Photo: Battery caged chicken on the day it was let out of its cage…and the same chicken three months later after enjoying life as a free range chicken.

Conventional vs. Free Range Chicken: Before & After Photos.

You don’t have to be Vegan to care about this here Chicken.

8 billion a year are eaten in the United States. http://www.ansc.purdue.edu/faen/poultry%20facts.html

Unfortunately, unless we’re vegan, we’re still directly killing chicks. Even if you’re vegetarian, or eat free range or local:

For further reading:

If you’re Vegetarian, you aren’t Vegetarian.

Virtually all hens in commercial egg operations—whether cage or cage-free—come from hatcheries that kill all male chicks shortly after hatching. The males are of no use to the egg industry because they don’t lay eggs and aren’t bred to grow as large or as rapidly as chickens used in the meat industry. Common methods of killing male chicks include suffocation, gassing and grinding. Hundreds of millions of male chicks are killed at hatcheries each year in the United States.

Well-educated comments:

Well, first people should realize that this is not the majority of farms even of those with “humane” or “free range” labeling.

But more than that, there is no humane way to kill a young (and meat animals are all juveniles) animal who does not want to die. They feel love and pleasure and only want to live. What’s more, all slaughter techniques have a failure rate, and therefore all slaughter houses have a person whose job it is to kill the terrified animals who didn’t die like they were supposed to. TJ Tumasse is an under cover investigator and he describes what that job is like.

Of course there are other indignities. Farmers claim that piglets hardly notice when they are castrated without anesthetic. Of course that’s not true. However, it’s the kind of claim people make because pigs can’t talk back. It’s not fair, they are not things.Piglets play and love like dogs.

Further, animals aren’t inherently that stinky. Yes, their shit stinks, but they don’t want to live in stink any more than we do, and while there is no way to run a farm without at least having enough animals that it stinks, it’s already closer packed than those animals would choose if they could.

 

Another: