News Good Essay from Vox's Future Perfect

Lou

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More and more I like the Vox news service. I subscribe to a few of Vox's podcasts including Future Perfect. And I also get the Future Perfect's newsletter in my mailbox. Today I got this cool essay. If I could I would post a link to it but it seems to only exist as a newsletter. So i'm just going to copy and paste it here.
BTW. Future Perfect's next podcast will be about beef. I'll let you know when it comes out and also after I've heard it.

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Being a chicken on a factory farm is pretty awful.
Some of the reasons why are obvious. Farms pack chickens in tightly to maximize profits, so a chicken in captivity has very little space and is surrounded by a sea of other chickens.
There isn’t dirt to peck in or root into; instead, they walk through their own waste, and the entire warehouse smells very strongly of ammonia from all the chicken poop.
There’s no sky or fresh air — even farms that claim birds have “access to the outdoors” often pack tens of thousands of birds into a warehouse that has a tiny yard that can fit a dozen of them.
In principle, we could fix all of those things, and movements to create more humane conditions on factory farms are working on it. We could require less restrictive cages, more space, a reasonable number of cagemates, dietary variety, and genuine access to the outdoors.
But the awfulness of life as a chicken in a factory farm is much deeper than that. For decades, we’ve been breeding chickens to be maximally economically efficient, which mostly means that we raise them quickly, and to be much, much meatier. And it turns out that this causes agonizing chronic pain, joint and movement problems, and other issues — even if you try to give the birds good living conditions.
That’s the finding of a recent two-year study from the University of Guelph that looked at more than 7,500 broiler chickens from 16 different genetic strains. It found that the fast-growing chicken varieties common on factory farms have tons of health problems that mean that, even in an ideal environment, they experience a lot of suffering.
Since they grow so quickly, it’s hard for them to move, and they spend much of their time immobile. They develop painful lesions and foot injuries. The birds that grow fastest had signs of heart and lung problems.
What does this mean? Well, the most important takeaway is that we can’t just hope to prevent animal cruelty on factory farms by requiring good conditions for animals (though we should do that!).
We also need to have rules about which varieties of animals are bred and raised for food in the first place. Strains that have been aggressively selected to grow incredibly fast will likely be in constant pain, while it’s easier to provide a humane environment for slower-growing birds. (It should be noted that there are some trade-offs here too — if we switch to raising birds that are a little smaller, even more of them will have short, difficult lives and be killed for food to produce the same amount of meat.)
In the long run, I hope that we can meet the world’s demand for chicken without killing any birds at all — through plant-based or cell-grown meat options. But a problem as serious as the torture of tens of billions of animals a year ought to be tackled from as many angles as possible. Figuring out what animals are possible to raise humanely — and which experience intense pain even in good environments — is an important step toward making life a little better for birds on factory farms. Hand-in-hand with efforts to ban cruel treatment of animals on those farms, it might much reduce the humane cost of our appetite for meat.
One last note: Like lots of people, I find it hard to empathize with chickens. The body language of dogs is familiar to most of us; when they’re in pain, we can see it and understand it. Chickens are much more different. When I read animal welfare papers that focus on animals that are so profoundly different from me, I’m always struck by how much effort they put into measuring suffering or comfort.
It’s a moving reminder that animals do feel, and suffer, and have complex preferences for enrichment and exploration and security and company, even if their emotions are hard for me to interpret. Animal behavioral science is always a great place to go for a reminder that minds very different from ours live, and breathe, and matter, right alongside us.
—Kelsey Piper, @kelseytuoc
I think I fixed the links so that they would work. Of course, the best answer is "just stop buying chicken". but I'm glad to see that some people besides vegans are recognizing the problem.​
 
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