Here's the quote that gets to me: “I never felt comfortable showing people that part of our operation [where chickens are killed],” Mr. Pitman [of Mary's Chickens] said. “I was embarrassed by it.”
I certainly agree that we should be employing best practices in the slaughter of food animals. But it seems to me the "stress-free" environment they aim to create is as much for the purpose of their public image as it is for the well-being of the birds. Is the process of sedation stunning going to become a universally-required practice, decrease our meat intake, slow demand for chicken, cut the profit margin? I doubt it. Unfortunately, to change the system we need a lot more from innovators than humane slaughtering practices.
I guess it's a start to anesthetize 140,000 chickens a week before we hang them upside down, slit their throats and let them bleed to death. But according to this article, Tyson "processes" over 1 million chickens a week.
If you don't mind my asking, what else would you do with them? These are animals that have had every defense mechanism carefully bred out of them with painstaking care; they can't survive on their own. Forgive my presumption, but given that the most obvious alternative for them is extinction, it seems like we're taking the least-cruel option available. [I'm not arguing that our particular practices are the least cruel possible, merely that the keeping chickens around to eat them is less cruel than turning them into another Kakapo]
ReplyDeleteAs a separate issue "...it seems to me the "stress-free" environment they aim to create is as much for the purpose of their public image as it is for the well-being of the birds." If I understand you correctly, you're implying that this is a bad thing; but isn't this just a case of morality and financial incentives lining up? Given the nature of corporations, this seems like it's both the best you can hope for and in a practical sense all you could possibly get(assuming (1) corporations are non-moral impersonal profit-making machines and (2) that your problem with their action lies in their intent and not the physical details of the slaughter itself. I don't know terribly much about slaughterhouses; I'd bet that even with the changes the could be less cruel, but if I understand you correctly it seems like you're faulting them not so much for failing to completely minimize cruelty so much as for failing to want to minimize cruelty)
just to be clear, I don't mean to trivialize the suffering of those beings, or to imply that corporations aren't in a general sort of way mind-numbingly evil, it just seems to me that there really aren't any big-picture better options.
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