In the News
Consumer choice can alter the fate of chickens
8 April 2010
THE soft, white thwacks on my windscreen made me wince. An eye peered out - a chicken flying down the highway at 100km/h looked my way as it and its fellower travellers lost feathers in the wind.
A truckload of poultry was packed up tight on its way to market and I was uncomfortable in its wake. Faced with the reality that those month-old, meaty birds sharing my piece of road today would be wrapped in plastic for consumers like me by the day’s end made me squirm.
It is not much of a life – and we have the power to change it.
The RSPCA in Queensland has had enough, believing the standards meat chooks live by in this state are not humane. They are campaigning now to get them changed.
Meat birds are packed in sheds with poor lighting and little fresh air. They grow at an incredible rate and suffer deformities and injuries as a result. They can’t scratch or bustle about, as chooks are wont to do, often turning on each other out of boredom or having to battle to reach food and water.
Then they are collected up by the upside-down handful, scared and stressed as they fill little trays in impossible numbers on the long road to a death that is not always swift or quiet.
Such sad lives are not really the chook farmers’ fault – they are just following approved practices and most do nothing wrong under the Queensland Government Animal Care and Protection Act 2001. But a lot has changed in ten years. Society’s expectations have shifted and the industry’s code of practice under the Act no longer reflect community expectations or standards.
Changing it partly boils down to shopping with a conscience. It is a matter of feeling good about what we buy and use.
Where once we used plastic bags, and bought fur coats and coffee beans picked by slave labour, many of us now do not. Such things no longer sit comfortably.
We are conscious of the part a single consumer can play and the power of the collective, so we choose other products where the environmental or humanitarian price is not so high.
But the treatment of chooks – surprisingly smart and social critters – has somehow escaped our critical, collective gaze. Some inroads have been made to increase demand for free range eggs, but cage eggs are still many shoppers’ default choice.
Maybe we just don’t think of chooks as regular animals with a right to a decent life and a humane death. Maybe we just love eating them so much that we don’t want to fully consider their lot.
Chicken has become our nation’s default meat staple of choice. More than 470 million chicken give their lives to satisfy our hunger for white meat every year, with every person devouring more than 35kg of the stuff.
I am not suggesting we should all be vegetarian or pick up our placards and march for animal rights. But surely our society is advanced enough to applying a conscience to what we buy and eat, and how we treat living things, especially when the information is available.
You can be passionate about animal welfare and eat meat. You just need to choose the right kind – free-range or organic, where comfortable living conditions are assured. At the moment, only 4 per cent of chicken meat in Queensland is from chooks who were natural, free and healthy.
Chef Hugh Fearnley-Wittingstall’s My River Cottage TV series in the United Kingdom made inroads into meat chook welfare awareness through his Chicken Out campaign. Organic and free-range chickens now account for up to 20 per cent of the UK market, doubling the market share that existed before the series went to air last year. High profile supporters like Jamie Oliver and Joanna Lumley have helped the cause.
It seems simple enough. Shop deliberately. Choose meat from birds that were allowed to scratch and live the chicken-y life.
Ethical consumption is the morally right thing to do, and it also has a kick-on effect of making better-tasting food. The RSPCA is running a 35-day challenge, asking that consumers give free-range and organic chicken a go for a month or so and see if it tastes better.
Every time a chicken that has been lived and died humanely – and was given the chance to act like a chicken – is bought in a supermarket, the merchants must take note. Public pressure to stock some free range and organic meat sees some available now at most supermarkets. The challenge is to make that proportion grow.
The RSPCA is also promoting an e-petition, asking the government to strengthen the industry codes of practice under the Animal Care and Protection Act, through its ‘chicken rights, farming wrongs’ campaign.
In this era, what consumers want is what they get and in this case, chicken lives can be better if we make better choices. Choosing humane over barbaric is a no-brainer.
Back to latest news.