New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof is a 2-time Pulitzer Prize winner. He also grew up on a farm in Yamhill Oregon, and often refers to that background when relevant in his writing. It is today, as you can read here
Today he writes about agribusiness, specifically, about a farmer who raises chickens for Perdue who had an attack of conscience after watching an ad of Jim Perdue talking about raising chickens "humanely" - and notes
The company’s labels carry a seal of approval from the Department of Agriculture asserting that the bird was “raised cage free,” and sometimes “humanely raised,” although it says it is phasing that one out.
Such labels appeal to many customers. Except, as farmer Craig Watts of NC, whose family has been on its farm since the 1700s and who has raised chickens for Perdue for more than two decades knows, the labels are not really true.
Watts allowed an organization to film in his chicken shed. Compassion in World Farming, which describes itself as "The world's leading farm animal welfare organization," has this video up, but I warn you that you will probably not want to watch it just after eating, or just before you plan to eat.
This is the context in which Kristof wrote this column, about which I continue below.
Kristof has watched the video. He writes
Most shocking is that the bellies of nearly all the chickens have lost their feathers and are raw, angry, red flesh. The entire underside of almost every chicken is a huge, continuous bedsore. As a farmboy who raised small flocks of chickens and geese, I never saw anything like that.
He tells us part of the problem with factory farming is how we breed animals to produce more meat. Thus in the case of chickens, where consumer want more breast meat, they are not merely too heavy for their own legs, a fact from an industry magazine should grab your attention:
if humans grew at the same rate as modern chickens, a human would weigh 660 pounds by the age of eight weeks.
Imagine that for a moment. Then read the words that follow in Kristof's column:
These chickens don’t run around or roost as birds normally do. They stagger a few steps, often on misshapen legs, and then collapse onto the excrement of tens of thousands of previous birds. It is laden with stinging ammonia that seems to eat away at feathers and skin.
Watts follows corporate instructions in how he raises his chickens. The methods are apparently acceptable to the US Department of Agriculture. Yet we can be mislead by advertising:
The claim about the chickens being raised “cage free” is misleading because birds raised for meat are not in cages. It’s egg-laying chickens that are caged, not the ones we eat. So “cage free” is meaningful for eggs but not for chicken meat. Moreover, Perdue’s chickens are crammed so tightly in barns that they might as well be in cages. Each bird on the Watts farm gets just two-thirds of a square foot.
When you consider that 2/3 of a square foot, remember the engineering of the chickens for more breast meat, and their inability to move as ordinary chickens.
We as consumers are in part responsible, so long as we are driven primarily by price. Factory farming has benefited us - as Kristof notes, the price of chicken in real (constant money) terms has dropped by 3/4 since 1930, but that ignores what economists would call externalities, in this case anitbiotic resistance and water pollution,
as well as a routine cruelty that we tolerate only because it is mostly hidden.
Joseph Stalin is reported to have once said to US Ambassador Averill Harriman that "The death of one man is a tragedy, the death of millions is a statistic." I thought of those words as I read Kristof's penultimate paragraph:
Torture a single chicken and you risk arrest. Abuse hundreds of thousands of chickens for their entire lives? That’s agribusiness.
I suspect that most Americans will continue to eat meat. My wife is now, mainly for health reasons, largely a Vegan. I have almost completely stopped eating meat and poultry as part of lifetstyle changes made when I began yoga almost a year ago. After reading this article, I think I am even less inclined to eat meat and poultry.
And were I in doubt, Kristof's final words would certainly have an impact upon my thinking. Perhaps they will on yours:
I don’t know where to draw the lines. But when chickens have huge open bedsores on their undersides, I wonder if that isn’t less animal husbandry than animal abuse.