Many of us choose to not think too much about where our food comes from and the food industry is quite happy to keep it that way. They will put pictures of happy animals on packaging, but to them animals are just a product.
I'm not including the horrific images directly in my post. These are our chickens who live a cosseted life and will not be killed off even when they stop laying.
Half of the chicks that are hatched will be male and they have no use to the egg industry. It seems they are less efficient to fatten for meat and so they are 'disposed of'. That disposal can consist of putting through a shredder, alive! This article contains video of this horrible process and it's for strong stomachs only. In some animal factories (they are not farms as we think of them) the chicks are gassed instead. For the companies it's a matter of economics.
I learned about this practice on The Guardian. A company called Seleggt has found a way to sex chicks before they hatch. They use a laser to extract a tiny amount of material from eggs at an early stage. The male eggs can be disposed of before they develop much. They are offering this technology to German hatcheries for free and the killing of day old chicks could be phased out there by 2020.
Is it any wonder many people are giving up animal-based foods? I do eat eggs, but they come almost entirely from our own chickens and so we know what went into their production. What I don't know is what process went on in the breeding of our chickens, but I'll be looking into this when the time comes to get more.
I think we should take more responsibility for how our food is produced and use our buying power to force changes. It may push prices up, but it's only through ruthless industries like this that prices have got so low.
Eat well.
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