{"id":3090,"date":"2013-12-10T18:10:00","date_gmt":"2013-12-10T18:10:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/farmforward1.wpengine.com\/?p=3090"},"modified":"2022-11-09T18:28:58","modified_gmt":"2022-11-09T18:28:58","slug":"anything-goes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.farmforward.com\/news\/anything-goes\/","title":{"rendered":"Anything Goes"},"content":{"rendered":"\t
\n\t\t
\n\t\t\t
\n\t\t\t\t
\n\t\t\t\t\t

What the Hummer is to fuel efficiency, poultry is to animal welfare. No food in the nation produces more suffering than poultry. Factory farming had its beginnings in the poultry industry in the 1920s, and no other industry has been so altered by its methods and logic.<\/p>\n

To make matters worse, birds raised for meat have absolutely no protection under the law. The Humane Methods of Slaughter Act is the only piece of federal legislation that offers protection to farmed animals at slaughter, and chickens and turkeys are formally excluded from the law. As a result, while cows and pigs must be rendered unconscious before they are slaughtered, it\u2019s legal\u2014in fact it is the common practice\u2014to paralyze birds and slaughter them while they are still conscious. This is true not only for factory farmed birds, but also for birds correctly labelled free range, organic, and even pasture raised.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s also perfectly legal to starve birds, cut off their sensitive beaks, and confine them for their entire lives in spaces so small they can never stretch their wings. And there are currently no laws in place to prevent corporations from genetically engineering birds any way they like\u2014regardless of the cost to the animals\u2019 wellbeing.<\/p>\n

Today\u2019s commercially available chickens, for example, are virtually all\u00a0genetic hybrids<\/a>.1<\/a> Most all of these birds grow three times as fast on a third of the feed when compared to heritage breeds. Imagine a child reaching adult size by age 7 while only eating lunch. The physiological effects of this rapid growth are devastating. The Defra-funded study2<\/a> of 51,000 chickens intensively bred specifically for their meat, found that at about 40 days old 27.6 percent exhibited \u201cpoor locomotion\u201d with 3.3 percent of the chickens not being able to walk at all.<\/p>\n

\u201cHeritage\u201d is the name give to the standard-bred chicken and turkey breeds that pre-date the rise of industrial agriculture. True heritage chickens will meet the American Poultry Association\u2019s (APA)\u00a0Standards of Perfection<\/em> and have three main characteristics. Heritage chickens mate naturally; they live long, productive lives; and they grow at a normal rate.3<\/a> If a chicken product doesn\u2019t come from a standard-bred chicken, odds are greater than 99 percent that the chicken grew at an accelerated growth rate that had catastrophic effects on the birds\u2019 health. Even more disturbing is the genetic engineering of today\u2019s turkeys, who can no longer fly, walk normally, or reproduce sexually.<\/p>\n

The extreme modification of chickens\u2019 genetics may be causing health problems not only in chickens, but in the people who eat them. Historically, chickens were relatively lean and contained more protein than fat, but a recent study4<\/a> suggest that they are now made up more of fat than protein. From 1870 to 2004 the fat content of commercially available chickens has increased 5-fold, while their protein content has shrunk by 25 percent.5<\/a><\/p>\n

When it comes to poultry, anything goes.<\/p>\n

Sign up\u00a0for the Farm Forward newsletter to receive updates and important information about how you can get involved.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t<\/section>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Chickens, while\u00a0sentient and with individual personalities, have been genetically modified solely for higher meat yields. Learn more here.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[25,20],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3090","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-genetic-modification","category-animal-welfare"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.farmforward.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3090","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.farmforward.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.farmforward.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.farmforward.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/8"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.farmforward.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3090"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.farmforward.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3090\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.farmforward.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3090"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.farmforward.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3090"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.farmforward.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3090"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}