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Chicken Matters

You don't have to be a vegetarian to understand the importance of animal welfare. As a carnivorous person myself, I have to put up with the fact that animals have to die. Nevertheless, it matters about animal welfare, and it's best if the animal's life is reasonably good for quite a while before it ends up being eaten.

Chickens are a particularly notable example of an animal that can be produced in conditions of varying degrees of appallingness, and then sold on to the meat-eating public without folks ever knowing what a shocking life the chicken had to endure, and yet it's also possible to produce chickens humanely. Can you taste the difference?!

Chickens are also of note in that they produce another popular food product: EGGS. When you buy wine, you might ask what the vintage is, but when you buy eggs, it's worth asking what conditions the chickens lived in when they produced those eggs.

This whole issue of chicken welfare was raised in 2007 in some high-profile campaigns by celebrity chefs including Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall and Jamie Oliver. The essence of these campaigns was to make people aware of the conditions in which chickens were kept, so then people could make informed decisions about what to eat, rather than allowing the factory-farming industry to hide the shocking truth.

It's interesting, because it's not a preaching campaign to get people to sign up to vegetarianism, but is more a matter of making an informed choice. If your view is "I don't care about animal welfare", well, you should at least know what conditions battery hens are kept in, and if you still have the same view, then at least you're consistent rather than hypocritical. Another way to put it is: "Would you eat those eggs if you knew the conditions of the chickens that laid them?". This has been put to the test, and quite a lot of people who previously hadn't really thought about chickens and eggs suddenly decided they'd rather go for free range now they knew the truth! It's like a poultry variant of Soylent Green!

Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall found that no-one would let him film in a battery chicken farm, so he set up his own! He had intensively farmed chickens crammed into a chickenhouse, and in another area the more humanely farmed BARN chickens, and on another plot some actual free range chickens. The programme "Hugh's Chicken Run" was a remarkable insight into what goes on in chicken production, and quite a lot of people decided after seeing it that they'd buy free range or barn in preference to intensively-farmed, if they could afford it.

Indeed, if you think about it, it's a bit much having 17 chickens per square metre, and them only living 39 days.

More about this at www.rivercottage.net and www.chickenout.tv

Jamie Oliver took a different approach and killed a chicken on stage. This made it on the news, as if chickens are never killed! The show, "Jamie's Fowl Dinners" had people at dinner tables about to be served chicken seeing for themselves the processes involved in producing the chicken, from when it was hatched to when it was killed. If anyone wants to make a big fuss about the on-stage death of a chicken, or the gassing of cute fluffy chicks, or the chickens crammed into cages, it would be more appropriate that they make a fuss about the widespread industry of chicken factory farming as a whole rather than grumble about Jamie Oliver slaughtering a few critters on stage to demonstrate to folks the things that go on.

So, there it is, meat-eating without hypocrisy.

Looking at the shops, eggs are clearly marked "free range", "barn eggs", or "caged hen eggs". You can decide before you buy. You can even do experiments at home to see if you can taste the difference.

Anyway, why are free range eggs so expensive? It would be understandable if they were 10% dearer or 20% dearer, but they are currently, (2008), two and a half times the price! This suggests there is something funny going on. Can it be the market is rigged to keep factory farming in business?

One way you can get free range eggs without paying much for them is to keep your own chickens. You keep them on the garden, not in a hamster cage.

In a supermarket, the eggs are clearly marked, but what about the chickens? Can you get a free range chicken to roast for the Sunday Lunch? Oddly, the chickens are sometimes not as clearly marked, and in some places they're not marked at all because ALL of the chickens are factory farmed. However it's still worth asking, which indicates to the management that there is a huge demand for free range chicken!

Restaurants advertising "free range chicken" on the menu are onto a good thing, because the cost of the meat is only a small component of the total on the bill. Free range chicken sells much better and it is a good marketable point. "It's finger-lickin' good!" is a trademark of Kentucky Fried Chicken, whereas "Free range chicken here!" is a freely usable open-source good marketing point which any restaurant can use provided the chicken on sale is genuinely free range.

Organic or Free Range?: There is a difference, and generally something can't be both organic and free range. "Organic" means it's approved by the Soil Association, and the animal has to be fed exclusively on stuff which has no contaminants. In practice that can mean it's fed on stuff that looks a bit like dry dog food. The advantage of this is that various unusual things are eliminated from getting into the animal. In contrast, "Free Range" means the animal has some freedom to move about. Free range chickens tend to peck around a farmyard, and that means they pick up all sorts of stuff including trace elements. I have anecdotal evidence to suggest that eating free range chicken can produce a healthier state of mind where thinking works better. It would be interesting to do some scientific experiments to see if that is true or just imagined. Regardless of which it is, I'd guess people eating free range chicken in restaurants would believe they would feel better.

Other chicken-related items: chicken hypnosis , and Lucies Farm (where free range eggs are produced). Chicken image copyright World Vision, a charity where you can buy gifts for your friends resulting in chickens being donated to the Third World, (where they will be free range, nodoubt).

Also see Compassion in World Farming

Some of the eggs at Iceland are free range, and ALL of the eggs at Marks and Spencer are free range!