The Underdog's Space

People in overcrowded jails or orphanages become aggressive towards each other. The lack of privacy, boredom, tension, fear of the future, bad food, constant pain and alien surroundings combine to produce violence. The same thing happens in poultries, piggeries and dairies where animals are pushed into tiny spaces till they die.

Chickens love gathering food, dust-bathing and exploring. When you crowd them into spaces in which they cannot move or lift their wings, they peck each other. A sensible way to deal with this would be to give the birds more room and natural surroundings. But the poultry industry would rather cut off their beaks. Debeaking is very painful, for the beak is composed of a dense mixture of blood vessels, connective tissues and nerves. It is like pulling out your nails with a pair of pliers. The Brambell government committee of veterinarians, established in 1960 that debeaking was extremely painful causing a hen’s heart rate “to increase 100 beats per minute,” and taking her heart “from six to 10 minutes” to calm down from the time of infliction. Researchers have recorded pain flashes from the beak stumps of debeaked birds for up to 90 days following mutilation.

Experiments to discover how much it hurts have been repeated using lakhs of birds and different ways of cutting, from partial to complete removal of the beak, using sheep shears, scissors, razor blades, lasers, hot blade debeaking machines, electronic trimmers, devices which burn a small hole through the upper beak so that it falls off after a few days to those that exposes the top beak of a bird to high-frequency radiation making the top beak fall off after two weeks. The conclusion after recording the effect on the birds’ behavior patterns, fearfulness, mortality, food intake, and body weight is that the birds have chronic extreme pain throughout their lives and cannot eat, drink or clean their feathers normally.

But every poultry does it. Is that all?

Intensively raised chickens suffer agonisingly from heat in the crowded buildings that they are imprisoned in. Rather than improve their living conditions, poultry researchers are trying to engineer birds who can stand prolonged intense heat. Heat tests on chickens range from the frightening to the absurd. Scientists at Alexandria University in Egypt put DNA from the heat-resistant bacteria Streptococcus agalactia into chicken eggs and then reared the chicks in a temperature of 25 degrees Celsius. No go as the birds showed tissue damage in their testes, liver, gizzard, heart, and spleen.

In May 2002, Hebrew University announced the creation of a featherless chicken, eliminating the need for cooling systems in poultry dens. Hebrew University says the research is “helping evolution”, as millions of years ago, human beings had fur. This is only one form of genetic engineering in chickens. There are hundreds of exercises being done by “scientists” to make the birds fit the poultry meat production demand, i.e., more meat/eggs produced cheaply by making chickens who eat less. As one poultry science meeting proclaimed in 1992, “We are no longer selling chickens, we are selling pieces. A knowledge of how broilers become pieces is increasingly important.”

Work is on all over the world to isolate genes of chickens that influence production traits such as feed efficiency, disease resistance and growth. The efforts to identify economically important genes in poultry are coordinated by the International Poultry Genome Workshop. The labs don’t even call them chickens any more. They are “oviduct bioreactors” and “meat” birds with economically favorable “agronomic traits”. The aim of the bioengineering programmes: “The whole idea of meat production is to get the time from chick to market weight down from 42 days to as brief a time as technically feasible. The days needed to raise a 35-pound broiler today is 38 percent less than it took in 1966, and today’s hens require about 33 percent fewer days to reach a 16-pound market weight. The yearly average body weight of 18-week-old males continued to rise from 1966 to 2001. Projecting this trend to the year 2010, they should easily achieve a live weight of over 35 pounds by 18 weeks of age.” — Growing Bigger, Faster, PoultryUSA, February 2002.

How is this being achieved? The global pharmaceutical company Merck, which under the name of Merial owns the largest shares of poultry breeding stock in the world, put cow growth hormones into chickens. In the early 1990s, Merck filed for a European patent on a “Macro Chicken” for a “transgenic fowl expressing bovine growth hormone”.

A fat-reducing gene is being isolated to insert into broiler chickens because their fast rapid growth has increased the number of fat cells in these birds. Genetic engineers want to make chickens grow larger, leaner and faster, and to change the shape and composition of their bodies to fit the “value-added,” deboned chicken parts market overtaking the traditional sale of whole birds.

Genetically manipulating a bird who would normally weigh a little more than a pound at six weeks old into a bird weighing four and a half or five pounds at this age (growing at a rate of three and a half times faster than normal) has created major disorders — 2 percent or more of these birds die of heart failure in their infancy; 30 percent of all broiler chickens are painfully lame. When given a choice between food with painkillers and regular food, all birds quickly identify the food with the painkillers and eat only that.

As a solution to problems associated with crowding in the poultry industry. Purdue University has suggested that chickens be blinded genetically as blind chickens, “don’t mind being crowded together so much as normal chickens do.”

Research is going on to get rid of their heads. Poultry industry predictions in The Baltimore Sun on the future of chicken and egg production will include birds “beheaded and hooked up en masse to industrial-scale versions of the heart-lung machines.” Since these birds won’t move, cages will be obsolete. Nutrients, hormones and metabolic stimulants will be fed “in superabundance into mechanically oxygenated blood to crank up egg production.” Since no digestive tract will be needed, “it can go when the head goes, along with the heart and lungs and the feathers, too. The naked headless, gutless chicken will crank out eggs till its ovaries burn out. When a sensor senses that no egg has dropped within the last four or six hours, the carcass will be released onto a conveyer, chopped, sliced, steamed and made into soup, burgers and dog food”.

Chicken and egg eaters: Are you proud of what is being done to satisfy your appetite?1

by Maneka Gandhi