Next time you eat chicken......

[Ed62]

consider where they came from, and how they're kept. Here's a pic of a large production farm. When I see stuff like this, I want to stop eating meat.

Ed

[ironhat]

If you ever saw a battery of egg-laying chickens where they can't even turn around without a struggle, Ed, you would gived up eggs as well!

[cabinetman]

If you ever saw a battery of egg-laying chickens where they can't even turn around without a struggle, Ed, you would gived up eggs as well!

How much room does a chicken need to lay an egg?
.

[Cochese]

Looks tasty.

[Ed62]

If you ever saw a battery of egg-laying chickens where they can't even turn around without a struggle, Ed, you would gived up eggs as well!

Nope. You buy your own chickens. Here's a pic of the layers. That's their whole life.

Ed

[dkerfoot]

Here's a pic of the layers. That's their whole life.
[ATTACH]16175[/ATTACH]

The one in the center is a Trustee.

[chopnhack]

Sad, truly, but think of it from the other stand point, do you realize how much chicken is consumed in the world? Someone recently posted a clock/calculator of all such things and it showed how many billions of chickens are consumed yearly. Now imagine if we gave each chicken a free range habitat of just one square meter..... It's hard to realize sometimes, but that is one of the necessary evils to feed so many people on the planet, especially the omnivorous obese segment. There are some people that consume in a day what should be their target goal for the week!

[Cochese]

The one in the center is a Trustee.

Who's the beneficiary?

[dbhost]

Who's the beneficiary?

Most likely this guy... Okay at least the company he started...

Image source: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedi...nd_Sanders.jpg

[BigguyZ]

I suggest you all watch Food, Inc. It's a great documentary, and it talks about the modernization of farming. A lot of it is pushed by the 3 main buyers of chicken, like Tyson.

[cabinetman]

A man was driving along a rural road one day when he saw a three legged chicken running down the road. He was amused enough to drive along side it for a while, as he was driving he noticed the chicken was running 30 mph.
Pretty fast chicken, he thought, I wonder just how fast it can run. So he sped up and the chicken did too! They were now moving along the road at 45 mph!


The man in the car sped up again, to his surprise the chicken was still running ahead of him at 60 mph!!!
Suddenly the chicken turned off the road and ran down a long driveway leading to a farmhouse. The man followed the chicken to the house and saw a farmer in the yard with dozens of chickens, and they all had three legs.



The man in the car called out to the farmer "How did you get all these three legged chickens?"
The farmer replied, "I breed 'em. Ya see it's me, my wife and my son living here and we all like to eat chicken legs. Since a chicken only has two legs, I started breeding this three legged variety so we could all eat our favorite piece."


"That's amazing!" said the driver "How do they taste?"
"Don't rightly know, I ain't caught one yet!"
.

[natausch]

Its okay, most "chicken" is actually just random parts, bone, beaks, etc.

It really makes you think exactly how precarious our food situation has become. Example, most turkey and chicken are produced by a handful of mega-farms. An incident (Sanitation, natural disaster, terrorists, etc) at just one of these could disrupt a major portion of our food supply.

In fact, any major disruption of our transportation network and we're all looking at our neighbor's terrier as tomorrow's meal.

[Cochese]

Most likely this guy... Okay at least the company he started...

Image source: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedi...nd_Sanders.jpg

Oh I hated the Colonel, with his wee, beady eyes...and that smug look on his face - 'Oh, you're gonna buy my chicken! Ohhhh'

[Shep]

We've got some mega farms around here. They do serve a purpose. People want cheap food available 24/7. You have to have a large supply to feed everyone. Birds are nasty anyways. These buildings they keep them in are huge. I can only imagine how big they would have to be if more space had to be available for the birds.

Any large farm has issues like that; however, all farmers want their animals to be healthy. Healthy animals equal more $. Sure, it may seem like birds or other animals don't have enough room to us, but to them there's plenty. I raised pigs growing up and we had a large pen for our 4-5 hogs we would take to the fair. Most of the time they would sleep right next to each other. We could have made their pen smaller and they would have still been happy.

Just my $.02 from being raised on a farm.

[Tom Slick]

They still look tasty to me! I'll take the third one on the left, fry 'em up.

You probably won't believe this but chickens are canibals and when they are in semi-confined spaces they "hen peck" the weakest in the group and kill it. By confining them to a tighter space they have less injuries and less disease because they can't move around as much.