Do you Pay more for Humanely Raised Chicken?

Craig Watts is a North Carolina chicken farmer who raises more than 700,000 broiler chickens each year for Perdue farms, one of the largest poultry manufacturers in the country.


Watts says he has been raising chickens for Perdue for more than 20 years, tending to the chicks delivered to him by the company and following Perdue's guidelines for how to raise the birds. Perdue labels all of its chickens as "humanely raised."

For a long time, Watts went along with things as they were. But then he allowed the group, Compassion for World Farming, to spend months at his farm with cameras documenting the conditions.

"This stuff is not advertised," Watts told animal welfare group Compassion for World Farming. "The consumer is being hoodwinked."

The result is this video, which isn't kind to Perdue:



The chickens depicted look sickly. Their breasts are so enlarged that they end up spending disproportionate amounts of time squatting to relieve their legs. They also suffer from lameness and limping, as well as heart and lung problems. Nicholas Kristof, who grew up on a farm, admitted to never having seen anything similar, in an Op-Ed this week:

Most shocking is that the bellies of nearly all the chickens have lost their feathers and are raw, angry, red flesh. The entire underside of almost every chicken is a huge, continuous bedsore. As a farmboy who raised small flocks of chickens and geese, I never saw anything like that.

The physical toll the chickens endure as a result of their genetic make-up only appears to be exacerbated by the physical reality of circumstances in which they're being raised. The birds are confined to a space smaller than a square foot, and frequently spend their entire lives atop mounds of feces. The result is that many birds—more than 1,000 per 30,000 bird flock—die within the first six weeks.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs...ay-humanely-raised-chickens-are-being-raised/

Sign the petition to Tom Vilsack to demand change https://www.change.org/p/usda-stop-labeling-factory-farm-chicken-as-humanely-raised?utm_source=action_alert&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=296789&alert_id=knwPpQykfJ_IYRqwlsiFf6Jh054Wkz8OJyOKn25MQATJCWaNvrs9iGHG/NuYZLmegv/YohHvekT

 

Yawn....