Did Pamela Anderson come to your house and take all the chicken out of your refrigerator? If not, then shut up.
Or perhaps, deep down, you are uncomfortable with the thought that your taste for fried chicken is being satisfied by causing animals to suffer needlessly. In that case, there may be hope for you yet.
Thank you for the links,** IC**. I think the European “five freedoms” idea is a good one and should be applied here in the US as well. For the record, because some here don’t seem to read very carefully, I never said that chickens aren’t sentient. Of course they feel pain, and that should be prevented if possible. I did say they don’t think and consequently don’t feel emotions like happiness and contentment in the same sense that higher animals do. If Daniel (**Left Hand Of Dorkiness ** is kinda cumbersome) is right, I may be wrong about that, too.
This whole thread was never intended to be about factory farming in the first place. I was calling out Pamela Anderson, not for expressing her opinion about factory farming, but for specifically calling KFC executives criminals, which they are not. I said up front that it was a lame, late-night rant. The thread turned out to be more interesting and illuminationg than I had expected, but it’s direction was not anticipated. I have learned something here. Now I have to go figure out what it is. 
Questions of cruelty aside, if I ever start sticking pictures of myself in a bikini up on billboards, will some kind soul please pull me aside, tell me I’ve become annoyingly presumptuous and to get used to the fact my 15 minutes have passed because I for one would listen.
Amen. The chicken industry treats its workers about as badly as is possible. I’m recalling an article I read some time ago about working for Tyson, one of (if not the) largest chicken operations in the country. It sounded absolutely brutal. If I can remember what magazine in was in (might have been the Atlantic, but I’m not sure), I’ll post a cite.
Sure, I’m in favor of minimizing the suffering of animals being raised for food, but that ranks pretty low compared to minimizing the suffering of actual people involved in raising those same animals for food.
Actually, reducing the latter might, in fact, also help with the former.
A fair amount of the animal suffering that occurs in the raising and the slaughtering processes can reasonably be attributed to the poor conditions under which the employees work. Understaffing, high-speed production lines, a concern with profit over humane treatment, and frequent violations of OSHA standards mean that many workers in factory farms and in meat processing plants have too much to worry about just to keep their jobs and avoid getting injured. They don’t have the time to care too much about the animals, and they know that if they make any waves they are likely to lose their jobs. This is exacerbated by the fact that many such workers are illegal immigrants, and can’t go to the authorities if there is a problem.
The suffering of the workers and the suffering of the animals, in many cases, stem from similar root causes.
Having worked on one small chickeny farm (twenty chickens, there mostly for eggs) and having visited a good handful of other small “market garden” farms run by a couple of people, I’d recommend going that route to avoid animal cruelty AND human cruelty. If a farm is run by two or three people, they’re not going to be treating the help badly, because they’re not going to be hiring help in the first place.
It’ll cost ya more to get your eggs from a small farm like that, but it’ll greatly increase the chances that the chickens lead a life lower in suffering, and that the workers lead a life lower in suffering.
Plus, if the eggs are anything like the market-garden eggs I’ve had, they’ll be astonishingly tasty. I’ve heard that chicken meat from such a farm would also have a superior flavor.
In general (with, of course, exceptions), small, family-run farms treat animals better, treat workers better, and treat the land better than large industrial farms.
Daniel
So. can one buy free range chicken at the local Ralphs? (SoCAL supermarket chain)
Is it clearly labeled? Or do I have to decipher some language? I don’t really eat enough chicken to make a difference but…
I can’t speak for the US but in Australia the free range stuff is very clearly labelled.
By that definition, a bank robber who waves around a gun (or threatens that he has one) is a terrorist.
I have. The person said that they really don’t think about it much, because the risk to them is statistically infantessimal. It’s not like ALF is bombing research labs every day.
Secondly, if ALF’s goal is to terrorize the populace, they’re failing miserably. People get pissed when property is destroyed-- they start to fear when people are harmed, or threatened overtly.
Do you think the only reason they’ve taken precautions not to kill anyone is because they don’t need to do so? Couldn’t such careful avoidance indicate a simple moral opposition to killing, be it people or animals?
These people ain’t as stupid as they look. They realize that a lot of people support them only because they’ve never crossed the line, and they would quickly lose support of all who are not rabid devotees if they did kill anyone. Right now, they’re on a very fine edge.
I actually went to ALF’s website tonight. I will not link to it to avoid violating SDMB policy, but their credo insists that anyone carrying out action in ALF’s name:
They were quite specific in stating that their goal is the destruction of property, causing economic loss to companies that harm animals-- hoping to make it unprofitable was the implication I gathered.
Look, I’m not saying I support these guys in any way. They should be prosecuted for their crimes to the fullest extent of the law-- but not under terrorism statutes. Let’s call the criminals by their real names: they’re saboteurs, arsonists, theives and vandals, but they’re not terrorists.
Don’t know about Ralph’s but I buy mine at Kroger’s. The eggs are found in the organic food section and run $1.99-$2.39 for a dozen eggs.
The fresh chicken is found in the poultry section next to the Perdue/Tyson stuff. I buy Amish chickens, which are not given antibiotics and are allowed to live out in the open. I make a lot of homemade soups and the difference in texture, and taste, of the Amish chickens is quite noticeable.
I also buy Laura’s Lean Beef, which are also raised without hormones and antibiotics. Can’t say that the taste is all that different, but for my children’s sake, I’ll avoid antibiotics in my food if I can.