The Ethical Carnivore by Louise Gray

Author:Louise Gray
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

In Britain we eat 15 million chickens a week. Have you ever wondered where they all are? There are certainly not millions of chickens scratching around in the open countryside. In the old days, you would at least see them transported in trucks, head and feathers peeping out the side of crates loaded onto lorries.

Mary McCartney recalled why her parents Paul and Linda McCartney became vegetarians. ‘They’d been driving behind a lorry that had lots and lots of chickens crammed into it and obviously between the two of them they thought, “That’s not right.” I think Mum even took a picture of it …’ she told the Guardian in 2010. I’d like to see that photo from the McCartney archive. I imagine Paul and Linda with their 1980s mullets, discussing it as they drove along with their young children in the back, and the more they spoke, the more uncomfortable they became.

Nowadays you would only see articulated lorries loaded with chickens if you knew what to look out for. They usually carry 6,000 or so chickens in blue or yellow crates. In wet weather there will be tarpaulin on the side. Perhaps you went past one the other day on the motorway?

What about the chicken farms themselves? As Ruth Harrison pointed out, they are no longer the pictures in storybooks we show our children, but a ‘straggling factory’ of long windowless barns with conical feed hoppers at the end. Around 95 per cent of the chickens we eat in this country are barn reared. Just 4.5 per cent are free-range and 0.5 per cent organic. There are around 2,500 poultry farmers, some small, some ‘poultry magnates’. Around half are independent businesses that sell the birds to a processor, and half are contracted, or owned by the company in the more American ‘vertical integration’ style.

The chickens are usually from breed stock owned by two companies – Cobb in the USA or Aviagen in Europe. These companies have invested millions into developing the modern birds, directly descended from those competition winners in the 1930s. The only trouble is, birds designed to fly have weak bones and tend to topple over under the weight of their own huge breasts, a condition known as ‘going off their legs’. Breeders claim this problem has been solved, but animal welfare experts are still unhappy with many of the breeds still used. The most common type in the UK is the Ross 308, a white bird with the ubiquitous big breasts.

The need for the birds to grow fast means that there are serious welfare concerns with breeding. The parent birds cannot be fed too much because they are genetically predisposed to build up flesh, so they are kept hungry most of the time to keep them lean enough to breed. Chicks arrive from hatcheries in the UK at a few days old and then are put into sheds lined with fresh sawdust. The flooring stays the same the whole time they are there, between 30 and 50 days.

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