for the animals, it is an eternal Treblinka."

It is perfectly possible that a socialist society would involve less eating of meat and eggs, and any animals kept for food purposes would certainly be treated as humanely as possible. To-day, the consumer pays the price by having to buy meat that tastes of nothing. "Anything that grows so quickly simply doesn't have much flavor, so you just have to add plenty of seasoning," says Wilhelm Hoffrogge, chief lobbyist for the umbrella association of the German poultry industry.

From Der Spiegel

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