| If you haven't seen the video of baby male chicks getting ground up yet, well... I can't say I recommend it. But, if you must, you can watch it at the link. The reason these birds are discarded is because they are male and thus unable to lay eggs. The question many ask when they see this is: Why don't they raise the birds for meat?
The sad truth is: money. In The Omnivore's Dilemma, Michael Pollan refers to the Cornish Cross (a breed of chicken) as the fastest converter of corn to breast meat. Similarly, one can call the White Leghorn the fastest converter of corn to eggs. One breed for meat, one breed for eggs, and the chicken industry doesn't have use for any other breeds of chickens.
The chicken industry is so "efficient" in fact, that the slaughter process is mostly mechanized, as all the birds are roughly the same shape and size. The machines kill the birds at the rate of 180+ per minute and a human stands guard to kill any birds that the machine misses (with imperfect accuracy, tragically). Given the standardization of the entire process of producing meat birds and maximizing breast meat, clearly the baby male White Leghorns go to the grinder is a calculation of profitability. Is it cheaper to use them for meat or to kill them? Because of their rate of growth or "feed efficiency" (how quickly they turn food into meat) or amount of breast meat or inability to fit with the mechanized nature of the chicken slaughter process or whatever, they aren't profitable. So they go to the grinder, which is apparently the cheapest way to kill them (or perhaps some combination of the cheapest and most "humane" way to kill them).
The problem isn't merely this practice of grinding up baby chicks, but the entire system. And yet, with Americans' great appetite for cheap meat and ability to ignore where it comes from, how it was raised, and how it affects the people who produce it or the environment, that's the system we've created. |
